What felt like the real win this week?

The real win is having a stronger direction for the website, and more of it in my voice. I'd tried to put this website together four or five times before, and every time I got hung up on what the process should be and what the visuals should look like, more than what the words should be.

I agonize more over something I'm building for me than something I'm building for a client. Client work doesn't represent me personally, so it's easier to ideate on the copy and the flow. When it's the way I launch myself into the world as a business owner, I go a little harder, and I'm harder on myself. And I'm trying to build a community and a client base at the same time, from not zero, but not one either. I would say a bunch of 0.5 clients.

I'm starting to actually understand GitHub and Cloudflare and how code goes from gobbledygook to published. Until now that felt like magic to me. Copy is still the hard part, because my natural propensity is to be 100% truly myself, and my 100% myself isn't the most marketing-first personality. It's very brutal honesty: this is what actually happens.

Where's your line between brutal honesty and what a client needs to hear?

I'm still discovering that line. I was told my role was being eliminated because of AI and vendor use. Because that was the reasoning, my next step, after going through all the stages of grief, was to figure out what AI could truly do, how I could work better with it, and how it could make me faster. That's been such a cool experience over the last few months, and the only reason I've had it is because I didn't have to juggle all my job responsibilities with learning. I've been able to spend my whole "working" brain on this project. It's a double-edged sword. But there are still times I mourn my old life and team.

I never want it to come off like I'm disparaging my previous employer, because there are so many people at my last job that I love so much. This is not a good versus evil. It's not a right versus wrong. It's literally: this happened, and here's what I'm doing with it.

Across my journey, the thing that's remained the same about me is that I care and I like to teach. My untraditional path has given me a lot of empathy for people trying to start out or transition in this world of complexity and change. And I am unemployed and not receiving a paycheck right now. So how do I communicate this in-between state honestly for the community, and still be someone people would want to work with?

If someone in your exact spot came to you this week, what would you tell them?

Where I was in July? First, if you can, take a few weeks and become okay with it. Journal, or whatever you do to get your thoughts out of your head, before you go out and do anything. Think deeply about what you want out of your next role: what you liked about the one that got eliminated, and what you didn't. Do the applications, spend time with your resume, update your portfolio if you're a creative. If you didn't try using AI during those initial updates, try using AI and see what happens, and deep dive on how to work with it.

If a company says a role was cut because of AI, I have a hard time believing that's the full truth. I think AI is an excuse. Companies want to publicly show devotion to the bottom line, and they do that by cutting employees. Long term, that's a losing game once you count the costs to rehire and the burnout from the people left filling in. I'd rather a company take the money it would spend on severance and send people to an AI boot camp, or let them fight for their role with AI as a tool. What IKEA did seems like a better use of resources: they let an AI bot take over the routine customer questions, then retrained thousands of call center workers as interior design advisers instead of letting them go.

After a few months of immersion, I really believe that AI actually creates new roles. Whether or not an organization is put together enough to allocate resources to implement those roles is another story. It's very clear when output is 100% AI generated, because it all looks the same. The prompting, the direction, discerning what goes in and what comes out, the refining - that's hard. It takes practice and familiarity with the different LLMs and outcomes. Even with devoting most of my free time to building in AI, I still make mistakes, and my output still needs repetition.

When you're in a scarcity mindset, it's hard to think through what's important to you. But incremental progress is better than no progress. You can learn the technology they said would replace you, and walk into your next role with the story: I struggled, this happened, it sucked, and here's what I did with it. The Instagram influencers with five prompts to get you $5 million? Maybe it worked for somebody. If everybody does it, you get a bunch of samesies. Just find what resonates for you.

Was there a moment this week when you knew something wasn't you?

I was so deep in the build that I needed a cross-check, a little separation, and that human feedback loop. Thursday night I showed my husband the in-progress site and the animations. I was really excited because some of the stories had started to sound like me. He's an accountant, so he looks at it from a different point of view, and he gave really pointed feedback on the copy, the story and the UI. Then he said, hey, this one page is really important, and I have no idea how to get back to it. It wasn't in the dropdown. It wasn't in anything.

I'd been prompting to build individual pages and hadn't thought through the site map. You can build anything with AI, but whether it works from a human point of view is really up to the human and up to the prompter. That's what prompted me to have Claude build out the static PDF. I used more than half of my capacity on Friday.

He was looking at it from an accounting standpoint, and my target market is growth companies in tech, finance and a lot of other industries. Anyone could read something and take it the wrong way. And my answers in these interviews come from the questions I'm having Claude ask me, just like this captain's log, and those are shaped by its memories of me. Last week was the foundation. This week is refinement. My homepage, with my logo and big words, doesn't feel quite as uniquely me or uniquely Corbie yet, because I gave examples instead of layout direction. So I'm going to map it out myself.

Doing AI responsibly is going to be a big piece of the future. Doing it ethically is going to be a big piece of the future. And those are not the same thing. Using it efficiently, with the output still feeling genuine to your brand, your story, who you are, is a whole other ballgame that I don't know if anybody's really solved yet.

