For the next year, I was really quiet in class. I didn’t speak up, even though I learned best by asking questions. But once I got a new teacher, I went back to asking questions. I’m proud that this trait remains a core part of who I am and how I work. Even when I was 5 years old, I was curious and didn’t always accept the first answer I was told. 

For the next little while, I’ll be asking a series of questions through this newsletter. 

To me, being a designer means being a strategic thinker who cares deeply about your business, with the unique benefit of coming in fresh, so it’s easier for me to ask the questions that insiders might overlook or perhaps feel uncomfortable questioning.  

Here are two questions that I recently wrote about: 

• “What problem are you trying to solve?”
• “When did you last use your own website on your phone?”

So, back to this big question, what do we want to outsource in life?

The hidden cost of outsourcing

For some people, hiring a gardener is an ‘essential’. They don’t have the capacity to do it themselves – whether that be due to desire, enjoyment, time, headspace, knowledge, energy, health, skills, etc. They’re happy to trade money for a beautiful garden. 

For others, hiring a gardener is unthinkable. It would mean losing their hobby, enjoyment, satisfaction, exercise, strength, outdoor time, skills, knowledge, etc. If you’ve ever talked to a passionate gardener, you will know how deep their pride and knowledge go. 

I remember my husband telling a friend how happy he was about having so many strawberry flowers in his garden beds that year. The friend asked why. Turned out they had no idea that flowers became fruit. One person’s joy is another person’s idea of the worst way to spend their weekend.

But there is a subtle cost for those who choose to outsource – you lose first-hand knowledge and experience. If you don’t know, it’s harder to judge whether or not a gardener is doing a good job, making sensible decisions, or working at an expected pace. The longer you remain detached from the process, the less likely you are to notice problems or even know the right questions to ask.

Now it’s AI

We always gain and lose things when we outsource. Trading manual labor for modern inventions is nothing new. Machines often do a faster, more reliable job than we ever could. But I know that I’ve lost skills as a result of these time-saving trade-offs.  

Now, with AI, we need to be incredibly intentional about what we outsource to the machines. What are we good at? What do we love? What makes us human? What doesn’t need to be optimized for speed?  

The danger is in outsourcing our thinking and our voice, two of the very things that make us unique humans. If we stop wrestling for hours to figure something out ourselves, we don’t instill the character we need to face other challenges. 

And, like the gardener analogy, if we outsource our thinking, how will we know if the AI is doing a good job or is confidently making stuff up? Will the time spent checking its work outweigh the time it would have taken to just do the thing ourselves in the first place?

When our lack of firsthand knowledge applies to the machines handling critical aspects of our lives, a subtle loss of skill can be a massive liability. Where the stakes are high, like safety, health, or finances, the risks of blindly outsourcing our critical thinking and expertise are scary. 

I’m still figuring out my boundaries, but for now, here are some things I’m happy to outsource to AI in my design work:

• Using Photoshop’s generative fill to expand backgrounds or remove stray objects saves hours of tedious cloning.
• Asking AI questions (of course) to ruthlessly critique my grammar, spelling, and argument after I’ve written a first draft. I explicitly instruct it not to write the edits for me.
• Handling manual digital labor. I loved getting Gemini to take a list of events from a PDF and automatically add them to my calendar. 
• Doing initial research, like I would have done with Google. I assume all references are potential fakes until I double-check them myself. 

But here is what I don’t want to outsource to a machine:

• My words. I will not outsource my authenticity to a prompt. I don’t want our conversations outsourced to machines. 
• Our relationships. When I say something to you, I want you to know that it’s coming from me, Rachel. Trust is so, so easily broken and much harder to repair. 
• My strategic design work, my love of asking questions. I suppose that’s why I’ve always been wary of templated solutions. They homogenize everything into a humanless formula rather than honoring the uniqueness of the people involved.
• Productivity for productivity’s sake. We are not machines. If we optimize everything for speed, we lose the space to just be, the ability for our brains to get weirdly creative through boredom.

I want to optimize for genuine connection, because that’s always how human business has worked… and it’s the most meaningful way of living. The world is flooded with more and more noise from the machines. I want to connect with real people.

