Reverend David Simmons has spent decades in ministry. The brief for his site wasn't "build me a business website" — it was "help people who've never met me understand who I am before they do." That's a very different design problem than the lead-generation sites I usually build.
Corporate Polish Was the Enemy, Not the Goal
The instinct with any personal or professional site is to reach for the same trust-signal patterns as a business: hero banners, stat counters, testimonial carousels. Here, those patterns would have worked against the goal. The challenge was translating decades of ministry work and personal history into a site that feels warm and personal rather than corporate, without sacrificing readability.
Not every site is selling something. Some are just trying to be understood. That changes what "good design" even means for the project.
A Quieter Visual Language, On Purpose
I chose a quieter visual language than a typical business site: fewer competing elements, larger type, and a pacing that mirrors reading a printed biography rather than scanning a landing page. Whitespace isn't empty here — it's doing the work of letting a story breathe instead of competing for attention with the next call-to-action.
Typography Had to Do the Heavy Lifting
With few UI elements to lean on, the type system carried almost all the design weight. It's restrained and generous rather than expressive — the goal was a site that reads like it was set by someone who cared about the words, not one that's showing off its own design.
“The best compliment this kind of site can get isn't "nice website." It's someone forgetting they're reading a website at all.”
Designing for a Reader, Not a Shopper
Typography and image sizing were tuned specifically for long-form reading on a phone, since most visitors arrive from a shared link rather than a search result. That single assumption — this is a reader, not someone comparison-shopping — shaped nearly every decision after it.