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.
What happens when you give a designer creative freedom
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 smoothly and was a reminder of why local relationships matter in this work. Patrick Iverson has been building websites and brand identities for businesses and friends across Santa Fe and New Mexico since 2003 — and the projects that start with trust and creative freedom are almost always the ones that turn out best.