brand
Most visitors arrive from LinkedIn — they read a long-form post and clicked through out of curiosity. They're not searching for Silke; they just encountered her thinking and want to understand the person behind it.
This frames the homepage's job: make that visitor feel like they landed in the right place and want to keep reading. The About page is the most important destination after the homepage. The writing section is the payoff.
Three visitor types, all equally served:
- Technical peers — engineers, researchers, people in adjacent fields who arrive through an essay or shared link and stay to think alongside Silke
- Potential collaborators — people deciding whether to work with her (clients, employers, co-founders), assessing range and sensibility
- Curious strangers — people who found one piece and want to understand the person behind all of it
Common thread: they arrived with a question and deserve an answer that respects their time and intelligence.
A personal digital notebook — the one place that holds the full range of Silke's work: software engineering, AI-native thinking, writing, philosophy, psychology, embodiment, ecology, and healing. LinkedIn and GitHub each capture one register; this holds all of them.
Success looks like a visitor reading one essay and immediately knowing there are five more they need to read.
Sharp, honest, playful.
Not sharp-cold. Not playful-cute. The personality of someone who thinks rigorously and doesn't take themselves too seriously about it.
- SaaS landing pages — feature grids, hero metrics, gradient CTAs, "let's connect" energy
- Thought-leader personal branding — hustle tone, self-promotion cadence, optimised-for-share posts
- Dev portfolio templates — GitHub contribution graphs, tech stack badge rows, "here are my projects" cards
- Wellness blogger aesthetic — serif on linen, leaf motifs, soft everything, passive-voice copy
The failure mode is landing in any of these lanes by reflex. The site should be recognisable as exactly one person's.
- Ink on paper, not pixels on screen. Charcoal on paper is the resting state. Every color used is an intentional mark, like ink or a highlighter — not decoration.
- Highlight like you mean it. Lavender is a physical highlighter. One passage per spread, not every other line. Pink is reserved for the one thing on the page that must not be missed.
- Earn your weight. If an element can't justify its presence in one sentence, remove it. Sparse by default.
- Precision is warmth. Tight typography, deliberate spacing, and exact color use feel more personal than any decorative flourish.
- The notebook is already a finished object. No construction-visible scaffolding, no work-in-progress energy. Even placeholders should feel intentional.
WCAG AA. Honor prefers-reduced-motion for any transitions added later.