Redesigning the Home Page: Six Principles

The original home page was a single full-screen hero: a serif headline, a short subtitle, a call-to-action. It looked intentional. It said nothing.

This is the reasoning behind replacing it.

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The problem with hero-and-tagline

The hero pattern comes from marketing. Its job is conversion: get a stranger to take one action before they leave. That logic makes sense for a product page. It makes less sense for a site whose value is accumulated over multiple visits, where the reader arrives not as a stranger but as someone who has been here before, or who arrived through a specific post and wants to understand the context around it.

A tagline like “Exploring identity in colour, writ in light” is not useful to someone who already knows what the site is. And it doesn’t give a new reader anything to hold onto either. It’s evocative without being specific.

The goal of the redesign was to make the home page useful: something that orients, anchors, and reflects the actual structure of the work.

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Principle 1: Orientation before inspiration

Information architecture research (most legibly in Peter Morville’s work on findability) establishes that users arriving at a new context ask three questions before anything else: Where am I? What can I do here? Where should I go?

The original hero answered none of these directly. A beautiful headline is inspirational but not orienting.

The redesign answers all three on first scroll:

• Where am I? The arc label (Arc 1 · To See) tells you exactly what phase of inquiry the site is in.
• What can I do here? Recent entries surface live work, not just the idea of posts, but actual posts.
• Where should I go? The arc map gives you a complete picture of the structure and where to enter.

Principle 2: Temporal anchoring (the newspaper front page principle)

A newspaper front page is redesigned every day. The structure is stable: masthead, above-the-fold, sections. The content changes to reflect what’s current. Readers learn to read the structure; the content tells them what’s new.

Home pages for journals, studios, and blogs fail when they don’t surface recency. A static tagline gives the reader no signal that the site is alive. The “recent entries” section acts as the above-the-fold: it tells you where the work is right now.

This is the principle behind temporal anchoring: the reader should be able to tell, from the home page alone, roughly when the site was last active and what it’s currently focused on.

Principle 3: Hierarchy mirrors structure

The site’s content is organised into arcs. An arc is a unit of inquiry, a sustained investigation into one aspect of colour. That structure is the most important navigational fact about the site.

Burying the arc in a sidebar label or a /learn page means new readers encounter posts without context. They see a piece of writing about colour temperature without knowing that it’s part of a longer sequence on perception (Arc 1: To See), which is itself part of a broader map of how the site thinks about colour.

Leading with the arc (eyebrow label, title tied to the arc’s theme, explicit arc map at the bottom of the page) means the hierarchy of content is legible from the entry point. The home page reflects the structure, not just the brand.

Principle 4: Specificity over generality

Design systems writing distinguishes between generic and specific information. Generic: “A personal studio journal exploring how colour shapes systems, emotion, and visual tone.” Specific: “Arc 1 · To See: Understanding colour through perception, models, and structure.”

Both are true. The specific version is more useful. It tells the reader what the site is doing right now, not what it is in the abstract. It’s also more honest: the site is not equally about all things all the time. It’s in a particular phase.

Specificity also signals confidence. A site that leads with its current arc is declaring that the arc is worth leading with: that the inquiry is real and in progress.

Principle 5: Typographic rhythm, not just typographic scale

Most “design-forward” sites treat typography as a scale problem: big headline, smaller subheading, body text. This produces visual hierarchy but not rhythm.

Rhythm is about the relationship between elements over time: the pacing of density, whitespace, weight, and size as the reader moves down the page. A full-screen hero followed immediately by a card grid has no rhythm; it’s a jump cut.

The redesign uses three distinct sections with explicit whitespace between them:

1. Arc hero: high contrast, serif, centred, spacious. Sets the tone.
2. Recent entries: left-aligned, compact, efficient. Changes the mode.
3. Arc map: grid, colour-coded, systematic. Changes it again.

Each section has a different visual density. The reader experiences variation, not monotony.

Principle 6: No “AI homepage” patterns

This is a constraint, not a principle, but worth naming because it’s easy to fall into.

AI-generated homepage layouts converge on a small set of patterns: full-viewport hero with centred serif headline, gradient background, one primary CTA, feature grid below, testimonials or stats, footer CTA. The patterns are not wrong in themselves; they’re wrong when applied without reasoning.

The checklist I used:

• Does every element exist because the content needs it, or because it looks like a homepage?
• Is the CTA doing something, or is it decorative?
• Would removing any section make the page less useful, or just shorter?

The original hero failed the third test. The redesign is built so that removing any section degrades the orientability of the page.

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What this isn’t

This redesign doesn’t make the page beautiful in an obvious way. It’s less dramatic than the full-screen hero. That’s intentional: the design should serve the reader’s needs, not signal effort.

It also doesn’t solve everything. The arc map will need updating as new arcs become active. The “recent entries” section will need filtering logic if the site expands to include content from multiple arcs simultaneously. These are constraints to revisit, not problems to solve now.

For now: the home page reflects how the work is structured. That’s enough.