I've always enjoyed making things. Sometimes that's a photograph, a piece of design, a website or a marketing campaign. Other times it's something considerably more complicated that started as a fairly simple idea and somehow turned into several weeks of figuring out how APIs work.
I don't think everything you create needs to become a business. Sometimes it's enough to have an idea, want something to exist and enjoy the process of figuring out how to make it happen.
That's probably the best explanation for why BVLDERDVSH has gradually become home to a collection of projects that don't necessarily have much in common at first glance.
There's a marketing toolkit for independent businesses, a website that suggests little adventures, tools for space simulation games, a gaming community, a Discord intelligence bot and the main website that connects everything. Some are commercial. Some are personal. Some exist almost entirely because I thought they'd be interesting to build. But they all reflect different parts of my interests, experience and approach to creative work.
BVLDERDVSH: A Home for Everything
BVLDERDVSH started as a place to bring together my creative work, experience and interests without having to separate everything into neat professional categories.
My background is primarily in marketing, design, content creation and creative direction, but I've never been particularly interested in limiting myself to one discipline. Photography influences my design work. Design influences how I approach marketing. Gaming has introduced me to technical problems I probably wouldn't have encountered otherwise.
I wanted a website that could accommodate all of that.
Part portfolio, part personal journal and part home for projects that might not fit comfortably into a traditional agency website, BVLDERDVSH gives me somewhere to experiment without needing to justify every idea commercially.
The blog is an extension of that. I write about marketing, design, photography, technology, gaming and whatever else I happen to be interested in. Sometimes it's practical advice drawn from my professional experience. Other times it's an opinion about something I've noticed or a project I've been working on.
From a personal branding perspective, I think that's more useful than presenting a carefully edited version of myself that only talks about work. A portfolio can show what you've made. Writing about your work, interests and opinions gives people a better idea of how you think. that's probably the part I want people to understand.
SIDE QUEST: An Excuse to Do Something Different
SIDE QUEST is probably the simplest project in the collection, and in some ways one of my favourites.
The idea came from something I think most people can relate to: having free time and somehow spending it doing exactly the same things you always do. You have an afternoon available, but instead of doing something interesting, you fall into the usual routine. The same coffee shop, the same walk, the same few websites.
SIDE QUEST is a small website designed to interrupt that habit.
You choose a mood, how much time you have and roughly what you want to spend. The site suggests something to do, whether that's exploring a neighbourhood, visiting a record shop, taking photographs or finding somewhere new to sit and watch the world go by. There's also a simple journal where you can save a photo and a few words about what you did.
It isn't meant to optimize your life, build better habits or turn your free time into another productivity exercise. If anything, it's the opposite. I wanted something that encourages a little curiosity without making a big production out of it.
From a design perspective, it was also an exercise in restraint. The interface needed to be simple, welcoming and almost invisible. The experience is supposed to happen outside the website, not on it. I like that idea: building a digital tool whose main purpose is to get someone away from their screen.
GOOD TO GO: Making Marketing More Accessible
GOOD TO GO is much more directly connected to my professional work.
After years of working across marketing, creative production, email, advertising and campaign planning, I've seen how much work goes into running even a relatively simple promotion properly.
A campaign isn't just a nice Instagram graphic and an email announcing a discount. There's the offer itself, the audience, timing, creative, operational considerations, customer experience and the question of whether the promotion actually made financial sense.
Larger companies have teams to manage those things. Smaller businesses often don't. GOOD TO GO is my attempt to make some of that experience more accessible. It's a collection of editable marketing campaign kits designed around specific business needs. The current collection focuses on three common situations: opening a new business, encouraging customers to return and running a short promotional campaign.
Each kit brings together planning tools, messaging, email templates, social creative, advertising copy and execution checklists. The idea is to give someone a useful starting point rather than another folder of attractive templates with no explanation of what to do with them.
I've tried to approach the design in the same way. The kits should look good, but they also need to be flexible enough for businesses to apply their own colours, fonts, photography and identity. I don't think a neighbourhood café, fitness studio and independent retailer should all end up looking like the same business because they bought the same template.
GOOD TO GO represents the more practical and commercial side of what I do. It combines marketing strategy, creative direction, product design and a fair amount of thinking about how to turn complicated processes into something people can actually use. It also challenges me to package what I've learned into a product rather than delivering it exclusively as a service. That's been an interesting shift in perspective.
SPACE // STUFF: A Small Gaming Project That Became a Large Technical Problem
SPACE // STUFF exists because I play an unreasonable amount of space games.
Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous and EVE Online are full of complicated systems, enormous amounts of information and gameplay that frequently requires opening several browser tabs just to figure out what you're doing.
There are already excellent community resources for these games, but I wanted a collection of tools that felt consistent, connected and designed around how I actually play, So I started building one.
SPACE // STUFF includes ship databases, loadout builders, trading tools, market information, crafting resources and other utilities across the three games.
The technical side quickly became much more involved than I'd anticipated. Connecting external data sources, working through game calculations, handling incomplete information and keeping everything usable across different screen sizes is considerably more complicated than making a nice-looking website. This is also where I've found AI particularly useful.
I've written before about my reservations around AI-generated creative work. I'm not especially interested in handing over creative direction and accepting whatever a machine produces. But I have no problem using AI to help work through mathematical formulas, troubleshoot code or connect different data sources.
