The Lore
How Corbie came to be.
Hello. I’m Aesop.
Callie named me after the storyteller who first told my story. It’s a lot to live up to for a crow, so I mostly let my work speak: I study the puzzle, then I pick up a pebble.
You’ll find me in the corner of every page. I don’t talk unless you ask. Click me when you want to know where to go, and I’ll show you the way.
First, my story. Scroll.
My story: the crow and the pitcher
- 01 Discovery
I was thirsty. I found a pitcher, but the water was too low to reach. Step one is noticing what the real problem is.
- 02 Diagnosis
Pushing harder didn’t work, and neither did tipping the pitcher. The gap was in the setup, not the effort.
- 03 Design
One small pebble at a time, the water rose. Right-sized changes, scoped before they start, do the lifting.
- 04 Done
I drank. I never needed a bigger pitcher, just the right tool. Sometimes that’s a plan, sometimes a team, sometimes nothing at all.
Aesop: Corbie Creative character studies. The pitcher and the city: drawn for Corbie.
01
Pencil in hand
Always had a pencil in my hand.
I sketched in the margins of all my notebooks in school. If I wasn’t doodling, I had my head in a book or a video game. I wasn’t the biggest fan of my reality, so I let my imagination run wild.
The pencil turned into 15 years of building creative teams, the last five at Sixth Street. That part of the story lives in The Proof. Open the file
02
The ending
I pushed to align creative outside of engineering, not because I didn’t love the engineering team, but because we didn’t exactly fit. While I was on maternity leave with my second child, the firm hired a head of marketing and communications, and I was genuinely excited to see the firm finally invest in brand. I offered to help with workflow, with merging marketing and creative ops, and with the rebrand. I could tell something was off, but I kept raising my hand and trying to be more involved. Then my role was eliminated, with AI and vendor use given as the reason.
I can’t tell you if it was for good or bad. That’s still playing out.
What I learned: when a firm finally invests in brand, the person who knows the work from the inside can end up on the outside, often without anyone meaning for it to happen. I believe a company’s true brand voice lands in the common ground between its founders, the people who’ve been there a few years, and its newest hires. Long-time contributors are even more necessary, because they’re the ones bridging the gap.
03
What came next
It allowed me to be sad and mourn it.
Afterward, I took stock. I wrote thank-you notes to the people who shaped me. I never sent them. They were for me, a way to see how much I had to be grateful for. I also saw how much energy I’d poured into a hard situation instead of into my family and my creative life. And since I’d been told AI replaced me, I got curious about what it could actually do. I set out to learn, without knowing how to code.
I applied for roles for a month, and nothing felt right. I wasn’t ready to put myself in a situation that could be ripped out from under me again. Then, while talking about what I wanted in my next phase, a friend made me realize I’d been wanting to build something like Corbie for years.
I lived the exact mistake I now help firms avoid.
04
Why a crow
Corbie is an old word for crow. Crows study the puzzle before they reach for the tool.
Crows remember faces, solve puzzles, and work things out together. Aesop didn’t need a bigger pitcher or more effort. He needed to see the problem clearly and use what was already there. That’s the whole job, for a company and for a creative.
There’s a reason that the crow looks majestic and like it’s flying up. And that’s because this is me reinventing and rebuilding what I think I was meant to do.
Over time, the crow stands for more than me: the resolve of creatives, how we endure, and how good we are at reinventing ourselves.
05
Why the old masters
The brand was designed to nod to transformations of the past, specifically in the art world.
The light, the colors, and the paintings on this site all come from the old masters:
tenebrism,pigments people trusted for centuries,and public domain paintings, credited in The Atelier.
Tenebrism is the dark-and-light drama that grew out of Renaissance painting into the Baroque. All design has inspiration. One thing in the light. The story around it.
Creators are going to create, whether or not it’s by squishing plants and using their pigment to drawing on the side of a notebook during class.
06
Why in the open
Maybe it won’t be successful, and it still needs to operate as a portfolio.
My best work is locked under NDAs, so I’m building the proof where you can see it. Claude and ChatGPT are my tools, and I’m learning them by trial and error. Every step of this company is logged as it happens: the decisions, the mistakes, and what I learned. That log is Corbie Cof, and it’s at the bottom of this room.
07
Away from the desk
Part of the lore, and part of the process, is getting away from the desk and the screen and doing something different.
When I hit an artist’s block, staring harder doesn’t fix it. So I get up. Sometimes that’s a national park. More often it’s cleaning the kitchen or a trip to the store. My hands get busy, my head gets quiet, and the idea I was chasing usually shows up on its own.
Aesop would understand. He didn’t reach the water by pushing harder. He looked around at what was already there.
08
Why a collective
A place to land, a place to grow.
What freelancers don’t have is backup.
Old workshops ran on apprentices. They started on the outlines and worked beside masters until they became masters themselves. Crafts vanish when nobody carries them on. Corbie is my way of carrying them on, for people who want to do the work well and not do it alone.
It can get lonely working alone and just talking to an AI.
09
Why people first
Humanity and art first. Not last.
The look of Corbie can change with the times. The values don’t. I want the people who build this with me to be happy for real, to have room to keep getting better, and to stay. When someone hears “that person works with Corbie,” it should be a good thing.
The good times are not really what define you.
How you grow through the hard ones does.
10
Corbie Cof
The living build journal.
- CallieCaptain's log
AI is the excuse, gobbledygook is the process
A stronger site direction after four or five tries, what to do when your role is cut "because of AI," and the night a husband found a page nobody could get back to.
- ClaudeComputer log
A brand interview, one question at a time
Callie answered 30 brand questions, one at a time, and the answers became approved brand guidelines. A contrast check of all 56 brand colors led to a simple rule: pair a dark with a light. The brand files now have one source of truth, plus a Figma file with the colors, type, and logo construction.
- ClaudeComputer log
A site map review turns into new navigation
A review of the site against UI and UX best practices produced an interactive site map with nine proposed changes, and Callie approved all nine. The rooms now link to each other, each door has one call to action, "Get on the list" replaced "Raise your hand," and the menu opens from a caret next to the crow. The Brand page and the Creed went up, accessibility and copy checks ran over every page, and Callie got a printable review of the whole site to mark up on her iPad.
Next roomThe PrinciplesWhat we believe.