I find the shape in things that don’t have one yet.
A taproom with four logos and three voices. A year of driving scattered across twelve thousand photos and a hundred voice memos. Both are the same problem wearing different clothes — something is trying to say a thing, and everything around it is getting in the way. I clear the way. Sometimes by hand, for a client. Sometimes by building a machine that does it on its own.
Take a taproom with four logos and three voices, none of them agreeing.
Fox & Fennel Taproom
Four logos in circulation, three voices, and nobody on staff sure which was the real one.
There were four logos in circulation and nobody could tell me which was the real one. The sign painter had redrawn it by eye in 2019. The menus used a version somebody had traced. Facebook had a third, made by an owner’s nephew, and the merch used a fourth that no one could find the source file for. Underneath that, three different voices: the menu was jokey, the website was corporate, and Instagram sounded like a completely separate business.
I didn’t start with the logo. I spent a Saturday morning sitting at the end of the bar listening to how the staff described beers to people who’d never been in before. That was the voice — already there, already working, just never written down. One bartender called a saison “the one that tastes like a back porch.” That line ended up on the menu.
Everything else followed from that. The wordmark got redrawn to match how the room actually felt rather than how a taproom is supposed to look. The menu got rewritten in the staff’s own language. The sign and the socials came last, which is the opposite of the order most people want to do it in, and the reason it held together.
They left with one mark, one voice, and a two-page guide plain enough that a new hire can follow it without asking anyone.
He figured out what we sounded like before we did.— Placeholder, Fox & Fennel
Two weeks later, it all sounded like the same room.
Then the same job, except the client was a year of my own life and the pile was far too big to sort by hand.
A machine that notices
An editorial engine that reads the raw exhaust of a life on the road and proposes the stories hiding in it.
Living in a camper generates an absurd amount of raw material and almost no finished work. GPS traces, fuel receipts, repair logs, twelve thousand photos, voice memos recorded while driving. The bottleneck was never writing. It was noticing — sitting down on a Sunday and trying to remember which three days out of ninety were actually a story.
So I built the noticing. The engine reads every signal into one timeline and runs thirty-one clustering strategies over it — by leg, by place, by person, by theme, by the gaps where nothing was recorded. When a cluster looks story-shaped it proposes a title, a summary, one of forty-nine editorial layouts, and a pre-filled draft, ranked by confidence.
The part I’m proudest of isn’t the clustering. It’s that layouts declare what they need — a place, a hero photo, a stat block — so the system can work out which forms a given pile of material could become, and rank them, without anyone hand-tagging anything.
It doesn’t write for me. It hands me a draft with the shape already found, which is the expensive part. Same job as the taproom. Different clothes.
Build the machine when the job repeats. Do it by hand when it doesn’t.
And the same eye again, pointed at a highway instead of a brand.
Thirty loud seconds for a band called Toad
A spot cut for a venue screen, where nobody is watching from the start and the sound is already too loud.
The brief was a thirty-second spot for a band with no budget, playing to a room where the screen sits above the bar and nobody watches from the beginning. That last constraint decided everything: it had to work entered at any second, with the sound already lost to the room.
So there’s no build. It opens at full volume, holds one image long enough to register, and gets out. The same instinct as the taproom menu — find the one thing it’s trying to say and cut everything standing in front of it.
However it arrives, it’s the same four moves
Listen before drawing
The voice almost always already exists somewhere — in how the staff talk, in the one email that got replies. My job is usually to find it and write it down, not to invent it.
Cut until it’s uncomfortable
Most work fails by addition. I take things away until removing one more would break it, and stop one step before that.
Leave something they can run without me
A guide short enough to actually be read. Naming that explains itself. The measure of the job is what still holds six months after I’m gone.
Build the machine when the job repeats
Done twice by hand, it’s a task. Done a third time, it’s a system I should have built already.
Working on something that hasn’t found its shape yet?
Brand identity, a site that needs to sound like a person, a pile of data with a story in it somewhere, or a thing you can’t describe in one sentence yet. Tell me what it is — I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right person for it.
A tailor’s Instagram that finally sounds like the tailor
Forty years of alterations, and the account read like a coupon.
Jun 2026The Usual — a directory for people who fix things
Cobblers, tailors, welders. The trades that don’t rank on Google.
Apr 2026A cobbler’s first email people actually opened
One story, one photo, no discount code. 61% open rate.
Mar 2026Cast iron, morning light
A print series shot entirely before seven a.m.
Feb 2026Where local retail is actually heading
What a year of talking to shop owners on the road turned up.
Jan 2026The lot behind the bar, before open
Four minutes, no dialogue, one locked-off camera.
Nov 2025