Originality Through Familiarity and Nostalgia

A few days ago, I set out to redesign my personal website.

That sounds more deliberate than it probably was.

I had a site already. It worked. It said the things a personal site is meant to say: here is who I am, here is what I have written, here is the book, here are some links, here is the contact route. It was perfectly acceptable, which is often the most dangerous state for a website to be in. Not bad enough to demand replacement. Not good enough to be remembered.

And increasingly, that bothered me.

The internet has become oddly smooth. Not technically, obviously. Technically, it is more capable than ever. But visually and emotionally, it often feels flattened. Personal websites look like startup landing pages. Startup landing pages look like SaaS templates. SaaS templates look like each other. Everyone is "building at the intersection of..." something. Everyone has a hero statement, a few rounded cards, some tasteful gradients, and a footer that appears to have been assembled by a committee that once read about personality and decided against it.

I do not say that with contempt. I have built those pages. I understand why they exist. They are safe, readable, responsive, and usually sensible.

But sensible is not the same as memorable.

The question I started with was simple enough: what should neilsmeyer.com actually be?

Not Beyond Countdown. That has its own site, its own purpose, its own voice, and its own commercial logic. Not a CV. I have LinkedIn for that, and frankly the world has enough polished profile pages pretending not to be CVs. Not a portfolio in the design-agency sense either, because I am not trying to present a set of tidy case studies as though my life has conveniently arranged itself into three-act client narratives.

The site needed to do something more specific. It needed to represent a person who works across delivery, governance intelligence, writing, AI collaboration, music, board games, and mildly excessive curiosity. It needed to be commercially useful without becoming dead-eyed. It needed to make someone think, "this person is credible," but also, "this person is interesting." Ideally, it needed to make someone remember it the next day.

That was the starting point.

The toggle that died

The first idea was more conventional: a professional mode and a personal mode. One version would be boardroom-safe. The other would have more personality. In theory, that sounded useful. In practice, it started to feel like a hedge. Worse, it implied that personality and professionalism were opposites.

They are not.

At least, not for this site.

The more I looked at it, the more obvious the flaw became. If the personal version was the more interesting one, why was I building a lesser version alongside it? If the professional version was only there to reassure people who might not like the more distinctive version, why was I designing around the imagined discomfort of people I probably would not enjoy working with anyway?

So the toggle died.

That was the first real pivot. No professional/personal switch. No "full" and "dull" mode. No multiple personality disorder with localStorage. One site. One person. Different contexts.

That last phrase became the key.

Different contexts.

The page is the context

The homepage would be its own thing: dark, calm, confident, and BCL-adjacent in visual rhythm. It would act as the front door. It would show the work, the scale, the numbers, and the routes in. It would say, clearly: I help organisations see clearly, decide wisely, and move with confidence.

But every other section could become the context it needed.

The About page did not need to look like a generic About page. We all already understand the professional grammar of a profile. So the About page became LinkedIn.

Not "LinkedIn-inspired", which is usually how you get something that looks neither original nor accurate. A proper homage. White page. Profile card. Banner. Circular photo. Open to work badge. Experience. Education. Skills. People also viewed. Enough reality to carry the credibility, enough mischief to let the page breathe.

That page taught me the first important rule of the whole project: if the platform is recognisable, the visitor arrives already knowing how to read the page.

That is not just a visual joke. It is a user experience shortcut.

When someone lands on a LinkedIn-style About page, I do not need to explain that this is the credentials room. The frame does it for me. The visitor knows where they are before they have processed the content. They know the shape of the thing. That familiarity buys time, and time is the rarest currency online.

The blog that remembers

Then came the blog.

This was the easiest decision emotionally and the hardest to explain without sounding sentimental. Years ago, my wife had a family blog on Blogger, using the old Minima Ochre template. Warm background, narrow columns, sidebar labels, archive links, tiny dated post headers, the whole thing. It is not modern. It is not fashionable. It is not going to appear in anyone's list of "10 clean portfolio design trends for 2026."

Which is precisely why it works.

The personal blog became Blogger. Not because Blogger is objectively the best platform for personal writing, but because it carries a specific emotional charge. It belongs to an older internet where people wrote because they felt like writing. Posts did not need a funnel. They did not need a lead magnet. They did not need to optimise for "audience development." They were just there.

That felt right for the personal writing. Board games, films, music, family-adjacent reflections, odd observations, the bits of thinking that do not belong in an editorial container. It gave the site warmth. It also gave it history. Not fake retro. Actual memory.

The book as product

Then the book page became Amazon.

Again, the point was context. A standard "my book" page can easily feel thin. Here is the cover. Here is the blurb. Here is a buy link. Fine. But a book is a product in the reader's mind, even if the author feels slightly embarrassed saying so. Amazon has trained us all in that grammar: cover on the left, title on the right, rating, formats, price, product details, "customers also bought."

So I leaned into it.

The Countdown to 2100 page became a product page, complete with the visual language of Amazon, but obviously branded as neilsmeyer.com and labelled as an homage. The paperback price had to be right. The PDF route had to work. The also-bought carousel had to link somewhere real. The joke only works if the practical details are serious.

That became another rule: every visible link must go somewhere real. No dead UI. No placeholder theatre. If the page mimics a platform, it must inherit not only the look, but also the implied contract.

Finding the editorial frame

The writing section was the one that took longer.