*The IKEA story is from Reuters reporting by Helen Reid, June 2023, republished by Inside Retail.*

What felt like the real highlight, even if the log didn't give it the most space?

This is going to sound really weird, but I got a new computer last week, and the real highlight for me has been having a consistent day of working without worrying about memory and storage space on my computer. Moving files around, and downloading and re-downloading them from the cloud, had really slowed down and hampered my creative flow and my process.

Another one, and this is going to sound so dumb to people reading this: moving from Cowork to Claude Code has been huge. That was really more of a Friday thing. I don't know why, but in my brain I thought Claude Code meant I had to type in code, and it was intimidating because I feel like I don't know code, even though I've learned a lot about coding since I started this whole process. It still feels intimidating to me for some reason, but I've done a lot more.

Actually, I think one of my next things after getting the website up and running is redoing Cof again, having it be in Claude Code and seeing if any pieces of the structure of Corbie Cof could be redone. My first post last week came off very AI-generated. I want more of my voice in it, and to use it more as a question and then record my answer, which is hard to do in a Substack if I'm speaking verbally.

You described your hand-built department being reshaped by vendors and AI, and wanting somewhere people can land. How much of that do you want in a public post?

I'm okay with all of it. I'm not embarrassed by the reason I'm starting this. I actually think it's a really important part of my story: how I look at challenges, reshape and reinvent myself, and learn how to come back.

And the rebellion message is not just about what happened to me. It's about what I've seen systemically, for a lot of my colleagues in the creative space and as a manager of creative teams. Anytime there's a round of layoffs in the tech or creative space, creative seems to be where companies push to reduce first. It causes a lot of worry and unrest. I went through that for the first time, unexpectedly, this year. It doesn't feel good.

I spent so much time at my last role fighting for different pieces of creative, and trying to give more training and support. It always felt like an uphill battle. I've never been in an agency, but I'm assuming that's not something you have to fight for as much in a company where creatives are the majority instead of a minority.

In the companies I've been a part of, creative was a small subset of the company. We saw a lot, we did a lot. A lot of the really important stuff came through the creative team's queue, but it wasn't a high priority. It was more focused on polish and returning deliverables. The credit for the communication, the data and the wording went, rightfully so, to the individual who sent the project to creative to get it done. So you don't see creative as a super important part when you're using it as a vendor. That's not true in every single case.

But I want to create a rebellion where people who are maybe starting their careers can join Corbie Creative and start building equity in a company. I want them to feel like their thoughts, feelings and desires, their overall happiness, their whole career journey, are actually in their hands. Versus feeling like, hey, I'm just gonna quit and go off and freelance, and then it really is all in my hands, but there's no backup.

I'm not 100% sure how to organize that yet. But I think a collective or a guild, something where we're actually taking care of each other, and figuring out how to vote on the movement of the company: what we want to build and what we want to prioritize. Say we have a collective pot of money from projects each individual has done, and an early vote is for healthcare, and there are different types of healthcare.

A lot of times the HR or benefits manager negotiates what's best and works with the partners, but usually that doesn't trickle down to the everyday employee. It's not a transparent part of running a business. You apply to a company, and here's your medical.

We're going through it right now. We're switching my insurance and our family insurance from my last company to my husband's company at the end of this month. That insurance is not as good, and there's no opt-in. It's point blank, because of the way his company is structured. It's not that it's wrong. It's just going to cost an insane amount more, out of our limited store of funds, to send my kid to the doctor or go to the doctor myself. And that's unfortunate.

So weighing that out with a vote, and figuring out how to weight someone's vote, by tenure or equity supplied or whatever, is going to be an interesting thing to figure out. That's not traditional. At a traditional company you sign up and you're given a list of your resources and benefits. You might use some, you might not. Every benefit you don't use, from a team lunch to the Christmas party, is pay you don't get in your paycheck, because it's all part of your compensation.

If I'd had the choice, I would have said screw you to Christmas parties and random after-work events, because that's my personal time with my kids and my husband. I'd also have said I don't need that office space in downtown Dallas. It wasn't fancy, but it was downtown Dallas: commuting an hour and a half to sit in a quiet office that's freezing and not the temperature I want, not running my own schedule, sitting in traffic, the wear and tear on my car. It's just not ideal.

So that's where my dream of rebellion comes from. I still want people to own their own little companies. I don't see why an agency couldn't join Corbie and funnel, I don't know, 20% of their overhead. I don't even know how it would work, but that's what the accountant is for, figuring all of that out with the legal side and the documents.

Having November 2 and November 16 on the calendar: relief, pressure, or both?

It actually feels a little bit like a relief. The struggle is that I don't have a clear picture of how all the coding works, because it's all in the back end. So it's not that transparency and ownership I really want. And I have the audacity to think, oh, I can just figure out the text and the layout and put it in. Getting that out of my brain and into writing is always hard. That's why right now I'm defaulting to: okay, I'm going to find all the pictures, put them in a layout, and try to make a seamless layout Claude can pull from.

