About
Martin Creative is me. Joe Martin, in Chicago. If you have been handed off to a junior the week after signing, or waited three weeks for a paragraph, you already know the problem. Most people arrive here tired of explaining their own business to the person they hired to explain it. No account manager sits between you and the work, because there is nobody here to be one.
The short version
Most people who write well cannot build, and most people who build cannot write. Doing both is the whole reason this works. The message does not get handed off and watered down on the way to a page, because the person writing it is the person laying it out.
That started as a development job, turned into a design degree, and spent the last decade on the one part almost nobody looks at: what the page actually says. Around two hundred and fifty websites, and ten years of writing first sentences for other people.
Before this there was a major dot-com, and the first privately held tech company in Chicago to sell for a billion dollars. Two businesses built and sold since. I have been the client on the other side of this table, which is the only reason I know how much a vague answer costs.
Schiller Park, then East Leyden High School. Triton College, Elmhurst College, and The Art Institute after that. Chicago the whole way through.
A small number of engagements at once, each one starting with a conversation rather than a proposal. If a project is not a fit I will say so on the first call.
How engagements runTalks, TV spots, podcasts and a fairly strange personal museum of a website live over at HiJoeMartin.com.
Press and appearancesWhat I believe
A person decides in a few seconds, off words. An AI deciding whether to recommend you never sees the design at all. Design is now the least machine readable thing a business owns, which is an odd thing to say out loud as somebody with a design degree, and it is still true.
So the order matters. Get the words right, then build around them. Do it the other way and you get a site that looks expensive and says nothing, which is the single most common thing I am hired to undo.
Before you ask
I do. There is no team behind this and no account manager in the middle. The person you talk to on the first call is the person writing the words and building the site.
One person. That is a real limit and it is worth saying out loud, because it means I take on a small number of engagements at a time rather than filling a pipeline.