Code, design, and video are treated as three careers. Working across all three isn’t spreading thin — it’s removing the two most expensive words in creative work: "hand off."
Every creative project dies a little at the handoff. The designer’s intent gets translated by a developer who wasn’t in the room. The launch video gets cut by an editor who never used the product. Each handoff is a game of telephone, and the final artifact is whatever survived. Generalist is not a slur The industry pushes specialization because it’s easier to hire, price, and replace. But small teams and independent clients don’t need three departments — they need one person who can hold the whole thing in their head: the brand, the build, and the story. When the same hands do all three, the work agrees with itself. What it looks like in practice On a recent product build, the component library and the brand guidelines were the same file. The launch film used the product’s actual UI motion curves for its animations. Nobody wrote a 40-page handoff doc, because there was nobody to hand off to. The project shipped in fourteen weeks instead of six months. The tradeoff is real: I will never be the world’s deepest expert in any single lane. But most projects don’t fail for lack of depth. They fail in the seams between experts — and I’ve made a career out of not having seams.