When AI meets humanity, the creative work gets closer to true.

Here is the exact seven-step process I used to translate two decades of other people’s words about me into a sensorial scene — and then into the aesthetic foundation of this entire website. You can do this for yourself in an afternoon.

Gather the raw material

I copied every LinkedIn recommendation I had received over the past fifteen years — the long ones, the short ones, the ones from CEOs and the ones from interns — into a single plain text document. No editing, no curation. The point is to give the model the unfiltered chorus of how other humans actually describe you.

Ask for the summary first

I dropped the document into ChatGPT with one prompt: “Based solely on these recommendations, summarize who I am professionally in three or four sentences.” This becomes your anchor — a positioning statement written by the only people whose opinion matters: the ones who have actually worked with you.

Translate into the five senses

Then the stranger ask. Same chat, same context: “Based solely on these recommendations, what color am I? What scent? What taste? What sound? What texture?” Ask for one word per sense, plus a one-line reason. Mine came back: rich teal, eucalyptus, citrus, a flowing river, polished leather. Each one with a justification rooted in the source material.

Compose the scene

Then: “Now compose a single visual scene that contains all five of these senses and represents who I am.” ChatGPT wrote a scene description — a worn leather journal and brass pen on a stone, citrus and eucalyptus nearby, beside a clear teal river. I asked where on earth that scene most naturally lives. It said Costa Rica. I have been going to Costa Rica almost every year of my adult life. Nobody told the model that.

Generate the image

I fed the scene description into an image generation model and iterated maybe four or five times — adjusting the angle, the light, the composition — until the picture matched the feeling. The image you see across this site, and on the self-portrait page, is the result.

Extract the design system

From that single image I pulled the entire visual language of this site: the clay and citrus and sage palette, the warm off-white background, the editorial serif paired with a clean sans, the soft drop-shadows that feel like sunlight on paper. The scene became the brand. The brand became the site.

Build with AI as the craftsman

I directed the build of this fully responsive, accessible, SEO-ready site in days instead of months by holding the creative direction tightly while letting AI handle the scaffolding. The voice, the cadence, the choice of an italic over a bold — those are mine. The speed is the gift of the tools. Twenty years of strategy distilled, then accelerated.

That is the whole process. Seven steps. One afternoon. The output is uncannily accurate not because the model knows you, but because the people who wrote your recommendations do — and the model is just a translator between their words and a visual language you can actually use.

The medium is the message. AI and humanity, working in the same direction.

See my self-portrait Let’s build something together