I hope that’s you too.

Let’s talk?

PS, I also wrote this: The loneliness epidemic will not be solved by more machines. 

The post What do we want to outsource?  appeared first on cre8d design.

They have no real reason to visit it themselves, so they tune out to it. They have seen it so many times that they stop seeing it at all. And in the meantime, things can slowly get out of alignment. Features can get added and then not removed when they’re no longer needed, and content can get moved around, but not tidied up. The business focus or visitor needs might shift, but the website doesn’t.

I recently audited a business website that looked like it had a lot of pages, but when I went through them one by one, many of them were still filled with filler text, unfinished sections, and pages that clearly hadn’t been touched since the site launched. The owner had been so relieved to finally get the new site live that they never went back and checked that every single page was useful to visitors. It happened to be a beautifully designed site, but the attention to detail just wasn’t there, and that matters enormously when someone is deciding whether to trust you with their business. (For a similar manufacturing website example, see ​this post​ by my colleague Dianna Huff.)

People are not coming to your website in a calm, relaxed, unhurried frame of mind anymore.

The baseline level of stress and overwhelm people are carrying around has just been climbing for years. I don’t need to convince you of this, but it’s often not connected to using a website. When someone lands on your site and is immediately hit with a pop-up (cookies!), then another pop-up (subscribe!), then yet another one (turn off your ad blocker!), then another one (a video ad!), and then a busy layout pulling their attention in six directions, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed and leave. This isn’t because your product or service isn’t right for them, but because the experience was frustrating and stressful.

What is the experience you are actually creating on your website?

What is different about going to your website versus just asking AI a question and getting a quick text-based answer? What is your website’s personality? What do you want people to feel when they land there? What are the most important things you want them to do? Is everything in total alignment around that?

After working on the ​Missing Persons Guide website​, I have been thinking a lot about this. Trauma-informed design is about removing every possible obstacle from someone who is already overwhelmed and just needs to find what they need. But really, that principle applies to every single website. Nobody has patience for complexity when they’re in a hurry. Fresh eyes from someone who understands design, data, strategy, and how people are actually using the internet right now is so valuable.

We do these audits as a ​Website and Brand Audit​: a manual, expert review of how your brand and website look, feel, and communicate, delivered as a video walkthrough and a designed PDF report with a clear, prioritized action plan delivered within 7 business days for $497.

If you are a food blogger, there is also a ​Food Blog Brand Audit​ specifically tailored to your world, also $497 – how your site works for sponsors, how your content is structured, and how easy it actually is to cook from. I audited a food blog recently that was so chaotic to cook from it was almost unusable. It was stressful just to use, which is part of what pushed me to build ​Binder-Ready Recipes​, but for people still cooking from their screens, the website experience itself really matters too.

If you have been ignoring a feeling that something is off with your website, please ​book an audit​.

And if you’ve been thinking about a new website or a refresh, we’d love to hear from you. You can ​book a call here​.

The post When did you last use your own website on your phone? (Use, not edit it.) appeared first on cre8d design.

Instead of rushing to discuss potential solutions, the question gets us to slow down, step back, and think more deeply and critically about defining what the problem actually is first. Why do you want to make changes, and what do you want to achieve? Does it solve a genuine need or improve a key metric that moves the business forward?

Often, we uncover that there isn’t really a problem to be solved, or it isn’t as pressing as it may seem. It may simply be a response to a fear of missing out on a new trend, a sense of restlessness, or a feeling of dissatisfaction.

While AI tools appear eager and easy to ‘do the work’ for us, people are realizing they may end up spending a lot of time and money iterating on results that initially feel like they’re gaining momentum but tend toward mediocrity.

In the same way, we can ask: Does this tool solve a real problem? Has this improved the outcomes and effectiveness? Or has this only increased the amount of output and activity?

(At a deeper level, the more concerning question becomes, have I outsourced too much of my thinking that I have become dependent on it, and my own capabilities to critique have declined?)

