There is a question I used to dread at social gatherings: "So, what do you do?" Not because I didn't know the answer, but because every answer I gave felt like a reduction. Web designer. Consultant. Founder. Each label was technically accurate and practically useless at explaining what I actually spend my time on.
I spent two years trying to get the elevator pitch right. Two years of workshopping the sentence that would make a stranger at a dinner party understand my work in the time it takes to pour a glass of wine. I got good at it. I got faster at it. And somewhere along the way I realized I had optimized for the wrong thing.
The problem with job titles
Job titles exist for the comfort of the listener, not the accuracy of the speaker. "Web designer" tells someone where to file me in their mental index. It says almost nothing about the problems I actually solve, the decisions I make, or the way I think about building things.
The work I do sits at the intersection of design, strategy, and communication. Some days I am writing copy. Some days I am restructuring how a business talks about itself. Some days I am building a system to help someone understand their own data. There is no clean word for that. There probably shouldn't be.
"The urge to have a legible identity is understandable. But legibility is the enemy of nuance."
What changed was simple: I stopped trying to explain it and started doing more of it. The work explains itself, eventually. The portfolio explains it. The results explain it. A well-crafted sentence about what you do is worth far less than a well-crafted piece of work that shows it.
Now when someone asks what I do, I say: I help small businesses build things worth building. If they want to know more, there is more to say. If not, we talk about something else. Either way, I am not performing a job title for their convenience.