The centerpiece is a set of vector self-portraits, one for each thing I do: designer me, developer me, DM me, and so on. Drawing yourself six times is a little uncomfortable, but it makes the site feel like mine instead of a template.

The logo is two code carets (< >) that rotate around each other to form an S or an N. It's a nod to the dev side of what I do, and because it's just two simple shapes, it animates well: as you scroll, it flips between the letterforms.

Bold colors, geometric shapes, a slightly cartoonish style. A lot of portfolio sites aim for sleek and end up feeling like nobody lives there. I went the other way.

Every section gets its own color and the whole interface shifts with it, so you always know which Nathan you're talking to. The blues, purples, oranges, and pinks are louder than they strictly need to be. That's on purpose.

The first logo was silhouette portraits of the founding duo, back when Wake Up John was just the two of us.

When we grew into a quartet, the silhouettes stopped making sense. The alarm clock was the obvious fit for the name, and it holds up at any size: album covers, posters, stickers.

The current version makes room for the full band name and still works everywhere we've needed to put it.

The Fugitive Closure art is built around a photo of Pulpit Rock: one small figure, a lot of sky. It matched where the songs were pointed.

Steel City ran a community contest for a new logo, so I sent in a pile of concepts.

Each one takes a different angle on the same three ingredients: coffee, live music, and the building's steel-town history.

An ongoing series where I strip a game down to as few shapes as possible. If it still reads instantly, it stays. If it needs a caption, it goes back on the bench.

The fun part is figuring out what actually makes a game recognizable. Sometimes it's a character. Sometimes it's just a color and a shape.

I DMed this campaign for two years, so by the end I knew these characters better than their players did. The portraits were a thank-you to the table.

Everyone gets the same minimal treatment — a silhouette and a palette — so each character reads as an individual but the party hangs together as a set.

The pitch started by making the case against the existing icon. It was three separate ideas stacked together — a stretched P, a top-heavy arrow, and a data line doing double duty as an M — and none of them held up alone. It also inverted badly, which matters when half your output is slide decks.

The replacement is one shape instead of three. Blue carries trust and focus, green carries growth, and the dark blue wedge in the middle is the data everything else is built on. It works inverted, which the old one never did.

A logo on its own doesn't change how a company looks. Most of the work was everything downstream — a UI kit so the product stopped drifting, and templates so the sales team stopped rebuilding decks from scratch.

The mark hides the initials in a helmet. Read it as a shape and it's a helmet; read it as letters and the M is the crown, the D and A are the face. It only works because all three letters were willing to bend a little.

The site keeps out of the book's way. Black, one photo, and four doors — bio, the novel, the blog, and press. An author site's whole job is to send people to the thing they can buy.

Classee was an education and training software idea that never got off the ground. The brief was open, so I took the name in as many directions as I could stand.

The obvious symbols for education are a pencil, an apple, a book, and a lightbulb. The interesting part is which ones can carry a letterform without turning into clip art.

Tribology is the study of friction and wear, which means the audience is engineers with a specific failure they need explained. The site leads with the problem rather than the company, because that's the search someone is actually running.