Consider the current trend by AI evangelists to build an AI agent that creates a customized “morning report.” This agent is designed to triage your inbox, summarize your calendar and outstanding tasks, and provide a plan for your day. The goal is to save time, reduce overwhelm, and eliminate the friction of manual labor.

But a morning report is a band-aid. It manages the symptoms of an overflowing inbox, but it doesn’t solve the underlying disease of an unsustainable schedule. Aside from the potential for AI errors, we have to ask: if we don’t self-regulate our own inputs, do we lose the ability to practice intentionality? When we surrender the practice of deciding what is signal and what is noise, we lose access not just to our data, but to our competence.

AI automation is being sold as the solution to surviving the flood of content that AI is simultaneously creating. It reminds me of the “Fix-it-Up Chappie” from Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches. It’s the same playbook: sell the problem, then sell the solution to the problem you created.

“My name is Sylvester McMonkey McBean. And I’ve heard of your troubles. I’ve heard you’re unhappy. But I can fix that. I’m the Fix-it-Up Chappie. I’ve come here to help you. I have what you need. And my prices are low. And I work at great speed. And my work is one hundred per cent guaranteed!”

The story ends with McBean driving away with all their money while the Sneetches are left exactly where they started, only poorer.

Before you look for faster solutions, let’s make sure you’re headed somewhere intentionally. I believe that effective web design requires wrestling with good questions and critical thinking, not clever prompts, ensuring every move is intentional. 

If you need help with your website, please get in touch. I’d love to help!

The post “What problem are you trying to solve?” appeared first on cre8d design.

About six months ago, I was approached to mentor three women. All of them are a little younger than me, in business, wanting to grow, and are in a season of transition. Working with them over the past six months has been such a privilege.

I’ve realised that strategy sessions are one of my greatest passions. When I get on a call with someone who is at the beginning of their business or feeling stuck, I love talking through ideas and directions and giving guidance about next steps and things to think about. Before Cre8d Design, I spent years teaching, and one of the things I loved most about it was figuring out ways to explain a concept until it finally clicked for the person in front of me.

Running a food blog business is a lot. You have planning, recipe development, shopping, cooking, cleaning, writing, social media, newsletters, automations, lead magnets, advertising, partnerships, SEO, content research, ad revenue, analytics, photography, videography, editing, and accounting. (I’ve probably missed things in this list.)

It is an incredibly rewarding business while also being exhausting, endless, and overwhelming. There are so many ways to monetize and grow, like a cookbook deal, actual food products, memberships, classes, digital products, and more. Figuring out what works for you and your audience takes strategy, not just amazing content.

I am rolling out mentoring for food bloggers first because a significant part of our work is with them, and because I don’t think there is enough happening in this space yet! While there are online peer support groups, this is very different from having someone in your corner consistently, who follows up and checks in. Someone who knows your business over time, what your goals are, and can see the whole picture when you are deep in the weeds. The longevity and depth of the relationship are what make it enriching rather than lonely.

As so much becomes AI-driven, people are starting to see how important genuine human connection is. I’m noticing that people are so very tired of social media, tired of the grind and the pressure to do more, more, more. There is a real shift towards wanting more meaning again in life. I read something so simple recently on Sarah Hart-Unger’s blog that I keep thinking about: What really matters in the end is time spent together, stories and meals shared, a place to come home to, traditions that connect us. That is what AI cannot replace. Yes, we can learn from AI and get ideas and help from it. But that connection is so not the same as with a real human. When you’re having an awful day, the machine can’t sit in silence with you where you feel its presence, or give you a hug.

The word mentor comes from the Odyssey* in Greek mythology, where Mentor was a trusted guide across a lifetime. Apprenticeships were typically how people trained in the past, and these lasted a few years. In modern times, mentoring has been replaced with short-term coaching packages. Ideally, mentoring is a long-term relationship. One where I get to know you and your business closely over time, and you have someone a little ahead of you who can listen, give guidance, and be genuinely in your corner.

With 17 years in small business and a longer period running multiple websites, I have a lot of outside perspective to bring across branding, strategy, data, design, technical, community, and content.

Mentoring is $450/month with a 3-month minimum.

