Your About Page Isn't a Resume With Warmer Lighting — It's a Scene

I've read a lot of About pages. Hundreds, probably. And I can count on one hand the ones I could describe back to you a week later.

The rest blur into a single document that reads like this: Passionate creative with X years of experience helping brands tell their story across digital and print. I believe great design is about people. When I'm not designing, you can find me hiking with my dog.

None of that is a lie. All of it is invisible.

The weird thing is that people don't write their project pages this way. They write project pages with specificity and shape — a problem, a turn, a result. Then they get to the About page, the one page that's entirely about them, and suddenly they're summarizing themselves like a LinkedIn headline generator with a mild fever.

Why It Collapses

Three reasons, and they're all understandable.

One: the About page has no brief. A project has a client, a deadline, a deliverable. The About page just has you, floating there, expected to justify yourself in 300 words.

Two: it feels rude to be interesting about yourself. So people sand off the edges and produce something that could describe roughly forty thousand other people.

Three: nobody knows what it's for. Is it a bio? A philosophy statement? A sales page? The answer, boringly, is: it's the page someone reads right before deciding whether to email you. That's it. That's the job.

So write it like that.

Exercise One: Replace an Adjective With a Scene

Go through your About page and circle every adjective that describes you. Passionate. Strategic. Detail-oriented. Collaborative. Then delete them and give each one a scene instead.

Not "detail-oriented." Instead: the night before a launch when you rebuilt the entire type hierarchy because one kerning pair was bothering you and you couldn't explain why.

Not "collaborative." Instead: the standing Thursday call with a client's operations lead that turned into the best part of the project.

Not "passionate about storytelling." Instead: the thing you were doing at 11 p.m. in 2019 that you didn't have to do.

You don't need one scene per adjective. Two or three across the whole page is plenty — enough that a reader feels a person in the room rather than reading a list of traits on a résumé.

Exercise Two: Name the Stake

Good stories have something at risk. About pages almost never do.

So answer this honestly: what were you afraid of?

Maybe it's the project that almost went badly and what you learned from the near-miss. Maybe it's a chase you took a pay cut for. Maybe it's the year you did work you're not proud of and what made you stop. Maybe it's simply the fear that the work you care about most is the work nobody asks for.

You don't have to confess anything you don't want to. You just have to name a stake. "I got tired of X" is a stake. "I kept watching Y happen and it bothered me" is a stake. A reader who shares the stake will keep reading, and a reader who doesn't will at least remember you.

Exercise Three: Write the Sentence You're Afraid Of

Every strong About page has one line that the writer almost cut.

Something like: I'm not the right fit for brands that want to move fast and skip the thinking. Or: I make things that are a little strange, and that's cost me work. Or: I'd rather do six projects a year properly than thirty I can't remember.

Write that sentence. Put it near the middle. Then leave it there for a week and see if it still feels true. The instinct to delete it is a good signal — usually it means you've found the voice, and the voice is the part that makes the page yours instead of generically employable.

A caveat: this isn't license to be a jerk. A point of view is not a grievance. If your sentence is about how everyone else is doing it wrong, cut it. If it's about what you actually care about, keep it.

Then Give It a Point of View

Once the scenes and the stakes are in, the page still needs a spine — one clear position on how you work. Not a mission statement. A position. Something you could disagree with.

Try finishing this: The way most people do [your thing] doesn't work because ____, so I ____.

If you can fill both blanks without hedging, that's your spine. Put it within the first four lines and let the rest of the page support it.

What to Cut

A short list, offered without mercy:

• The phrase "passionate about."
• Any sentence beginning with "I believe that."
• Your full employment history — that's what the projects page and the résumé are for.
• The dog. Unless the dog is genuinely load-bearing to your point of view, in which case, fine, the dog stays.
• Anything you wrote because it sounds like what a creative person is supposed to say.

The Test

Close the tab. Wait an hour. Open it again and read only the first three sentences.

Would you keep reading?

Better question: would a stranger be able to describe you to someone else, out loud, at a party?

If yes, you're done. If the best they could do is "uh, creative, does branding, seems nice," you've written a resume with warmer lighting — and resumes don't get remembered, they get filed.