Content Over Design (A Manifesto for Clarity)
The best ideas I've ever consumed came from ugly websites.
Since 2007, Hacker News has remained a beige table of text links, and yet it's still where founders, engineers, and investors go each morning to find the ideas that end up shaping the industry.
Reddit, meanwhile, spent years and millions on a redesign, only to keep old.reddit.com running nearly a decade later because enough users simply refuse to leave it. A company doesn't maintain two parallel versions of its product for eight years out of nostalgia. It keeps them because the demand never went away.
This applies to the people building the most consequential technology of our time. They write the same way.
When Sam wants to think out loud about AI, startups, or the future, he does it in a plain column of text.
When Dario publishes fourteen-thousand-word essays on where humanity is headed, they appear on a personal site with no logo, no newsletter modal, no design to speak of.
And with just black text on a white background, Paul Graham's essays have probably created more startup value per word than any business school.
Even though these people could afford any website in the world, they chose the absence of one.
When a pattern holds this consistently, across audiences this different, it's worth sitting with. Here is what I think it's saying:
An idea that's alive doesn't need packaging to survive the trip from one mind to another. Whatever you wrap around it becomes weight the reader carries on your behalf, and whether they know it or not, readers keep a ledger of that weight.
I came to this from language rather than from design.
The years I spent studying linguistics taught me something the discipline rarely advertises: that it isn't really about grammar at all, but about perception.
When Chomsky argued that the architecture of language is wired into us before we ever speak, or when Sapir and Whorf suggested that the tongue we inherit quietly shapes the world we're able to notice, they were making a claim about everyone, not only about linguists.
The words available to us help draw the borders of what we can think.
Marketing, it turned out, makes a strikingly similar claim from the other direction. It presents itself as the study of how people buy, yet underneath it is really the study of how people see: which stimuli register and which slide past, how a frame quietly decides what an audience is even capable of perceiving.
When I began working in marketing at a Spanish startup even before I finished my Linguistics degree, I felt I was leaving the seminar rooms not because I'd lost interest in any of this, but because I wanted to watch it happen in the open. Marketing is the world's largest experiment, where words are tested against human attention by the billion every day.
That curiosity has taken me through plenty of design along the way. I've spent months wearing the content (both visual and written) creator’s hat, building sites in WordPress, Webflow, and Framer, editing in After Effects…
So if you want to judge my criteria for both design and content, don't do it here. Look at CXL, Next Matter, Otera, or Semrush, projects I helped grow from inside their teams, for more or less time and with higher or lower success, but on the whole proudly.
Or, if you could ask them (you can't), some C-suite executives at some of the world's largest insurers and consulting firms would tell you about the videos I've crafted for them.
But this, however, is simply not a site where I want design to carry any weight.
Those years inside marketing and growth taught me how to add things to pages: pop-ups, hero videos, social proof carousels, exit-intent modals. All of it works, at least in the narrow sense that it moves a metric.
But they also taught me something less comfortable. Decoration tends to exist because the content underneath it can't quite do the job alone. It's what you reach for when the writing can't carry the weight, which is why you could read most conversion stacks as a kind of confession.
Consider, too, how little space ideas actually take up.
While the median web page now weighs about 2.6 MB (HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025), the text you came for on a typical article page is usually under 50 KB, buried inside megabytes of machinery built to monetize your attention. In other words, the page is fifty times heavier than the thing it carries.
Zoom out and the proportions become almost comical.
The entire English Wikipedia, every article, compresses to about 24 GB. Everything Paul Graham has written across two decades, a collection of more than two hundred essays totaling roughly half a million words, amounts to a few megabytes of text; it would fit on a floppy disk from 1995, and yet it reshaped how a generation builds companies.
And when the cognitive scientist Thomas Landauer spent years measuring how much a person actually learns and retains over a lifetime, his estimate came to around a billion bits, a few hundred megabytes, which means a human mind's accumulated knowledge is smaller than the JavaScript budget of some homepages.
That is why there's something beautiful about a site that weighs a few kilobytes. It has been stripped to its content, the way a song can be stripped to a voice and a guitar and lose nothing that mattered.
Containers, in fact, have always been mortal in a way that words are not. When Nineveh fell in 612 BC and the palace of Ashurbanipal burned, the fire consumed the empire's greatest library, except that clay doesn't burn the way palaces do: the flames baked its thirty thousand tablets harder, and that is why we can still read Gilgamesh while the kingdom that archived him is dust.
An army set out to erase a civilization's words and ended up firing them like a kiln. The epic survived because it carried nothing but itself.
Rick Rubin built one of the great creative careers of our time by protecting emptiness. In The Creative Act he describes how a creative signal can't be chased down or analyzed into existence, and how we receive it instead by clearing room for it:
Instead, we create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum.
Oversaturation does more than crowd the new thing out. It leaves us unable to notice it arriving at all.
Reading works the same way. An idea needs open space on the page to land in a reader's mind, and a cluttered page is simply an overpacked mind imposed on someone else. The Romans seem to have understood this when they named the thing itself: pagina, the word that became our page, comes from pangere, to stake out rows of vines when planting a vineyard. A column of writing was, in its original sense, planted ground.
In vineyards, rows are kept apart for a reason: without space between them, light never reaches the fruit.
I'm building a place to move ideas from my head to yours with the least possible loss, which means nothing pops up, nothing autoplays, and nothing asks for your email before you've decided whether I've earned it.
These words are my only product here, and everything else has been removed so you can tell whether they're any good.
If they are, you'll come back. If they aren't, no design would have saved them.