Anomaly 01● Before
The work lives in five inboxes and a spreadsheet.
Resolved
One board
Every request, job and client in one place, sorted by what needs you next.
Service 01 / 08 · Service
Custom Dashboards
A dashboard built around how your business already runs: requests, jobs, clients, hours and reports in one place. Your clients can get a side of their own, with a private link, status pages and updates by email. Designed in Figma first, and the code and data are yours. Single-workflow dashboards from $9,500; a full client and owner Mission Control from $18,000.
Discipline
Custom Dashboards
Best for
Service businesses running on inboxes and spreadsheets
Tools
Figma
Supabase
Vercel
GitHub
Pairs with
Related missions
Missions logged.
Mission
Control
/impact · what this fixes
Problems solved
The problems this service usually walks in with, and what you get instead.
Anomaly 02● Before
Clients keep asking where things stand.
Resolved
Status they can check
Each client gets a private link and a status page, so the answer is one tap away and nobody has to email you for it.
Anomaly 03● Before
Month-end reporting takes a whole day.
Resolved
The numbers keep themselves
Hours, finished work and open questions are counted as you go. The monthly report starts from that data instead of from memory.
/payload · 6 deliverables
What’s included
Everything this mission ships with, planned and mocked up before anything is built.
Item 01
Workflow map
Every step of the job today, and which ones the dashboard takes over.
Item 02
Design in Figma
Both sides designed before any code: yours and your clients'.
Item 03
Owner dashboard
Queues, filters and a "needs you" view. Installs on your phone.
Item 04
Data + sign-in
A real database with access rules, in accounts you own.
Item 05
Client side
Private links, status pages and automatic emails. (Mission Control)
Item 06
Guides
One for you, one for your clients, and tips on the screen.
/flight-plan · 4 stages
Flight plan
How this service usually runs, from first call to launch.
Stage 01
Map the work
Walk through how a job moves today, and where it gets stuck.
Stage 02
Design both sides
Figma screens for you and your clients, approved before code.
Stage 03
Build + test
Built on real cases from your business, then tested end to end.
Stage 04
Launch + run
Live on your domain, with a walkthrough. Optional $250/mo to keep it running.
/missions · related
Related missions
Work where this service did the heavy lifting.
Every mission lives in the archive
Mission archive→mission-control
topicweave
/engineer · flight computer
Flight computer
The code that flies this service. Run a program and watch what each line does.
Mission Control · needs you
const needsYou = tickets.filter(function (t) { if (t.urgency === 'urgent' && t.status !== 'done') return true; if (t.status === 'waiting') return t.updated_at > t.waiting_since; // client replied return t.status === 'received'; });
/faq · 3 questions
Before we launch
How much does a custom dashboard cost?+
A single-workflow dashboard for your own team starts at $9,500. A full Mission Control with a client side (private links, status pages, emails and monthly reports) starts at $18,000. Running it is optional at $250 a month, and hosting is billed to you directly. Every project gets a fixed quote once we've mapped the workflow together.
Who owns it?+
You do. The code, the database and the hosting accounts are in your name. Keep me on to run it, hand it to another developer, or run it yourself.
Why not Airtable, Notion or a ready-made client portal?+
If one of them fits your workflow, start there; it costs less. A custom build pays off when you've bent those tools as far as they go, when per-seat fees keep climbing, or when your clients need a side of their own in your brand.
/observatory · for this service
Further reading
Creative studios
Service businesses
Mission-led teams
Agencies + partners
Webflow CMS
Interactive 3D
Motion + scroll
Brand identity
Design systems
Discovery
Prototyping
Custom code
Versioned deploys
Handoff
Mobile performance
Tap vs hover
Reduced motion
Crawlable links
Scope creep
Perceived speed
Philosophy at work
No items found.
Science of time
No items found.
Asking better questions
Saying no
No items found.
