I launched Artemis Nova as my product consultancy last January, but I still didn’t have a website for the business. I had a vision in my mind for something simple, elegant and medieval inspired. My creative constraint was time: I had to ship it within a single work session. 4 hours later a website was born!
Problem I’m solving
While I was not actively taking on new clients at the time, my product consultancy needed a website to appear more legitimate, and a front door for new client requests. Who knows, maybe someone special would come along.
Where I started
My original vision was way grander - a gorgeous medieval style “book” you would open to see different custom generated images representing different projects in my portfolio. Think an illustrated manuscript like the Book of Kells. I also did some research into beautiful interactive portfolio sites like igloo.inc. However, I realized that to generate images in the style I wanted would be an entire intense sub project likely using image generation tools like Midjourney I’d never used before. Given my time constraints, I scoped the entire project down to a single page website that had the elements of my desired aesthetic.
Where I ended
I was pretty happy with the end result - an elegant single page website with a moon graphic that updates with the live phase of the moon. The moon is an important symbol to me personally, Artemis is the goddess of the moon, and I wanted the website to be feel slightly sacred/mysterious rather than corporate. I spent a lot of time on the moon image itself to get a “hand drawn” feel, and tuning the moon and logo “shimmer” to be less of a sweeping gradient effect and more of a dark gold glow effect.
What I learned
Design is very important to me and takes time, even for very simple experiences. In fact, the simpler an experience is, the more important design becomes. I always underestimate how much iteration it will take to get something to a place where I feel it is good enough, and it’s difficult to know when to cut it off. Having a time limit is really important because otherwise I can endlessly churn on improvements and iterations.
When I reviewed my work on this site, Claude actually said it best - getting good design from LLMs is more like sculpting. It takes a lot of patient micro-prompting.
→ See it live