I've always agonized over the wording and context of written text. It's easier for me to just say what's on my brain and word vomit, and that's not so easy to do on a website where everything is static and stays.

A couple of days ago we were working on a tagline for the overall company, and everything sounded so standard. Pre-AI, I probably would have gone to the store, gotten a bunch of Nerds and Skittles, gotten myself a little hyper, done a painting, picked a random few words, and been like, yeah, that's brilliant. Right now I'm not really able to do that. It's hard when I'm jumping back and forth between house care and parenting. Not full-time parenting, since the kids are still in daycare for a little bit, but switching my brain on and off isn't a long-term solve for coming up with creative ideas.

That's one of the pieces I really miss about having a team: the back and forth, the writing-on-the-wall session where I'm waving my arms around. I can come to a team member with an idea, and it may be good, it may be subpar, and then the collaboration and the energy you get from ideating make the idea so much better.

To quote Andrew from my old team: we only ice baked cakes. We only decorate the finished product as a way of iterating. I'm still very much in the ingredient-collection and mixing phase. I haven't put the cake in to bake yet. So it's hard for me to create a tagline for all of Corbie without having all those pieces baked, if that makes sense. Which it might not.

Having my artwork move and having a direction feels better. I can see more of what I’m trying to make. But yesterday I was learning another unfamiliar process: save things here, upload them to GitHub, have Cloudflare pull from GitHub. I can visualize the steps, but I still don’t fully understand how everything connects. This is completely outside the work I used to do.

I’m used to building and shipping with an external deadline. A client needs something by a particular day. There are parameters, people to work with, and a point when it has to go out.

Now that decision is mine. The website probably could go live. But there are a few more tweaks, and the content doesn’t quite feel like me yet. I keep getting ideas before I’ve had a full stretch of time to work through the ones I already have.

I need the website to be proof of my capabilities. It needs to work as a portfolio, explain what I’m offering, and give someone a clear next step. I want it to show how I think through storytelling and how I make decisions.

Getting an outline together and having Claude code it has been the easier part. Refining it so the message is there, the interactions aren’t overdone, and the whole thing doesn’t feel rushed is harder. That refinement feels like part of the proof of who I am as a leader, designer, creative director, and creative operations person.

The Shopify Winter ’26 site gave me a lot of inspiration. I like how the format and visuals change around what they’re trying to highlight. That appeals to the part of me that wants to play with different things and see how they work. I want to find my own way to use that kind of movement with restraint.

Then there are the case studies.

Claude picked up numbers and examples from my résumé and put them into the site. They weren’t necessarily the things I would have chosen to highlight. But when I try to say what should replace them, I’m not sure.

I know the work was hard. Thousands of slides. Alignment across teams and locations. Building a team and workflows. Helping get a general session ready, where partners get onstage to share the information people came to hear.

My responsibility was a specific, vital piece of a much larger event. I also worked within limits. I didn’t have full control, and I wasn’t brought into all the conversations. There was often someone between the presenter and me, which I hated because it didn’t make sense.

I can talk about that work topically, but I can’t share the visuals. I don’t know yet how to make those stories convincing, or which ones demonstrate what a business wants from fractional leadership. Maybe there’s self-doubt in that too. I know what it took. I’m less sure how impressive it looks from the outside.

And the investor conference is about to happen without me there. It sucks not being able to support my friends when I know this is the crazy crunch time.

When I think about Corbie Creative, I think about building somewhere freelancers can land and grow. Somewhere working as a team gives them a real return on their time.

I also need paid work now.

If I could bring people in today, I’d want someone to identify prospects and make those first contacts. I’m happy to show up and be the voice of Corbie. I’d want someone technical to help make the workflows work, legal support, and people to bounce ideas off.

I miss the writing-on-the-wall sessions with my team. I miss someone being able to say, “That’s a shitty idea,” or, “That’s a great idea,” and working through it together.

Last week, I stepped away from screens and went to a park in Denison. I listened to birds, walked, took pictures, and explored without knowing exactly where I was going. I sketched on paper two days in a row.

The paper buckled. The pencils weren’t quite doing what I wanted. My water leaked. I got better paper for my traveler’s journal, but even with the imperfect setup, the output felt pretty enough.

I came back refreshed and made serious progress on the website.

Getting the footage off my devices was another story. Some larger files wouldn’t transfer. The window when I had time to work with them passed, other things became priorities, and now the footage is another thing waiting in the back of my mind.

There are school pickups, the house, errands, and a few available hours that never feel like all the hours I want. My computer is struggling to run everything. I’m waiting for the EIN after the website didn’t work when I applied. Money and health insurance are part of why the timeline feels pressing.

I’d love to do workshops eventually. Hiking and sketching with other people sounds wonderful. But right now I need a steady stream of client work and the bills covered before I can give that idea the time it deserves.

AI has helped me get much further with this website than I could have on my own. I guarantee it wouldn’t be anywhere near what it is without it.

It still doesn’t feel as solid as it would with a team.

I am making progress. I can see that. I’m still figuring out how to make the work represent me well enough to share, while fitting the build into the life I actually have.