Search + AI answers
Knowledge System
Micro-interaction
How to add structured data to Webflow CMS pages (no plugin)
Paste a JSON-LD `<script>` block into the CMS template's Page settings › Custom code › Before `</head>`, and insert the item's fields with + Add field wherever a value belongs. Every item then ships its own structured data, built from the same fields as the page. Keep straight double quotes (`"`) out of those fields, because one of them breaks the whole block.
BN-01
Search + AI answers
Webflow CMS
Knowledge System
Your Webflow project pages might be invisible to Google. Check your links.
If JavaScript adds your cards' links, the HTML Google downloads may not link to your project pages at all. View the page source (not the inspector) and search for `/work/` or your collection's path. If nothing comes up, set each card's link to Current [Collection] page in the Designer so the link exists before any script runs.
BN-02
Crawlable links
Webflow CMS
Custom code
Smooth scroll without the stutter: Lenis + GSAP in Webflow
Most Lenis + GSAP stutter in Webflow comes from three things: two animation clocks running at once, Lenis's stylesheet missing, and canvas animations that never pause. Drive Lenis from `gsap.ticker`, add Lenis's CSS, and stop anything that isn't on screen.
BN-03
Motion + scroll
Mobile performance
Custom code
Interactive 3D in Webflow that doesn't wreck your mobile score
Heavy 3D doesn't have to mean a slow page. Load the scene only when it's about to be seen, pause it whenever it's off screen, render at a lower pixel ratio on touch devices, and give reduced-motion visitors a still image. The first screen stays fast because the 3D isn't on the critical path at all.
BN-04
Interactive 3D
Mobile performance
Custom code
Tap is not hover: the touch bug hiding in interactive Webflow builds
On a touchscreen, a single tap fires `pointerenter`, `pointerleave` and then `click`, one after another. If hover code opens something on enter and closes it on leave, it closes it again before your click handler runs. Ignore touch in the hover handlers (`if (e.pointerType === 'touch') return;`) and let taps use `click` alone.
BN-05
Tap vs hover
Micro-interaction
Mobile performance
Versioned custom code for Webflow: GitHub, jsDelivr and SRI
Write your custom code in a GitHub repo, tag every release (`v1.4.0`), and load it in Webflow from jsDelivr pinned to that tag with an `integrity` hash. Every deploy is a new URL, so there's no cache to fight, a bad release rolls back by changing one version number, and the browser refuses a file that doesn't match its hash.
BN-06
Versioned deploys
Custom code
Handoff
Reduced motion without losing the magic
When a visitor's device asks for reduced motion, keep everything the motion was saying and drop only the movement. Check `prefers-reduced-motion` in every animation, replace big moves with a fade or a still end state, and design the still version on purpose rather than just switching things off.
BN-07
Reduced motion
Motion + scroll
Micro-interaction
Why before how: what a philosophy degree taught me about building websites
The most useful thing philosophy taught me is a habit: asking what something is for before deciding how to build it. In web projects, that one question saves more time than any tool: it turns "we need a new website" into a clear goal, a shorter sitemap and a design that has a reason for every section.
WB-01
Philosophy at work
Asking better questions
Discovery
One hour there, seven years here: Interstellar and why waiting feels longer than it is
In Interstellar, an hour on Miller's planet costs seven years back home, because a huge mass nearby really does slow time down relative to a distant observer. On the web, time bends in a different way: a wait with nothing to look at feels longer than the same wait with visible progress. You can't change physics, but you can change how a wait is experienced, by showing something useful immediately and making progress visible.
WB-02
Science of time
Perceived speed
Motion + scroll
The camel, the lion and the child: Nietzsche on scope creep
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the spirit changing three times: into a camel that carries every burden, a lion that says "no" to the rules it was handed, and a child that creates something new. A good project goes through the same three stages. First you take everything in, then you refuse what doesn't serve the goal, and only then do you build. Skip the lion and you get scope creep.
