Embracing the Beautiful Mess

I've been staring at my personal website for months now, feeling increasingly disconnected from what it had become. What started as a way to showcase my work and process had turned into this polished, static artefact that did not reflect how I actually think or create. Everything felt too finished, too curated feel like I was only sharing the highlight reel of my work.

But the truth is, my process is anything but linear. It's mostly messy, scattered and experimental. I have half-formed thoughts scribbled in margins, bits and pieces that don't quite work yet, ideas that bounce between different projects and connect in ways I didn't expect. My website wasn't capturing any of that. Meanwhile, ironically, some of these raw thoughts and process moments were ending up on my Instagram stories with their 24-hour lifespan, while my small slice of the web remained this static, polished space. I’ve been sharing my thinking in the most disposable format while keeping my small corner of the internet overly curated.

It felt like tending to a pristine garden where only the perfect roses are visible — no compost pile, no seedlings, no strange offshoots you’re not sure will thrive but want to nurture anyway.

That realisation led me down the rabbit hole of digital gardening. I started collecting examples and bookmarked a few ideas on Arena, and the more I saw, the more it felt like coming home to a more honest and flexible way of sharing my work.

What even is a digital garden?

If you've never encountered the concept, a digital garden is an evolving approach for thinking about writing, creating and sharing ideas/work online. It values the slow development of thoughts over time rather than final, polished artefacts. Unlike polished work and articles published in reverse chronological order, you treat ideas like plants. Something you tend to, shape, and grow.

Living documents, Growing Ideas

What drew me in wasn't just the philosophy but the practicality of it. Digital gardening treats your website like a living landscape — always changing, always in flux. Instead of feeling the pressure to publish only what’s “finished”, I can plant a seed of an idea and revisit it as it grows.

This seems a bit radical in our overly curated digital culture. You make room for imperfections. Your typos, your half-formed thoughts, your "I'm not sure about this but..." musings, they all have a place.

Growth stages

One thing I’m really enjoying about restructuring my site is thinking of ideas as living things that move through different stages of growth. Everyone has their own way of organising, but this is what’s working for me right now

Seedling: early sparks, fragments, "what if..." ideas that I want to remember and return to.

Budding: when an idea starts taking shape. I'm exploring it more actively, connecting it to other thoughts, but it's still pretty rough around the edges.

Blooming: ideas that have developed enough substance that it might be useful to others, even if it's not "done".

Composted: ideas that might not have worked out as I expected, but they've broken down into fodder for other thoughts. Instead of deleting them, I can acknowledge what I learned and how they contributed to other ideas.

Grafted: hybrid ideas formed by seemingly disconnected threads and disciplines

I’ve found this structure mirrors how my ideas tend to develop — sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, often circling back or connecting in ways I didn’t expect. It helps me make sense of the mess without flattening it.

Staying close to the mess

What resonates most is what Tim Rodenbröker calls "a kind of digital refuge, a retreat to get in touch with your own ideas ^[1]." Rather than performing expertise, I get to document the actual process of figuring things out.

This feels especially important to me as a designer. So much of design discourse focuses on outcomes — the final design, the completed project, the polished case study. But the richness lies in the exploration and the messiness of it all.

But ideas aren’t summoned from nowhere: they come from raw material, other ideas or observations about the world. Hence a two-step creative process: collect raw material, then think about it. From this process comes pattern recognition and eventually the insights that form the basis of novel ideas.

My digital garden will be where I collect ideas from different projects and let them cross-pollinate. It’s where I’ll mess around with new tools, investigate new methods, no polished case study required. It will be space full of whimsy, spontaneity, and creative detours where messiness isn’t a problem, it’s part of the charm.

Tending vs. publishing

The shift from "publishing" to "tending" feels significant. Publishing implies you're done, that you're presenting something complete for consumption. Tending is ongoing care that benefits from rethinking and revisiting.

I've been thinking about how this changes the relationship with my readers too. Instead of consuming finished content, they become fellow wanderers in the garden, perhaps stumble on connections I haven't noticed yet or find value in catching glimpses of ideas at different growth stages.

So that's where I'm headed. Converting my polished website into a living, breathing space where ideas grow, meander, and evolve. I can be more honest about the reality of my practice — that it’s iterative, relational, and beautifully unfinished.

So, welcome to my garden. Stroll through and see what ideas take root.

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