Dowdian

Some clients you win. This one I had already been learning from for three years. At QuidPro he was the colleague who showed me the ropes of C# and Razor while I sharpened my SCSS and JavaScript, and who set the standard for how I think about refactoring and testing. When he went out on his own as a fractional CIO, offering companies executive-level technology leadership without the executive-level salary, he asked me to build his site and refresh his logo. It felt like an honour, really, and I treated it as one.

the mark

The brief on the logo was restraint. I kept everything that was already right and touched only what had drifted. The wordmark got an updated typeface, kerned meaningfully rather than left to the font’s defaults. The brand colours were distilled from the old logo instead of replaced, so nothing he had printed or posted suddenly looked wrong. The symbol was adjusted in stroke weight and symmetry and otherwise left alone. If you did not know it had changed, you would not notice. That was the intent.

the site

Dowdian’s site does one thing: explain, to a business owner with a technology problem, what a fractional CIO does and how to book a conversation. The structure follows from that. A clear proposition at the top, a five-step method, three service pillars, and a direct route to email or a calendar slot. Portfolio and blog sit behind it for anyone who wants to check the work.

The hardest decision was what not to build. The blog runs on Astro’s content collections with markdown files kept in the repository. The client maintains markdown files comfortably, so a content-management system, paid or otherwise, would have added cost and a login without adding value. I cut it. The site is lean and fast, and it looks modern because there is nothing on it that does not need to be there.

what it taught me about clients

Between QuidPro and Dowdian I worked out what I look for in a client. Someone with perspective and a vision of their own. Someone with knowledge to share, so the work goes both ways. And someone I know I can trust. This project ticked every box before it began, which is probably why it ended up so clean.