claude code rebuilt my entire personal brand in 2.5 days
the strategy, the AI stack, and the reasoning behind every deliberate pixel — from a growth guy who treats his website like a product.
six years ago i built my website to do exactly one thing: hold my blog posts.
that was the whole plan. i was an engineer and project manager working for other companies, and i wanted a corner of the internet to think out loud — write about hackathons, share what i learned at Amazon and Eventbrite, and document my slow crawl from "javascript dev" toward product.
it did that job well. for a while.
but six years is a long time. and somewhere along the way, the site quietly stopped telling the truth about me.
so i blew it up and rebuilt the whole thing in two and a half days.
this post is the director's commentary — not just what it looks like, but why every piece is there. because i don't think about a personal website as a portfolio. i think about it as a growth channel. and brand, done right, is pipeline.
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why the old site had to die
here's what happened to me over those six years:
i built 10 AI products (six of them in the last two months alone). i left a founding-engineer seat at a startup to go build my own thing. i moved to the US. i started advising a startup on marketing and growth. i launched my own social platforms and made a pile of content go viral.
and my website still said: javascript developer, slowly moving into product management.
that's a positioning problem, and positioning problems are expensive. when who you are outpaces how you're packaged, you leak. every person landing on my site was meeting a 2019 version of me and quietly bouncing. that's not a vanity issue. that's lost pipeline.
the site wasn't wrong, exactly. it was just years behind the person.
what i actually wanted it to do
let me be honest about the business goal, because pretending otherwise would be very off-brand for a growth guy.
this redesign has a job: bring better people to my door. contracting work. co-founders. partners to launch AI products with. exciting projects worth putting my name on.
and the only way to attract those people is to show how i think — about growth, marketing, product, and brand — instead of telling them. so the site itself had to be the proof. (yes, this post is part of that too. meta, i know.)
then there was the harder constraint. i'm a playful, funny guy. that's not a bug i'm trying to hide — it's my signature. but i also needed the site to read premium and trustworthy. half playground, half boardroom.
and the renaissance-man problem: i'm an engineer and a marketer and a content creator and a designer and a brand builder. most websites force you to pick one lane. i wanted a white canvas that just says — this is me. whether you like it or not. this is what i've been up to.
the brand: black, white, and one very deliberate orange
a brand, to me, is an extension of myself. so i started there, before touching a single page.
black and white came first. it reads thoughtful, premium, clear — this guy knows what he's doing, you can trust him. white for clarity and space. black for that premium weight.
then orange.
orange has shown up in every single redesign i've ever done — it's the one constant across years of versions. orange and red are just… me. my favorite sweater is orange. my phone case is orange and red. it's the energy, the fire, the part of me that doesn't sit still.
but here's the discipline: i use it almost nowhere. orange lives mostly on the CTAs. when the entire page is black and white and exactly one color screams click here, your eye has nowhere else to go. that's not decoration — that's conversion design. scarcity is what makes the orange loud.
the logo: from "JF in a box" to a connector
the logo went through every phase you can imagine — an avatar, my actual face, a plain "JF."
one version i genuinely loved was simple: JF in the middle, an orange square around it. no-bullshit, bold, grabs you by the collar.
but i wanted the new mark to say something specific. i'm an AI maximalist, and in AI the whole game is building ecosystems. i connect companies to companies. people inside companies. models. agents. i'm the connective tissue.
so after 100+ variations, i landed on the orange square — but with little notches cut into every side. they read like Lego studs: things snap together. that's the entire idea. i connect product, design, and marketing. i connect people and businesses. the logo is a tiny thesis statement you can read in half a second.
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the stoic head (my supporting logo)
lately i've gone deep on Stoicism — the philosophy of actually governing your emotions instead of being run by them. Marcus Aurelius, that whole world.
so i built a supporting mark to carry that: a resin, almost Roman-bust version of my own head. it lives in the quiet corners of the site — hover over the logo and the stoic head appears.
JF is the headline. the stoic head is the footnote that tells you what's underneath it. both are me.
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extending the brand everywhere
a brand that only lives on one page isn't a brand — it's just a logo. so i pushed it everywhere: wallpapers, my iPhone, all of it.
the centerpiece idea is the resin head as the "main character" — a 3D, digital version of me. around it sits the JF name on little plaques, ringed by the logos of every company and product i've built.
it reads exactly like the connector story, made literal: JF in the middle, an ecosystem of ideas orbiting him.
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the AI stack i used to pull this off
people keep asking how this got done in 2.5 days. here's the honest stack:
ideation — ChatGPT did a lot of the early heavy lifting on logo directions and page concepts. i'd riff, it'd riff back, and we'd move fast.
inspiration — Pinterest and Are.na were my mood-board engines. the homepage masthead came straight from a Pinterest find i couldn't stop staring at: your name and your face in black and white, with barely any contrast between them. polished, but modern and almost fashion-editorial. i took the feeling and made it mine.
layout — quick, ugly-first sketches in Figma to lock the structure before i cared about a single pixel.
build — everything got built with Super Builder, my own Claude Code souped up with 30+ custom features. that's the engine that let me move at this speed. → [Super Builder link]
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shipping smart: a /redesign subfolder + a real design system
i didn't rebuild the live site in place. i spun up a /redesign subfolder and treated it as a staging ground — test the vibe, refine, repeat, then promote it once it actually felt right. lower risk, faster iteration, no half-finished site exposed to the world.
and i built a system, not a pile of pages. one of my favorite things in the world is designing structure that scales. the core template is dead simple: a big headline + subhead + CTA on the left, and me on the right — different faces, different actions, a background that sets the tone.
once that template exists, every new page takes minutes instead of days. that's the unglamorous secret to a brand that can actually grow with you: systems, not one-offs.
the 10x polishes (where it gets personal)
this is the part i care about most.
most personal sites are too serious — they flatten you into a job title. but i'm a lot more than an engineer or a founder. i'm a DJ. a producer. i love art, i love music.
so i added a layer of what i call "10x polishes":
- a DJ section with my favorite Spotify playlists and recordings of the live sets i've played
- a 3D stage — think a mini Las Vegas Sphere — where you can actually watch and listen to my shows
- a music player that follows you around the site
- and an SMS line so you can literally text me, directly that last one isn't a gimmick. the entire point of this site is to start conversations with the right people — so i removed every click between a prospect and me. friction kills pipeline. the easiest possible path to "hey jorge" wins.
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the takeaway
two and a half days. one idea, full send. i'm stupidly proud of it.
but the real lesson isn't about my site. it's this: your brand is not decoration. it's a filter and a funnel. it decides who shows up at your door, and whether they trust you once they're there.
if you're a founder, a potential co-founder, or a company that wants someone who thinks about growth, marketing, product, and AI like this — the door's open.
and yeah. you can just text me.
keep building. — jorge
