Over the last month, I moved the MacSparky Labs and Field Guides over to a new home in Circle. I’ve spent a lot of time on that space. Colors, tone, the little details that make a place feel like somewhere instead of just software.

Then I’d click back over to macsparky.com and wince a little.

The old site was grey, black, and white. When I first moved to WordPress, I was just relieved the thing worked. Getting it stable was the whole project. But relief isn’t the same as liking how it looks, and I’d been living with a website that read like a law firm’s letterhead for a while now.

So I rebuilt it. The new macsparky.com leans into a warm, paper-and-desert palette instead of the old monochrome. Cream, sage, a little mustard, a coral accent.

There’s a lightning bolt that shows up as a recurring mark across the site, a little wink to my last name. Rubber-stamp postmarks here and there. It feels like a place I’d actually want to visit, which sounds like a low bar until you realize how long the old one didn’t clear it.

A few pages worth going and looking at directly:

The About page got the full treatment. There’s a mission plaque, real numbers instead of guessed ones, and a note near the bottom from a longtime reader that still gets me every time I read it.

The Now page is where I keep a running account of what I’m actually doing with my life right now. The redesign gave it room to breathe, chapter by chapter: work, health, the garden, the woodshop, what I’m reading. And there’s a new companion, the Then page, which archives every past version of the Now page going back over a year. You can watch the last twelve months of my life change a few paragraphs at a time.

The Field Guides page is intentionally its own thing. Warmer colors, different type, built to work like a catalog because that’s what it is. I didn’t want it trying to be a mission statement. I wanted it to help you find the guide you’re after.

People are going to read this and assume it’s an AI story, that Cowork designed my website. That’s not quite right. I brought the direction. I picked the palette, decided the boxes needed softer corners instead of hard black outlines, decided the bolt was the right mark and a star wasn’t. Cowork did a lot of the actual CSS, the HTML, the parts where I’d normally have to either learn something I didn’t want to learn or pay someone and wait two weeks.

What that freed up was iteration. I went through more versions of this site than I would have had the patience for if every pass meant filing a change request. I could try something, hate it, and try the next thing an hour later instead of a week later.

I keep coming back to a thought about AI in general, not just this project. The tool can code as fast as you can describe things. The part that’s still entirely on you is knowing what you’re going for.

My limiting factor on this redesign was never the coding. It was figuring out what “feels like me” actually looks like in cream and coral and a lightning bolt. AI didn’t solve that for me. It just got out of the way once I did.

Go poke around. I hope you dig the new MacSparky.com.