Initially, it was going to be Substack-like. That made sense on paper. I have written there. It is associated with personal essays and independent publishing. But the more I looked at the draft, the less convinced I became. Substack has a problem for this use case: it is too subtle. Many Substack publications do not look identical. The platform grammar is weaker than LinkedIn, Blogger, or Amazon. Worse, using my actual Substack branding risked confusing the site. This is neilsmeyer.com. It is not Watching Grey Rhinos.

So we went looking.

Medium? Too customisable. WordPress? Too broad. Reddit? Wrong audience. Hacker News? Funny, but too narrow. Stack Overflow? Same problem, and too developer-coded. Vox? Strong visual identity, but American in a way that did not fit the voice. The Guardian? That landed.

The Guardian has a visual language people in the UK recognise almost instantly: dark navy, yellow support bar, strong serif headlines, pillar navigation, opinion architecture. It carries editorial seriousness without needing explanation. It also suits the kind of writing I want in that section: governance, AI, capitalism, culture, systems, and public argument.

So the writing page became The Guardian. Not pretending to be The Guardian. Not passing off. A clearly labelled homage. But fully committed: masthead hierarchy, category pillars, article grid, standfirsts, latest column, footer, the lot.

The screenshot test

That decision clarified the wider principle.

The platform must pass the screenshot test.

If someone sees the page with the logo removed and cannot identify the reference, the idea is not strong enough. Medium fails that test. WordPress fails it. Generic newsletter platforms fail it. LinkedIn passes. Amazon passes. Blogger Minima Ochre passes for a particular kind of internet person. The Guardian passes.

That is where the originality sits, oddly enough. Not in inventing a new visual system from nothing, but in assembling familiar systems into a new narrative structure.

I did do some research to check whether this was already a thing. Not because being first matters as much as people think, but because it is useful to know whether you are walking a well-trodden path or open ground. What I found was interesting. There are retro personal sites. There are whole portfolios designed like one platform. There are playful interface experiments. There are people doing Windows 95, GeoCities, Spotify, operating systems, desktops, terminals, games, and all sorts of clever single-world concepts.

What I did not find was this: a personal site where each section becomes a different recognisable platform, and where the platform choice itself communicates the purpose of the content.

That does not mean nobody on earth has ever done it. The internet is too large for that kind of claim. But I did not find a comparable example, and that was enough to make the work feel worth pursuing.

Gimmick or design idea?

The danger, of course, is gimmickry.

A gimmick asks to be noticed. A design idea earns the notice by doing useful work.

That was the line I kept coming back to. Is this just amusing, or does it help the visitor understand the person? Does it make the site clearer, or merely stranger? Does nostalgia add meaning, or is it just decorative?

The answer changed by section.

LinkedIn works because it compresses credibility. Blogger works because it signals informal personal writing. Amazon works because it makes the book feel like a real object, not a sidebar claim. The Guardian works because it gives serious writing a serious editorial frame. The planned MySpace-style projects page works because it is where the stranger, deeper, more playful material belongs: music, software, games, experiments, the things that should be discoverable but not dominant.

That sequence matters.

Credibility first. Range second. The "wait, there is more?" moment third.

I have learned the hard way that not every part of a person belongs in the first impression. Music matters to me. Board games matter to me. AI-assisted making matters to me. The odd little projects matter to me. But if someone arrives because they are considering whether I might help with governance intelligence, delivery leadership, or AI scaling, I should not make them walk through my entire personality before they find the signal.

The homepage therefore has to be calm and direct. It has to show the work. The platform clones can then reveal the range. That is the balance.

Practical constraints worth naming

There were also practical constraints. I am colourblind, specifically in the red/green range, so colour cannot be the only carrier of meaning. The site uses blue, gold, and warm neutrals where it owns the palette. In platform sections, where the original platform colours matter, labels, position, and structure need to carry the meaning too. That is not a small detail. If the site is meant to respect attention, it should also respect perception.

The technical work has had its own little lessons. Custom CSS in Tailwind v4 needs to live in the right layer, or it starts winning fights it should not win. Each platform page needs to own its navigation, because a persistent global nav breaks the illusion immediately. The footer needs to match the room. The page should disclose the homage without apologising for it. And whenever I was tempted to approximate, the better answer was usually: go and look at the real thing.

That last point became a kind of design ethic. Do not guess when the reference exists.

I like that. It feels weirdly connected to the broader work I do in governance. Look at the public record. Do not rely on the story you would prefer to be true. Name what is there. Build from evidence. It turns out that applies just as well to mimicking an Amazon product page as it does to assessing institutional behaviour.

Where it stands

The current state is not finished. The homepage is close. The LinkedIn page needs tightening. The Guardian writing pages need the full article bodies migrated properly. The services page needs to be built. The projects page is still waiting for its MySpace moment. Mobile needs proper attention, because a concept that only works on a large screen is not finished, however much I might wish otherwise.

But the spine is there.

A personal site where the page is the context.

A site that uses familiarity not as a crutch, but as a doorway.

A site that uses nostalgia not to avoid the present, but to make the present feel less flattened.

I am surprisingly energised by it. Partly because it is fun, and I do not think fun should be treated as suspicious in professional work. Partly because it feels like mine in a way a generic site never could. And partly because it solves a problem I have had for a while: how do you present a life and body of work that does not sit neatly in one box, without making the visitor do all the sorting?

The answer, for now, is to build the boxes honestly.

A serious front door. A LinkedIn room. A Guardian room. A Blogger room. An Amazon shelf. Eventually, probably, a MySpace garage full of slightly odd things I have made and still like.

It may not be the safest personal site.

Good.

Safe is already well served.