Hi, I'm
Josh Motlong.
Designer, developer, integrator, thinker. Husband of one, father of four, resident of the Texas Hill Country.
Fifteen years,
still learning.
A short résumé — abridged for the sake of the reader.
I started in the usually unusual way — online marketing, copywriting, landing pages built in the early days of the mobile web. Learned, in order: that beautiful things that don't convert aren't serving anyone, and that things that convert but aren't beautiful rarely last.
The work since has been a slow walk away from one of those ideas and toward the other. Design “that performs” is still the working phrase, but the second half of that sentence — beauty matters — is the part I keep trying to earn.
Design and development in the same pair of hands. It means the code doesn't lag behind the intent. It means when a layout wants to breathe, it breathes. It means the team I hand it to can run with it.
A few moments
along the way.
-
2010Moved to the Hill Country.
Wife, kids… more kids on the way. New horizons.
-
2011 — EarlyFirst line of HTML that mattered.
Online marketing role. Learned conversion before composition.
-
2011 — LateFirst full brand identity kit.
Realized naming, mark, and voice all belong to the same sentence.
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2012Went rogue.
Started first web business, learned hard ’n fast. Round one.
-
2014Went more rogue.
Lessons from round one applied to round two. Better.
-
2015My place in this world.
Connecting begins with “forever” clients.
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2020Good God, help us all.
You were there, you know what it was like.
-
202570+ sites, 20+ marks, still counting.
The folio as it stands today. Detail by detail.
-
2026Launch Lever & Co.
Everything I’ve ever done on raging steroids.
“Turning
complexity
into
simplicity
is
the
greatest
challenge
for
good
design.
Pull
it
off
and
you
have
a
long
road
of
success
ahead.”
The best work I've done begins with asking the right question before offering the right answer. Each company's uniqueness is the thing that makes anything else effective, and no two briefs are close.
So there's an intake that's a little longer than you'd expect, a little nosier. Favorite movies and worst music genres and the real story of how the business came to be. That's where the brief is.
The challenge — my favorite challenge — is identifying and creating something that will help you prosper and excel. Everything else is in service of that sentence.
The usual suspects.
Tools change. The thinking doesn't. Here's what's in rotation this year.
One wife,
four kids,
one dog.
Twenty-two years married this fall. Four children, an assortment of ages, all so much better than I deserve it confuses me. A two-story house on a hill in the Texas Hill Country so full of memories the furniture seems to sing at times.
The studio is by the fireplace. The clients are all over the map. The work, improbably, gets better each year. I take that as a good sign.
I'd love to hear from you. Questions and comical first-hand stories are heartily welcomed.