(#032) Always moving forward
Barely a month ago, on June 16th — the one-year anniversary of this blog column — I published a post recounting the origin story of this very website.
That piece explored how it all began, and how, through iteration after iteration, I arrived at what I then called Website 3.0 — the third complete overhaul, evolving in step with my own transformations.
Well… here is Website 4.0.
I didn’t know, I swear. That post wasn’t a setup for this big reveal.
But sometimes, a month is a very, very long time.
Since June 16th, I’ve:
Hosted the official launch event for Jam Nation.
Unearthed a mountain of postponed tasks buried beneath the event prep.
Dived headfirst into the “what’s next?” for Jam Nation’s future.
Realized that my other ventures — past and ongoing — aren’t separate from Jam Nation at all. In fact, they overlap, often profoundly.
Spent a week in a strategy retreat (at home) to look at the bigger picture.
Concluded that compartmentalizing my past from my present was doing me a disservice. That…
Maybe I am the total sum of all I’ve done and continue to do.
And resolved to build a new, more complete, more authentic version of my digital presence.
Marrying my business ventures and my creative soul in one clear, coherent, concise display was no easy feat. Vulnerability isn’t exactly a prized line on a business résumé. But then again, no one really connects with the cold, robotic precision of an executive archetype, either.
I’m proud of the solution I found: give everyone a choice.
When you land on the new homepage, you’ll find a large, open space with two doors. Each bears a bold, clean sign — not overly descriptive, perhaps even a bit ambiguous.
The signs — and the choice you take — may say more about the visitor than they do about me.
But they clearly lead to two distinct paths. This way, I can’t be held responsible for the one you take. I can only promise that each is uncompromisingly honest.
Neither path undermines the other. Neither apologizes for what it's not.
And then there's the font.
As visually obsessed as I am, I’ve come to believe that typography is to the written word what body language is to a conversation. It’s not the content — but it carries equal weight.
So yes, the elegant PT Serif I had spent years fine-tuning… gone. Replaced by the suspiciously modern, somewhat blunt tone of Oswald — a sans-serif font I wasn’t sold on at first. But after we circled each other a few times, I’ll admit: readability, especially on small screens, has massively improved. And Oswald, as it turns out, delivers both streams of introspection with a dash of vulnerability and bullet-pointed achievements with zero irony. That’s a rare and precious trait.
There’s so much more that has changed, besides, Website 4.0 is still a work in progress. I have more ideas, more expansions, possibly even revenue models in mind. But for now, I’m proud of having worked — yet again — on a new way to move forward.
L.F