WB-03
Philosophy at work
Scope creep
Saying no
Plato's cave: what a crawler sees is not what your visitors see
In Plato's cave, prisoners mistake shadows on a wall for the real world. A crawler reading your site is in a similar spot: it often sees only the raw HTML the server sends, not the page your visitors get after scripts run. If your links, titles or content only appear after JavaScript, some machines are reading the shadow. The fix is to put the real thing in the HTML itself.
WB-04
Philosophy at work
Crawlable links
Search + AI answers
The Ship of Theseus: when does a redesign stop being the same brand?
The ancient puzzle of the Ship of Theseus asks whether a ship is still the same ship once every plank has been replaced. Brands live that puzzle every time they refresh. My answer, from designing this site's own identity: a brand stays itself as long as a few deliberate things stay fixed (its proportions, its core colors, its rules about how pieces fit). Everything else can be replaced, plank by plank, without anyone feeling a stranger has moved in.
WB-05
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Design systems
Amor fati: Nietzsche and learning to love Webflow's limits
Nietzsche called it amor fati, "love of fate": wanting nothing to be different, and not merely putting up with what is necessary but loving it. Every platform has necessities you can't argue with. On this site, Webflow's hard limits (a 60-field cap, nested lists that stop at five items, components that can't hold CMS lists) each forced a structure that turned out cleaner than what I'd planned. So the limits ended up shaping the design.
WB-06
Philosophy at work
Webflow CMS
Knowledge System
Descartes' method of doubt: publish, then check
Descartes built his philosophy on one rule: accept nothing as true unless you've seen for yourself that it is. On a website, that means a change isn't done when a tool says "saved" or "published". It's done when you've checked the live page and found it there. Descartes' four rules of method (verify, divide, order, enumerate) turn out to be a very good checklist for shipping a site.
WB-07
Philosophy at work
Asking better questions
Crawlable links
Descartes' coordinates and a star chart of ideas
Descartes' great mathematical idea was to give every point a pair of numbers, an x and a y, so that shapes could be described with algebra and equations could be drawn as shapes. The star chart on the Topics page does something similar with ideas: each topic in this site's vocabulary gets a position, a size and lines to its neighbors, so you can see how the ideas connect instead of reading a list.
WB-08
Philosophy at work
Knowledge System
Micro-interaction
Less is a bore: when websites got boring, and why I built this one loud
Websites got boring around 2010 to 2013, for good reasons. Phones arrived, Flash died, responsive layouts and frameworks made the web usable everywhere, and flat design became the safe default. Those were good fixes for real problems. But the problems got solved, the tools got powerful, and the habit of playing it safe stayed. I built this site maximalist on purpose: planets, a starfield, warp transitions, a black hole in the footer. What keeps it from being a mess is discipline in how all of that is built.
WB-09
Philosophy at work
Motion + scroll
Design systems
Mercury, Gemini, Apollo: how to start a big, slightly crazy website
Don't start a big idea by building all of it. Start by finding the one part most likely to fail, and fly that first, small and cheap. NASA got to the Moon through Mercury, Gemini and a string of Apollo test flights, each one proving a single scary thing. A huge website, app or redesign works the same way: keep the ambition whole, make the first step tiny, and let every step answer one question.
WB-10
Discovery
Prototyping
Scope creep
Why designers are the hardest audience for a loud website
Designers are usually the first to call a maximalist site "too much," and it isn't because they're wrong about design. Taste is trained, and a whole generation of it was trained on the same clean, minimal SaaS pages. Anything outside that pattern reads as a mistake before it reads as a choice. That reaction is worth listening to, but it's not the same as a client's reaction, and it's not always about the site. The hard part is telling whether a reaction points at a real flaw or just an unfamiliar look.
