Studio Note #46: Everything Can’t Be Important.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is a great movie, but a terrible way to build a homepage. Without thoughtful editing, your site can look like a college student center’s bulletin board.
I have been working on some updates to a client's website from a document they sent over outlining changes to the homepage and the addition of another services page.
None of it was bad.
That was the problem.
There were good ideas in there. Relevant capabilities. Things their potential clients probably should know about the business.
But almost immediately, I knew we couldn't put all of it on the homepage.
When you're close to a business, everything feels important. Every capability deserves an explanation. Every differentiator deserves a headline. Every part of the process feels like something the customer needs to understand before they can possibly make a decision.
Then AI gets involved.
AI is incredibly good at taking an idea and expanding it. Give it a service and it can give you six pillars. Give it six pillars and it can give you a framework. Give it a framework and suddenly you have phases, supporting points, explanations and enough content to fill an entire website.
And a lot of it might be good.
But you still have one homepage.
That's the part that's easy to lose sight of.
A homepage doesn't need to explain everything about a business. It needs to create enough clarity and interest for someone to keep going.
The deeper information can live somewhere else. In this case, much of it belonged on a dedicated page where someone interested in that particular capability could actually spend some time with it.
The homepage just needed to get them there.
This is becoming an increasingly important part of creative work.
The cost of generating ideas, copy, imagery and entire concepts is rapidly approaching zero. We can make more things, faster than we ever could before.
That doesn't mean we should.
If anything, the abundance makes editing more important.
Someone still has to decide what matters most. What belongs here. What belongs somewhere else. What deserves attention and what is distracting from the thing we're actually trying to communicate.
Good creative direction has always involved subtraction.
AI just gave us a hell of a lot more to subtract from.
Everything can't be important.
Because when everything is important, nothing is.