For SPACE // STUFF, the design, visual identity, layout and overall experience are my creative decisions. AI helps me tackle the technical work that makes those ideas functional. I think that's an important distinction.
The project demonstrates how I approach UX, information architecture and technical problem-solving, but it also reflects my interest in making complex things feel relatively straightforward. It's probably the best example of how a personal interest can push you into learning skills you never originally intended to learn. And I'm still adding things to it, which suggests I haven't learned anything about keeping projects manageable.
PROJECT ECHO: Building a Community Around a Shared Identity
Project Echo is a different kind of project because it's about people as much as technology.
It's the identity behind my gaming community, bringing together players from Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous under a shared organization. I've always enjoyed the social side of multiplayer games, particularly when there's some sense of shared purpose, history or identity. I like the idea of a small crew operating within a much larger universe, with its own stories, traditions and reasons for being there.
Project Echo grew out of that interest.
The website gives the organization a proper home, explaining its identity, fictional history, values and the different ways people can get involved. There's a strong influence from science fiction, particularly the idea of independent crews operating on the edges of larger systems. That comes through in the writing, visual identity and overall tone. behind the fictional world-building, however, is something much more familiar from my professional work: branding and community development.
An organization needs a recognizable identity. People need to understand what it represents, whether they belong and what they can expect from participating. The same principles apply whether you're building a consumer brand, an online community or a fictional organization operating across several imaginary star systems. Project Echo has been an opportunity to explore those ideas without a traditional commercial objective. It's also a reminder that branding is much more interesting when people actually participate in it.
A logo and a website can establish an identity, but the community is what gives it meaning.
CHORUS: Turning a Community Problem Into a Useful Tool
CHORUS is one of the newer projects, and it grew out of a fairly specific problem within multiplayer gaming.
In games like Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, you encounter other players constantly. Some are friendly, some are hostile and some leave you wondering whether you should have trusted them in the first place. The problem is remembering those encounters, particularly when you're part of a larger crew. Someone might recognize a player name, but the context gets lost in Discord conversations, screenshots or someone's increasingly unreliable memory.
CHORUS is a Discord bot designed to make that information easier to record and retrieve. Members can log encounters with other pilots, identify whether an interaction was friendly or hostile and include notes explaining what happened. Other members can then search for that player and review the recorded encounters. The idea isn't to create a universal blacklist or decide who's good or bad. Different people can have different experiences with the same player, and those reports need context.
What interests me about CHORUS is how much thought has to go into a relatively simple concept once real people are involved. There's interface design, command structure, data organization, permissions, privacy and the question of how information should be presented without implying that every report is an objective fact.
It also needs to work where the community already communicates. Nobody particularly wants to leave Discord, open another website and search through a complicated dashboard just to check a player name.
CHORUS brings the tool into the conversation instead.
From a professional perspective, it's another exercise in product thinking: identifying a specific problem, designing around the people experiencing it and making the solution as simple as possible.
It's also proof that some of my more useful ideas come from spending too much time playing video games.
What These Projects Say About My Work
Looking at these projects together, I can understand why they might seem like an unusual collection.
A marketing campaign toolkit, an activity generator, a space gaming database, a fictional organization and a Discord bot don't exactly form a conventional agency portfolio.
But I think that's what makes them useful as a representation of my work.
They show different applications of many of the same skills:
Design and creative direction: Building recognizable visual identities, choosing typography, colours and layouts, and making each project feel distinct.
Marketing and communication: Understanding audiences, developing positioning, writing copy and making complicated ideas easier to explain.
User experience: Organizing information, reducing friction and thinking about what someone is actually trying to accomplish.
Technical problem-solving: Working with integrations, calculations, automation and the practical limitations of building digital products.
Community and storytelling: Creating identities and experiences that give people a reason to participate.
More importantly, they demonstrate curiosity.
I don't think a personal brand should just be a collection of carefully worded claims about your expertise. Anyone can write that they're creative, adaptable, strategic or passionate about problem-solving.
I'd rather show the things I've actually spent time making.
Some projects are more polished than others. Some are still evolving. A few will probably change considerably as I figure out what they should become.
I'm comfortable with that.
There's value in showing the process, not just the finished result.
Why I Keep Building Things
I spend a lot of my professional life working within objectives, deadlines, budgets, approvals and business requirements. That's part of marketing and design, and I enjoy the challenge of making good work within those constraints. Personal projects are different; They give me room to experiment with ideas that don't necessarily have a client, a brief or an immediate commercial purpose. I can spend time learning something unfamiliar, change direction halfway through or build a feature simply because I think it would be useful.
Sometimes those experiments turn into something with real commercial potential. Other times they remain small personal projects. Either outcome is fine.
I've also found that the things I learn from these projects tend to find their way back into my professional work. Building a complicated gaming interface changes how I think about information design. Creating marketing products changes how I approach campaign planning. Managing a gaming community reinforces how important communication and identity are to keeping people engaged. None of those connections were necessarily obvious when I started, And I think that's the point.
I don't particularly want BVLDERDVSH to become a website that only showcases the work I've been paid to do. I want it to reflect the things I'm interested in, the problems I like solving and the kind of work I choose to make when I have the freedom to decide for myself. There's probably a more efficient way to build a personal brand than creating six different projects, But I suspect I'd find it considerably less interesting.
I'd rather keep making things and let the work speak for itself.