WB-11
Philosophy at work
Asking better questions
Brand identity
The Alchemist and the treasure under the sycamore: why I stopped chasing design trends
In Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, a shepherd crosses a desert to find a treasure at the pyramids, only to learn it was buried under the tree where he used to sleep. My design career went the same way. I spent years keeping up with whatever the industry was excited about, always in its most minimal form, and the work was good, but it felt a little hollow. Building this site sent me home, back to what I loved making before anyone paid me to make anything. The trip wasn't wasted, though: like the shepherd, I had to make it before I knew where to dig.
WB-12
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Asking better questions
STAY: Interstellar, love and designing a message for someone you'll never meet
Near the end of Interstellar, Cooper is stuck in a tesseract behind his daughter's bookshelf. He can't talk to Murph. All he can do is push on small things across time: a few books, then the second hand of the watch he gave her. It works because she knows that watch, and she knows him. A website is the same kind of message. You send it forward to people you'll never meet, and it only lands if it speaks a language they already know, the way Murph knew that watch.
WB-13
Philosophy at work
Handoff
Science of time
The first easter egg: Warren Robinett's secret room and why hidden things make people love a site
The first famous video game easter egg exists because a designer wasn't allowed to sign his work. In the late 1970s, Atari didn't credit its game designers, so Warren Robinett hid his name in a secret room in Adventure. When players found it, Atari decided to leave it in, and the name "easter egg" stuck. Hidden things still work for the same reason: they reward people who look closer, and they prove a real person made the thing. This site has 19 of them.
WB-14
Micro-interaction
Brand identity
Philosophy at work
How I hid a boss fight in a website (Webflow, GSAP and a little Web Audio)
The boss fight on my About page is one script. It builds a full-screen dialog, draws pixel sprites from text as SVG, runs a small real-time game on GSAP's ticker over a canvas starfield, and synthesizes its own soundtrack with Web Audio. Webflow only holds the card that opens it. The parts that took the most care were the exits: Skip, Esc, retry, sound off by default, and a still version for anyone with motion turned off.
BN-08
Custom code
Motion + scroll
Reduced motion
Scope creep
AI is a brush, not a hand: using AI as a creative tool (and why taste still decides)
AI won't make the thing for you. It will help you see the thing faster than any tool before it, and sometimes it will put things within reach that used to need a team, a budget or a decade you didn't have. But someone still has to know what's worth making, what's wrong with the third version and when to stop. That's taste, and AI doesn't supply it. A creative who learns to use AI well will usually outrun a creative who refuses it. AI with no creative behind it just makes more of what already exists.
WB-15
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Design systems
Follow the white rabbit: curiosity as a design material
Nobody follows a button because it's interesting. People follow things they don't understand yet. Alice chased a rabbit because it had a pocket watch, and rabbits don't have pocket watches. Neo followed one because a message on his screen told him to, and he had no idea why. Aristotle said that wondering about something is where all thinking starts. On a website, that means one strange, unexplained detail can pull a visitor further than any "Learn more." But if you open a question, you owe the visitor an answer.
WB-16
Micro-interaction
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Red pill, blue pill: every interface is a choice you design
Every screen with two buttons on it is a choice someone designed, and the design always leans one way or the other. Sartre said we're "condemned to be free": we can't get out of choosing, and even refusing to choose is a choice. Websites can't get out of it either. You decide which option is bigger, which one is already ticked, which one is worded to make you feel bad. Morpheus is a surprisingly good model here. He tells Neo exactly what each pill does, holds them out evenly, and lets him pick.
WB-17
Philosophy at work
Micro-interaction
Reduced motion
The desert of the real: Baudrillard, The Matrix and websites that copy copies
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that we've slowly swapped the real world for copies of it, until the copies stopped pointing at anything real at all. He called them simulacra. The Matrix put his book on screen in the first ten minutes. A lot of websites live in that stage now: a site copies a template, which copied a popular design, which copied a trend, and nobody remembers what the original was for. The fix is to build from the one thing nobody else can copy: what's actually true about you.
