Generalist, Not Vague: The Case for a Creative Practice With a Throughline

Somewhere around the fourth time a well-meaning person told me to niche down, I started keeping a note of what I thought they actually meant. Usually it was one of three things: they wanted to refer me and did not know what to say; they wanted my website to be easier to skim; or they had found their own lane years ago and had forgotten how foggy it looked from the outside.

All three are fair. None of them require me to pretend I only do one thing.

The niche advice is usually right — for somebody else

Let us be honest about why the advice exists. A tight niche is legible. It is good for search, good for word of mouth, good for pricing, because a specialist can charge specialist money. If you are a wedding photographer in Cheshire, the phrase 'wedding photographer in Cheshire' will do more for you than any amount of clever positioning.

But legibility is a marketing property, not a moral one. The industry has quietly conflated the two, and the result is a lot of creatives performing a narrowness they do not feel, hiding half their practice behind a tab called 'other'.

I have done this. It was fine. It was also a bit like turning up to a party in a costume that only fits when you stand still.

A throughline is not a niche

Here is the distinction I have come to rely on. A niche is a category. A throughline is a preoccupation. Categories are chosen by the market; preoccupations tend to choose you.

A throughline has three strands, and I can only ever find three.

Theme. The subject you keep circling. Mine is roughly this: how people explain what they do, and why the explanation is usually worse than the work.

Process. How you get there. Interviews, awkward questions, a wall of index cards, three drafts before anything leaves the building.

Point of view. The argument you make whether or not anyone asked for it. Mine: clarity is a form of generosity, and most brands are hiding behind their own adjectives.

None of those require me to make only one kind of object. All of them make the range feel deliberate rather than scattered.

What that looks like in practice

Last year my work included a messaging project for a small engineering firm in Sheffield, a photo series about sign painters, a workshop for six people in a rented room above a pub in Leeds, and a hand-drawn poster for a record shop. On a bad day that looks like a portfolio with no centre of gravity. On a good day it is four versions of the same question: what is this thing really, and how do we say it plainly?

The engineering firm needed their own words handed back to them. The sign painters needed someone to notice that the lettering was the argument. The workshop needed a room and a deadline. The poster needed a shop that trusted me. Four different shapes, one curiosity.

The test I use before anything goes on the site

I used to decide what to publish by asking whether the project was good. That is the wrong question, because it is really asking whether I am good, and there is no stable answer to that.

Now I ask three questions instead.

1. Does it show a theme I keep returning to?
2. Does it show how I think, not just what I made?
3. Would I be pleased if a future client saw it and asked me about it?

Three yeses and it goes up. Two, and it goes up with a proper note explaining the connection. One, and it stays in the folder — and the folder is not a failure, it is an archive.

There is a simpler version: the pub test. If a friend asks why that piece is on your site, do you have an answer that is not 'it was a job'? If the honest answer is that it paid in February, that is a perfectly good reason for having done the work and a terrible reason for leading with it.

Two housekeeping rules that make a generalist site readable

Sort by intent, not by discipline. Do not make me choose between 'brand' and 'editorial' before I have decided whether I like you. Group the work under the questions it answers: voice, clarity, launch, curiosity. The labels should sound like things a client has actually lain awake worrying about.

Write notes for the reader, not the client. A caption reading 'brand refresh for a leading provider' tells me nothing. A caption reading 'they had nine taglines and no sentences' tells me everything, and it does it in nine words.

The manifesto, such as it is

• