People occasionally assume the name is about spiders, or that it's meant to sound ominous. It's neither. The idea is much plainer, and it comes out of a frustration I had for years before I ever named anything.
The problem the name is about
I started out doing creative work for a church, which meant I was never allowed to specialize.
In any given week the same idea had to become a website, a graphic, a stage design, a video, an announcement, and something printed. Nobody handed those off to separate departments. It was all one job, and it had to feel like one thing by the time it reached a person — because to them it was one thing. It was the church.
That taught me something I've never been able to unlearn. The parts aren't separable. A brand isn't the logo. A website isn't the pages. A photograph isn't just an image. They're all making the same argument, and they either reinforce each other or they quietly cancel each other out.
Most of the bad creative work I've seen wasn't bad in its parts. Each piece was fine. They just weren't connected — made by different people at different times against different assumptions — and the result felt like a business that hadn't decided who it was.
Why a web
A web is the most ordinary thing I could point to that has the property I care about.
It isn't a pile of threads. It's threads with tension between them, and the tension is what makes it hold. Pull one and the whole structure responds. Take enough away and it stops being a web and starts being litter.
That's what I want the work to be. The typography knows what the photography is doing. The site structure knows what the brand is claiming. The copy sounds like the same person who chose the images. Each piece is stronger because the others exist.
The web on this site is that idea drawn out. It isn't decoration bolted on to justify the name — it's the actual argument, and it's interactive because the point is that the connections are live.
Why black
Less philosophical.
Black is what I keep coming back to when I want something to feel deliberate. It doesn't try. It gives everything else room — photography, a single accent, a well-set headline. Most of my favorite design is mostly restraint with one thing allowed to be loud.
It's also honest about how I work. I'd rather remove things than add them.
What it's meant to promise
That you're hiring a connected way of working, not a menu of services.
If I design your site and someone else shoots your photography and a third person writes your copy, you're the one holding it together — and you probably don't have time for that. The name is a commitment that the threads are my problem, not yours.
That's it. No spiders. Just the observation that good creative work is a system, and the parts get better when they know about each other.