UPDATE: I’ve finally seen sense and reverted back to the normal design. It was fun while it lasted.

So. The website’s gone full pirate.

Not “a small nautical flourish in the footer” pirate. Not “tasteful rope-border in the header” pirate. Full pirate. Skull and crossbones somewhere in the navigation, a colour palette that’s basically just every shade of “weathered wood” and “treasure chest,” and I’m fairly sure there’s a font in there now that I can only describe as Ransom Note’s slightly more seafaring cousin.

I’ve spent two decades building websites professionally. I know what good, restrained, on-brand design looks like. I have opinions about whitespace. And despite all of that, I sat down a few weeks ago and apparently decided that what my personal site — the one with my actual name on it, the one prospective clients might visit — really needed was to look like it was being run out of a beach hut by a man who recently lost an argument with a parrot.

The Honest Answer Is: I Don’t Fully Know

I’d love to give you a clean, sensible origin story here. Something like “it ties into a creative project” or “it’s a clever metaphor for charting your own course,” delivered with a knowing wink, the kind of thing that sounds great in a portfolio case study.

It isn’t that. I genuinely don’t have a tidy explanation. One day I was looking at the site thinking it needed a refresh, and somewhere between “needs a refresh” and “actually opening the design files,” my brain quietly filed a motion for pirates, the motion passed unopposed because nobody else was in the room to object, and that was that. There was no committee meeting. There was no mood board. There was just me, a laptop, and an alarming amount of confidence in galleon iconography.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it’s because it is — I’ve written before about how my best ideas arrive at 2am and don’t survive breakfast. This was very much one of those. Whether it was the heat — British people, as a species, are simply not built for warm weather, our internal thermostats are calibrated for “drizzle” and nothing else — or the four custard doughnuts and a Toblerone I’d apparently decided constituted a balanced evening meal, something sent me doollally enough to greenlight an entire pirate rebrand without consulting anyone, including, crucially, myself at a more sensible hour. Normally these ideas don’t make it past the morning read-back. This one, against all precedent, just… stuck.

This is, if I’m honest, a known pattern by now. 2am-Gary has form. He’s the same one who once tried to give Small Fish a secret underground tunnel system and convinced End of the Line’s zombies needed an entire chemical-spill backstory, complete with a name he’d apparently already settled on. Normally Daytime-Gary catches these at the door — reads them back over breakfast, winces, quietly deletes them, no harm done. This time Daytime-Gary just… didn’t. He looked at the pirate idea, shrugged, and let it through. I’d love to tell you why this one got past the bouncer when the tunnel system and the chemical spill didn’t. I don’t have an answer. Maybe a website doesn’t have the same structural consequences as a 24-chapter outline, so there was simply less for sensible-hours-me to object to. Maybe the doughnuts were just that good. Either way, this is, as far as I can tell, the first 2am idea to survive all the way to a full site overhaul, which feels like it should mean something, even if I can’t say what.

If you’re after deep psychological insight into why a man in his forties with a bad back and a strong professional design background has chosen this particular hill to die on, I can’t help you. I’ve asked myself the same question. The honest answer, every time, is something close to a shrug.

In My Defence (Such As It Is)

I do live on the Kent coast. There’s a sea nearby. There’s a long and genuinely storied history of smuggling, shipping and general seafaring nonsense around these parts, so it’s not a complete non-sequitur. I could, if pressed by a sufficiently patient interviewer, construct a reasonably convincing argument that this is “coastal heritage-inspired branding” rather than “bloke gets the urge to add a skull to his website and simply does not stop himself.”

But if I’m honest with you, and I try to be honest with you on this blog even when it’s mildly humiliating, the coastal heritage thing is a justification I built afterwards. It’s the kind of explanation you give a client when really the truth is “I just wanted to.”

What This Says About Me As a Designer

Probably nothing good, professionally speaking. If a client came to me and said “I’d like my entire web presence themed around 18th century maritime criminals, no particular reason,” I would, as a responsible designer, ask several follow-up questions before reaching for the cutlass clip art. I would want to understand the audience. The brand strategy. Whether this serves the user journey or simply serves my own desire to use the word “plunder” in a call-to-action button.

For myself, apparently, none of that scrutiny applies. I am both the client and the designer in this scenario, and it turns out I am an extremely easy client to please. I pitched myself one idea. I said yes immediately. There was no negotiation. I didn’t even ask myself for a deposit.

Full Site Overhaul, No Half Measures

And this isn’t a “just the homepage” situation either, for anyone hoping I’ll come to my senses on the inner pages. This is a full overhaul. Every corner of the site is getting the treatment. If you land on a contact form on my website in the near future and it doesn’t at least gesture vaguely toward “message in a bottle,” I will personally consider that a missed opportunity, and so, increasingly, will the site itself.

I’ve made my peace with the fact that some people who land on it will think “ah, coastal branding, lovely, very on-brand for a man in Kent.” And others will think “has he been at sea for several months without proper supervision.” Both reactions are valid. I am prepared to stand behind this decision with the same unwavering confidence with which I apparently made it, which is to say: very little actual reasoning, but enormous commitment.

So that’s the story, such as it is. No deep meaning. No grand rebrand strategy document. Just a man, a laptop, and an unsupervised impulse that nobody was around to talk him out of.

Oh, and yes I am aware my hand in the picture has five fingers and a thumb. You can’t expect AI to get everything right!