One of my favorite parts of building Two Girls One Idea has been getting to watch something that used to exist mostly in our heads become something we can actually look at.
At first, the website was basically a rough draft.
Pages. Ideas. Sections. Notes about what should go where. What the colors might be. What kinds of things we wanted people to see. What we wanted to keep private. What the studio should feel like.
Then slowly, all of those little decisions started turning into an actual place.
And I think that has been the most exciting part for me.
Designing the feeling of it
I really loved figuring out the themes and overall visual direction.
I didn’t want the website to feel like a generic business site where everything is technically there but nothing feels personal.
I wanted it to feel like us.
Creative. Warm. A little playful. Organized enough that people can actually find things, but not so stiff that it loses all personality.
I especially loved working on the Studio Journal because it reminded me a little bit of interviews.
You get to ask questions, think about why you made certain decisions, explain where ideas came from, and actually let people into the process a little.
That part has been really fun for me.
Miranda gives me her opinions on things as I build, so even though I’m the one physically putting a lot of the website together, it still feels collaborative.
I’ll make something, show it to her, change something, ask what she thinks, and slowly it becomes more and more like our actual studio instead of just my version of what the site should be.
The tiny details mattered to me too
One of my favorite things was making the custom thank-you messages.
That probably sounds like such a small part of an entire website, but I really cared about it.
I didn’t want someone to send us a message or request something and then just get some cold:
That felt so impersonal.
If someone took the time to reach out to us, I wanted the website to still feel like Two Girls One Idea on the other side of that button.
Even a tiny confirmation page can make the experience feel warmer.
Those little details are part of what makes the website feel like a creative home to me instead of just a collection of pages.
Some parts were definitely less cute
Linking everything together was probably the most frustrating part.
At first, some of the coding just did not want to work.
A page would look right but the link would be wrong.
Something would work in one place and not another.
You fix one thing and suddenly something completely unrelated looks strange.
There were definitely moments where I was staring at it thinking:
But I think that made the moment when everything finally connected feel even better.
The moment it actually felt real
I remember planning the website as a rough draft first.
It was still basically an idea at that point.
Then I was finally able to take that rough draft and put it into actual site files.
The pages connected.
The site had a name.
There was a real link.
And then I clicked it.
That was probably the moment it felt real to me.
It wasn’t just:
I could physically open it. I could scroll through it. I could click Projects. I could go to About. I could see our studio name sitting there like it belonged there.
That made me really happy.
I want people to be excited, not overwhelmed
There are a lot of ideas behind Two Girls One Idea. A lot of projects. A lot of characters. A lot of things we eventually want to build.
So one thing I care about is making sure the website doesn’t throw everything at someone at once.
I want people to open it and feel curious.
I want them to see the effort that went into it.
I want them to want to click a project because something about it caught their attention.
I want them to wonder:
Not:
That balance is something I’m still thinking about while we build.
It is still unfinished — and I’m okay with showing that
There are still placeholder visuals. There are pieces of artwork I want to redraw myself. There are pages we’re expanding. There are sections that are technically built but still need more personality or information.
There are probably things we’ll look back at months from now and completely redo.
And I actually think it is okay for the Studio Journal to show some of that.
I don’t want every behind-the-scenes post to pretend everything came together perfectly on the first try.
Because it didn’t.
We tested things. Some layouts didn’t work. Some visuals didn’t feel like us. Some wording sounded wrong once we actually saw it on the page. Some technical things were annoying.
Then we fixed them.
That is part of building something.
It isn’t just an idea anymore
That is probably the biggest thing this website has given me.
Two Girls One Idea doesn’t only exist in conversations between Miranda and me anymore.
There is somewhere we can point to. Somewhere the projects can grow. Somewhere we can document what we’re making. Somewhere people can discover our work.
And someday, when the site looks completely different because there are more projects, more artwork, more collaborators, and more things happening, I think I’m going to be really glad we kept some record of this version too.
Because this was the version where it started becoming real.