For a while now, a small itch had been sitting at the back of my mind. Nothing urgent, just a quiet feeling every time I opened this site that I’d been looking at the same page for too long. I design things for a living, which makes it slightly embarrassing to admit how long I let my own corner of the internet stay exactly as it was.

Most of the personal sites I read belong to other designers, and I’ve noticed they almost all go through the same cycle. Every couple of years (or months!), a new typeface or layout, sometimes a whole new idea of what the site is for. I’m not sure if it’s a professional habit or something more psychological, a kind of restlessness that comes with spending your days making things look right. Probably both.

Either way, I’ve come to see it as a good sign. A site that changes every now and then is a site where someone is still home. And it’s one of the few creative exercises where I get to be both the client and the designer. No brief, no deadline, nobody to convince but myself. Which, it turns out, is its own kind of difficult.

The change of season was a pretext more than a reason. Autumn was about to start, and I needed a starting line of some sort. A coincidence I was happy to take.

I ended up changing more than I’d planned, though most of it is on the surface.

The biggest shift is the type. I swapped the old typefaces for Schibsted Grotesk, a sans-serif with a bit of newspaper in its bones, and paired it with Martian Mono for dates, tags and other small print. Together they give the site the feel of an index or a catalogue, which is why I called the whole direction Index.

Colour now follows the calendar. What you’re looking at is the autumn palette, and when the season turns, the site will turn with it. Even the little icon in your browser tab changes. Nobody will notice that, and I’m fine with it.

The Reading page, meanwhile, now groups books by the year I read them. I only put the ones I’d happily recommend there, so it’s a fraction of what I actually read.

I’m fairly sure that in a year or two I’ll open this page and feel that same itch again. That’s fine. If anything, I’d be more worried if I didn’t. For now, it feels good to be looking at something new, even if the only one who really needed it was me.