Why I asked a brand manager to redesign how I present myself

I’ve spent around twenty-five years designing products, interfaces and brands for other people. You would think that rethinking my own site would be the easiest project on my list.

It was the hardest.

The designer’s blind spot

When you design for a client, you have distance. You can see what matters and what’s noise, because none of it is yours.

When you design for yourself, that distance disappears. Every project feels important. Every skill feels worth mentioning. Twenty-five years of work turn into a long list, and a long list doesn’t tell anyone what you actually do today.

My old site said a lot. It said I was a product designer, an AI consultant, an accessibility specialist, a service designer. All true. None of it explained why someone should talk to me now.

My work had changed. I’m co-founder and CTO of Shorium, I work on post-quantum security for connected products, and I advise executives, CISOs and investors on deep technology. The site was still describing the person I had been.

What I asked ACM Brand to do

So I asked Alessandra Carmen Maria Clerici, brand manager and founder of ACM Brand, to lead the work.

She took on three things.

Positioning. Deciding who the site is for and what it should say first. The answer turned out to be narrower than I would have chosen on my own: executives, CISOs and investors, and the intersection of AI, intelligent systems and security.

Messages and text. She wrote the brief that defined every text on the site, page by page: what to keep, what to rewrite, what to remove. Some of the things removed were things I was proud of. They were also things that made the message weaker.

Project direction. She kept the project on track, and kept the decisions consistent with the positioning, even when I was tempted to add one more thing.

What changed

The site is now shorter and clearer. It leads with what I do today. Work is organised as a few case studies instead of a long portfolio. The writing you’re reading now follows the same line: security, AI and design, for the people who have to make decisions about them.

It also made something obvious that I already knew as a designer and had forgotten as a client: you can’t design a good site until you’ve decided what it’s for.

Decide first

At the heart of ACM Brand’s work is a simple observation: a wrong decision sets off a domino effect. One professional refreshes the image, another builds the site, a third launches the campaigns. Each piece can succeed, and the investment as a whole can still fail. Alessandra helps people who run a business decide where to put their time and money before they spend it. She explains the approach in her article on brand strategy (in Italian).

It sounds simple. In practice, most of us start from the tool: a new website, a new logo, a new campaign. Then we discover that the real problem was a decision nobody had taken.

If you run a business, a studio or a project and your communication no longer reflects what you do, I recommend talking to her. You can start with the free Brand Check on her site, or get in touch with ACM Brand directly.