Launching Titans of Industry

I finally got around to launching my professional website for my company, which is called Titans of Industry. How did it get that name?

Back in my days at VRT's Creative Lab, we regularly held off-site brainstorming sessions for major projects like election coverage and the European Championships. These multi-day retreats culminated in pitching our ideas to stakeholders, typically heads of subbrands or marketing executives. At one particular retreat, when the usual stakeholders couldn't make it, we were told we'd be presenting to representatives from various external companies - or as our producer dramatically put it, "titans of industry."

The phrase became an instant inside joke during the retreat and stuck around long after. Later, I didn't overthink the name choice when I needed to incorporate a company for my contract work with Automattic. To this day, it still confuses the mailman when he has to deliver a package.

After leaving Automattic, creating a website lingered on my to-do list. Despite several false starts, I finally set myself a firm deadline: launch something - anything - by the end of January. And I made it.

I've always been fascinated by early Windows and DOS aesthetics. How they created functional information interfaces before real computer graphics were viable still amazes me. Some of my earliest computing memories involve those text-based interfaces, before Windows got "pretty" around version 3.

I made several attempts at recreating something like that, a text user interface meets early 90's BBS using xterm, but even though it worked - it felt like a gimmick, was very hard to navigate on mobile, wasn't accessible at all, and couldn't be crawled by Google. I also wanted these very hackery scanlines and curvature, which got me in a WebGL shader rabbit hole I still have nightmares about.

I eventually settled on incorporating the aesthetic of text user interfaces while building on modern web technologies. The result is fully crawlable by search engines and accessible to all users, and I even managed to preserve the original WebGL shader effect in the header.

Oh, and there's an easter egg hidden somewhere!

Check out the site here: titansofindustry.be

With this launch, I'm now taking on new projects and collaborations. If you're looking for someone who brings both technical expertise and creative problem-solving to the table, let's talk.