* Christopher Nolan’s movie on this comes out soon, and gosh, it’s fascinating to read about the extremes he went to avoid CGI/AI in the film!

The post Why I’m Launching Food Blog Mentoring appeared first on cre8d design.

When I first got married, I had basically zero cooking experience, and my husband ended up doing almost all the cooking (and he was/is very good at it!). I got into cooking slowly, by heating pasta and a pre-made jar of sauce and mixing them. I was terrified of cooking chicken due to an unfortunate food poisoning experience from a party I went to, which landed me in a hospital bed for five days!

Now, I’ll happily try almost any recipe. I avoid birthday cakes with fondant (it’s never perfect enough for my liking!) and shrimp (my husband’s anaphylaxis makes me genuinely fearful of being even near them in someone else’s cart at the supermarket checkout!)

I love to cook from a few cookbooks, I regularly turn to the NY Times Cooking app, but mainly I cook from food blogs.

But cooking from a screen has never been a great experience for me. Trying to scroll up and down through a recipe when my hands are covered in flour, raw chicken juice, or meatball mixture isn’t ideal. I’m forever cleaning my iPhone screen.

And, my screen is just too small to see everything at a glance. I also have to keep switching apps to set/turn off timers. I live by the timer. (The number of times I’ve put something in the oven and the alarm has gone off and I’m momentarily confused about why it’s shocking!).

So a few years ago, I bought a ring binder and started putting my favourite recipes into plastic sleeves to keep them clean. It worked, but as a designer, I didn’t love how the recipes printed.

The number one issue was the clunky page breaks. Oftentimes, there would only be one or two lines on a page by itself, or the text was way too small (or big). Sometimes the images were too big, or there was a lot of color (in the end, I always printed in black and white… ink is expensive!). While the recipes were 5-star, the printed recipes were anything but a high-end cookbook feel.

So I made my own template and would copy and paste my favorite recipes before printing them off.

That template idea turned into Binder-Ready Recipes, a service that reformats food bloggers’ recipes into professional, print-ready PDFs. Compact layouts, easy-to-read text, proper fractions, and a QR code back to the original post. This is something worth keeping on the kitchen counter.

If you know a food blogger who’d love this, or if that’s you, I’d love for you to take a look!

The post Introducing Binder-Ready Recipes appeared first on cre8d design.

I’ve also been working on some new ways to work together, which I’ll be sharing over the coming weeks.

Five things I’ve been enjoying lately:

1. Deep Questions with Cal Newport ​

I’m a big fan of Cal’s books, and his podcast is always very thoughtful about how to be a better thinker in this age of distraction. Highly recommend if you haven’t found it yet.

2. Best Laid Plans with Sarah Hart-Unger ​

I discovered this one through Cal’s podcast. What I love about Sarah’s approach to planning is that it’s not about being more productive. It’s about being more intentional with the limited hours we have. Her book of the same name is also great.

3. Belonging by Owen Eastwood ​

I was pleasantly surprised to find high-performance coach Owen Eastwood talking about the Maori concept of whakapapa, an unbreakable chain of people going back and forward in time, in the context of getting the best performance out of teams. The idea that people perform better when they know their history and their place in that chain, when they’re not at risk or needing to prove their worth, “you belong here,” is something that has really stayed with me.

4. The Missing Persons Guide

We recently worked with The Missed Foundation to redesign their Missing Persons Guide website. They’re doing incredible work supporting people whose loved ones go missing. The site uses trauma-informed design principles, which means designing specifically for people who are overwhelmed, distressed, or in crisis. That looks like stripping away distractions, using calm and clear language, and making it immediately obvious what the next step is, rather than leaving someone to figure it out. While it’s an Australian website, the information applies to all missing persons. I’m really proud of this one!

5. The Tongariro Crossing

Last month, we walked the 22km/14mi Tongariro Crossing as a family, regularly named one of the top three best one-day hikes in the world. If you have ever seen The Lord of the Rings, it’s Mordor. I’m so proud of my four kids for completing the challenge. Thinking while walking outside is actually one of Cal Newport’s recommended activities for building what he calls “cognitive fitness,” along with daily reading (check!), embracing rather than avoiding writing (check!), and not having your phone with you at all times (in progress!).

