Business and Pleasure Do Mix

There’s an old saying to not “mix business with pleasure.” Sometimes, this can definitely be true. It would be unfortunate for one to ruin the other. But, I personally value people and relationships more than business. There are exceptions to that saying in my opinion.

Recently I designed and built a website for an old friend of mine. This isn’t exactly a new thing for me. I live in a relatively small city and am good at what I do, so I’ve built lots of websites for lots of old friends throughout the years. This project was for handpicked SANTA FE, which is the real estate brand of long-time friend Daniel Huberman.

Daniel is a really good guy — personable, knowledgable, caring, hard-working. He makes a great realtor. I also have plenty of experience in the real estate marketing world. I was the Director of Marketing for the local Prudential Real Estate office for a bit.

Now, to the point… This was a really fun project for me. Daniel gave me carte blanche with the creative side of things. He already had a site built, but essentially just told me to make it “sexy.” I took his existing content and general navigation structure and gave it a new look and feel.

I used a really flexible and innovative new theme I’ve been playing with, created a new color scheme, updated the typography, and helped enter a ton of new content. It’s a vast improvement with a better UX and much more polished UI.

The project went smooth and was very enjoyable. In this case, my freelance business and pleasure of making a friend look good was in fact a great success! Check it out here!

Patrick is singularly gifted when it comes to translating vision into elegant design. And, his ability to manage creative workflow makes him even more rare as a key player in digital ventures. He is a passionate team player and unbelievably efficient as an individual contributor.
Allan Cohen, Strategy Consultant