WB-18
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Design systems
Bart sold his soul for five dollars: what The Simpsons taught me about building websites
In "Bart Sells His Soul," Bart signs his soul over to Milhouse for five dollars, and nothing dramatic happens. Small things just stop working. Automatic doors don't open for him. His breath doesn't fog the glass. He can't laugh at cartoons. Websites can lose their soul the same way: they still load, the buttons still work, and something small is missing in every corner. That episode, plus a few Treehouse of Horror stories, taught me more about building things than I expected a cartoon to.
WB-19
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Versioned deploys
Interactive 3D
How I cut my layout shift from 0.40 to 0.001 in Webflow
Layout shift is the page jumping under you while it loads. Google measures it as CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), and under 0.1 counts as good. My Observatory page scored 0.40 on phones. It came from four small causes, each with its own fix: reserve space for anything a script fills in, give your web fonts a fallback with the same shape, start split headings in their final layout, and let the CMS leave out empty sections before the page is sent instead of hiding them afterward.
BN-09
Mobile performance
Perceived speed
Custom code
Webflow CMS
Ten thousand hours, give or take: Outliers and what practice looks like when nobody's teaching you
The "10,000-hour rule" from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers says it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to master something. The researcher whose study it came from, Anders Ericsson, spent years correcting it: ten thousand was an average, not a finish line, and the hours only count if they're the right kind. He called that kind deliberate practice: working just past what you can already do, with fast feedback, on purpose. For a self-taught designer there's no teacher to build that for you. You have to build it yourself, out of real projects, honest feedback and the habit of checking your own work.
WB-20
Philosophy at work
Asking better questions
Brand identity
1984 on the web: Newspeak, the memory hole and the interface that lies politely
1984 is a novel about a government that controls people by controlling language and memory. Its tools have small, everyday cousins on the web: button labels that hide what they do ("Pause" when you wanted "Cancel"), terms and prices that change without a trace, and announcements that call a cut an improvement. Orwell's answer, in an essay he wrote a few years before the novel, was plain language: say the thing, in the shortest honest words. It still works for interfaces.
WB-21
Philosophy at work
Micro-interaction
Search + AI answers
Thirty seconds of fun: what Halo taught me about the smallest loop on a website
Halo's designers talked about the game as "thirty seconds of fun" repeated over and over: see enemies, pick an approach, fight, recover, go again. If those thirty seconds felt great, the rest of the game could be the same loop in new places. Websites have loops too, just smaller: hover, click, drag, release, scroll. The lesson is to find the one small interaction people will repeat on your site, make it feel good every single time, and reuse it, instead of adding ten more features nobody plays with twice.
WB-22
Micro-interaction
Motion + scroll
Philosophy at work
Zombie websites and the hand of the maker: Ruskin, Gutenberg and building with AI
After World War II, the US built faster than ever, and builders copied modernism's look without the thinking behind it. What was left were buildings that worked and meant nothing: zombie buildings. AI has started a new building boom, and it can fill the web with zombie websites the same way. The way out is old: have a point of view before you build, write your standards down where the tools can follow them, don't confuse done with good, and leave room for the strange, hand-made detail that shows someone cared. John Ruskin said it about Gothic cathedrals in 1853: you can see the hand of the maker in every column.
WB-23
Philosophy at work
Brand identity
Design systems
Micro-interaction
Mission Control didn't fly the rocket: what NASA can teach a small business about dashboards
NASA's Mission Control in Houston never flew a spacecraft. The astronauts did that. What the room did was take a flood of data from the spacecraft, put it on screens in front of the people responsible for each system, and then ask each of them one question before every big step: go or no-go? Most small businesses run on five inboxes and a spreadsheet, so nobody can see the state of anything, including the owner. A good dashboard does what that room did. It answers "what needs me next?" for you, and it gives your clients a view of their own, so they stop having to ask whether you got their email.
WB-24
Philosophy at work
Service businesses
Handoff
Asking better questions