Run and tell the neighbours, shout it from the highest peaks, stop the presses etc. I’m really happy to say that after a long period of not existing, freak.ie is now a thing. If you’ve been eagerly waiting (doubtful) I really appreciate that, sorry to keep you in suspense. Here’s a brief story about making this.

So for the last five or so months I’ve been running a freelance business making websites (and other stuff), whose name is a website (freak.ie, haven’t you heard?), without actually having a website. Quite cheeky I think, but probably not very sustainable. So I made this:

Just to clarify, it took quite a while to make. And was pretty close to being finished. And then I scraped it and started again.

Why?

To put it really simply, it wasn’t what I wanted. It was flashy and slick (and used the royal ‘we‘ a lot) and looked and sounded like it belonged to a big fancy design company. It probably would have been really good at selling my stuff. But I just wasn’t happy with the direction it was going. I started this journey (ugh) to create something that reflected myself, my personality, and the kind of projects I wanted to work on. This wasn’t that. So I went with this instead:

It’s literally the website you’re currently looking at. Yeah, it’s still upselling like crazy — I do have to make a living — but the tone and scale are more in line with what I want it to be. If anything, there’s still a bit too much going on. I can only imagine the next iteration will be something along these lines:

There’s probably a lesson in here about authenticity, or integrity, or market niches or something, I’m sure I don’t need too spell it out. In all honesty, I just wanted to post something so when people came to the site the last blog item wasn’t from February, and this is the best I’ve got. Anyways, I think it turned out alright (this blog post and the website).