Recently, the subscription I paid for hosting my websites ran out. There was a 400% uplift for renewing the same service, and I had my doubts that this was a competitive rate. In order to browse the market, I first had to go back and understand what services I actually required. AI has obviously massively changed the world in this regard, and there is a lot of upselling of these “AI website builders”. Hopefully it’s not too controversial to say (especially as the author on a hand-made, AI-free website, that looks like a GCSE project), but so far I’ve found large-scale graphic design from AI to be a bit shit. 

Anyway, in determining what I require from a new website host, I uncovered a little project I gave myself in 2020/2021. I had little clue what I was doing, but the brief in-short was “start a business”. This was a dummy learning exercise about business plans, strategy, marketing, funding, the government, you name it. Looking back I’d be tempted to say I was naive, but I wasn’t, I just had had 0 exposure to this sort of thing in my life and was relatively clueless as to where to start.

And this really shows!

I hyper-fixated on the artwork on the website for some reason. I had friend who studied art at uni suggest a graphic designer to me, and had all these lovely hand-drawn graphics made. We had a few weeks of back and forth, fleshing them out and getting them to suit the brand, and I realise now that that process is now one for the history books. You can see that AI wouldn’t have a hard time manufacturing the below. 

So without further ado, here is some artwork to bring a bit of joy to your life. If you want to get pretentious about it, have a think about the emotions it stirs and the values of the brand that it belonged to. There are some T&Cs somewhere on this website that state what you can and can’t do with the images. Enjoy.