***

And if you’ve been thinking about a new website or a refresh, we’d love to hear from you. You can book a call here or just hit reply.

The post Five Things I’ve Been Enjoying Lately appeared first on cre8d design.

I’ve spent the last few weeks talking about what we do on several podcasts, including Food Blogger Pro, Eat Blog Talk, and Tastemaker Talk. I’d love to hear what you think of them!

This week, I’m heading to Los Angeles for the Tastemaker Conference! I’m so looking forward to meeting many of our clients in person for the first time. If you’re going to be in LA, please let me know – I’d love to meet up.

I’m also documenting the trip over at our new Instagram, @cre8ddesign. I’ll be sharing insights and tips from the sessions here if you want to follow along.

***

As we kick off the year, I’ve noticed a recurring theme: even successful sites eventually lose some of their alignment.

For one of our current clients, we’re auditing a site that hasn’t been redesigned in six years. It’s a wonderful record of their growth, but it’s also a time capsule of old landing pages, courses, and offerings they no longer provide.

What was once a clear path for their visitors has become a maze.

I’ve realized that my best work isn’t just “designing.” It’s bringing everything back into alignment with what is offered now and what their visitors’ needs are today, not what was relevant in the past. By cleaning up content, taxonomies, and redirects, we make the site feel streamlined, light, and fast again.

It turns a “cluttered basement” of a website back into a high-growth asset. Just like our workplaces need regular cleanouts to stay functional, so do our digital spaces.

If you’re planning a site “spring cleaning” or a refresh this year, we’ve opened up a few spots for our Site Strategy Review.

This is a comprehensive evaluation from a design, UX/UI, and SEO perspective. It’s designed to be an action roadmap that identifies exactly where you can improve engagement and visibility. By the end, you’ll have a clear, prioritized list of recommendations to ensure your site is performing at its best and representing your brand accurately.

If you’re feeling out of sync with your current goals, I’d love to help you map out a plan to bring some order back. You can grab a slot on my calendar to see if a review is the right next step for you.

The post How much of your site is actually “you” right now? appeared first on cre8d design.

Last night, while sitting on a beach with friends, we discussed how text messages have become the default method for celebrating birthdays. We discussed how it feels less intentional, less effortful, and less personal.

We reminisced about the old tradition of Christmas family cards with a printed newsletter tucked inside. It was a lovely way to catch up on the year’s events with friends and family we hadn’t seen in a while.

Then, Facebook came along and enabled us to keep up passively. The end-of-year newsletters became fewer. The ads, memes, and videos took over the personal updates on social media. By then, habits had shifted, and we never went back to the old way of reaching out.

Now, we have a pile of newsletters in our inboxes every single day. It’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed.

I work hard to bring intentionality into how we design websites. If we are overstimulated, distracted, and stressed by the world today, how can websites accommodate this?

More calm and space. More guidance and fewer choices all at once. (The paradox of choice is exactly why it takes so long to pick a show on Netflix.)

More personal and real. We are tired of sales pitches, contrived stories, and wondering if something is fake. We can sense when someone is authentic, even if we can’t put our finger on why.

***

If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope you experience moments of unexpected joy. This is our first time cooking a Thanksgiving meal for a friend from the US and his family. It’s lovely to be able to do this for someone living so far from home. Here’s what we’re having:

• Cornbread (Tastes Better From Scratch)
• Sourdough bread (Modern Sourdough)
• Cornbread Stuffing (Tastes Better From Scratch)
• Green Bean Casserole From Scratch (Sally’s Baking Addiction)
• Sweet Potato Casserole (Once Upon a Chef)
• Mashed Potato (Once Upon a Chef)
• Dry Brine Turkey (Once Upon a Chef)
• Homemade Turkey Gravy (Once Upon a Chef)
• Cranberry Sauce (Costco)
• Pumpkin Pie (Costco)

***

How do you know when it’s time to redesign?
Watch my interview on Eat Blog Talk.

Do we really need food blogs anymore?
Listen to my interview on Tastemaker Talk.

Need help with your website?
Please book a call!

The post Your inbox is full like mine, right? appeared first on cre8d design.

Four years ago, I wrote a guide covering 10 things to check to help build trust on your website’s bio/about/team page.

The first item was: “Do you still look like yourself?” It sounds almost funny to write that, but it’s as vital a question as ever. Does the photo on your website look like you do in person today? If you were to get on a video conference call or have a business meeting with someone, would you be clearly recognizable, or would they be taken by surprise? If not, it’s time for a new photo. 

This helps build subtle trust signals because you look familiar and consistent with the picture that the person has in their mind of you.

In the past, I’d ask clients to provide high-quality source photos. Ideally, these were taken by a professional photographer, a high-quality camera, or a late phone model, with great composition and lighting. The types of photos that weren’t ideal were ones where other people had been cropped out (you could always tell), that had distracting backgrounds, or were taken on vacation (unless the website was in the travel industry). In short, I was telling them to provide something professional. We would then lightly touch up photos, such as removing a piece of stray hair, a temporary blemish, reflections in glasses, or a distracting sign in the background.  

More recently, I’ve found myself counseling clients not to add obvious facial filters or provide AI-generated headshots. It’s tempting, I get it. They are fast, fun, and easy to use, and at first glance and on the surface, they might look professional, suitable, and maybe even amazing. Dig a little deeper, look more closely, however, and we go back to the original question: Does it look real? As soon as I see a portrait image that is AI-generated or heavily filtered, I lose some trust and become suspicious: what else is not as it seems around here? 

As social researcher Brene Brown says, trust is built through a series of small “marble jar” moments, and when someone has to say “trust me!” at a critical moment, that’s a red flag. People are not perfect, and our imperfections, our unrounded, quirky personalities, are what make us memorable, what makes us who we are. If we all talked and looked the same, the world would be so bland, boring, and forgettable. 

Yes, photos need to present us well, but they need to be real, raw, honest, and authentic. The internet is being flooded with AI-generated safe and homogenous “beauty”, averaged from all notions of what users like. It ends up looking cheap and deceptive, and all the same. Once trust is broken, it’s harder to rebuild. 

Resist the urge to use AI to create your professional headshots. Be all the human that is you.

(Insert K-Pop: Demon Hunters song here. You’re welcome!)

The post Authentic photos matter more now appeared first on cre8d design.

New posts

If you’ve written a new post, show the published date.

e.g. Published October 31, 2025

Minor updates to old posts

If you’ve updated an older post in a minor way, such as fixing typos, adding internal links, adjusting categories, or updating photos, use the Change Last Modified WordPress plugin to lock the last modified date and prevent it from being updated. This is important because Google can ignore or devalue your modified date if it changes for minor things. Continue showing the published date on these posts.

e.g. Published August 1, 2023

Meaningful updates to old posts

If you’ve updated an older post in a meaningful way, such as correcting content mistakes, improving instructions, changing methods, adding a video, or adding additional context, providing an FAQ based on reader feedback, etc, show the last updated date first to show its freshness and that you care about keeping content useful for your visitors.

Some sites only show the last updated date to give the clearest signal to Google that it’s fresh content. However, I think it builds trust to see when a recipe was first published as well as when it was last updated, because recipes that have been tested and improved over the years based on lots of feedback are usually better. It helps people see that the content has longevity and history. The nice thing about recipes is that they are almost always timeless. I think trust is reduced if you only see the last updated date – it feels like there’s a lack of transparency and almost makes you suspicious about how old the content is when you’re not told.

e.g. Last updated: October 31, 2025 Published: August 1, 2023

After a meaningful update, you can request that Google re-crawl the page. Give it a bit of time, then search for it in Google and check to see which date is showing in the search results. If it’s consistently showing the older published date and your click-through rate drops, you may need to switch to only displaying the last updated date on the page itself (while keeping both dates in your page’s schema code) to preserve your search click-through rate.

The post Which should I show: last modified date, published date, or both? appeared first on cre8d design.