I’ve designed websites for 20-plus years.
So you’d think refreshing my own brand would be, oh I don’t know, a long weekend? A focused week, tops?
It took me about 18 months.
Yes, I see the irony. And no, it wasn’t because I don’t understand this stuff. It’s because rebranding your business asks you to see yourself clearly, and that turns out to be the hardest part of the whole thing. Especially when the business you’re branding is your own.
If you’ve been circling your own brand for months, changing a color, hating it, changing it back, this one’s for you.
Why rebranding my business felt impossible when I do this for a living
There’s an old saying about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes. Design has its own version.
I can sit with a client, look at their business from the outside, and see it. Their vibe, their voice, the colors that fit them. It’s clear to me because I have distance. I’m not tangled up in their doubts or their history or the seventeen versions they almost went with.
My own brand? No distance at all.
I was standing three inches from the canvas trying to judge the whole painting. Every choice felt loaded. Every color felt like a decision about who I am, not just what looks good on a website.
Why it’s so hard to design for yourself
It’s not a skill gap. It’s a perspective gap.
When you’re the client and the designer and the business owner all at once, you lose the one thing this work needs most: a clear-eyed look from the outside. You know too much. You care too much. You second-guess things you’d never let a client second-guess.
This is why so many designers hire other designers for their own rebrands. It’s not that they can’t do the work. It’s that someone else can see them more clearly than they can see themselves right now.
I get it now in a way I really didn’t before.
The 18-month brand evolution my followers watched happen
Here’s the part I can’t pretty up: a lot of this happened in public.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you saw it. The colors that shifted. The logo that wasn’t quite right, then was closer, then changed again. Gold, then not gold. Little tweaks that probably looked like I couldn’t make up my mind.
I wasn’t being flaky. I was iterating.
Each version taught me something about what didn’t fit, which is honestly how you find what does. You rarely arrive at “this is me” in one clean shot. You get there by ruling things out, one slightly-wrong version at a time.
So if your site feels like a work in progress, good. Mine was too. For a year and a half, out loud.
Finding your brand colors when nothing feels right
Colors were the sneaky-hard part.
I’d land on a palette, feel great for a week, then start side-eyeing it. Not because it was ugly. Because it wasn’t mine yet.
The thing nobody tells you is that you’re not really picking colors. You’re trying to translate a feeling into a hex code, and feelings are slippery. It took a lot of swatches, a lot of “close but no,” before the palette finally settled into something that felt like walking into my own house.
The soul-searching part nobody warns you about
Here’s what I didn’t expect.
The real work wasn’t the design. It wasn’t fonts or icons or layouts. Those were the easy part, or at least the obvious part.
The hard work was figuring out what actually felt like me.
How I talk. What I’m drawn to. What I want someone to feel in the first three seconds of landing on my site. What I’ve become after two decades of doing this, which is not the same person I was when I started.
I had to dig into all of that before a single color choice could stick. Because you can’t reflect something you haven’t defined yet. Turns out you have to know the person before you can brand the business.
That’s the part that took 18 months. Not the design. The knowing.
Take a stroll down memory lane and see how I’ve evolved.
When your website branding finally clicks
And then, quietly, it did.
Once I understood what I was actually building, who I am now, how I want to show up, what I want people to feel, the website almost designed itself. The colors made sense. The illustrations made sense. The whole thing clicked into place because the foundation was finally there.
The design was never the bottleneck. The clarity was.
What this means for your website (and your brand)
So here’s what I want you to take from my very long, very public rebrand.
If you’re struggling to brand your own business, it does not mean you’re bad at it. It doesn’t mean you’re indecisive or behind or doing it wrong.
It usually means one of three things:
- You’re too close to see yourself clearly right now
- You haven’t fully defined what “you” is yet, which is normal, especially if your business has changed
- You could use some distance, some guidance, or just permission to let it evolve
Your brand is allowed to change. Your website is allowed to evolve as you do. The set-it-and-forget-it thing was never real anyway. Your site isn’t just a pretty brochure, though. It’s the current best version of who you are, and “current” is the key word.
Mine took 18 months to catch up to me. Yours might take a weekend, or it might take a year. Both are fine.
If you’ve been staring at your own brand for too long and can’t tell up from down anymore, that’s usually the sign it’s time to bring in a pair of outside eyes. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for your brand is hand it to someone who can see you clearly. (Hi, I can help you there.)
Curious what that could look like for your site? Take a look at how I work with clients here. No calls, no pressure, just a clear next step whenever you’re ready.
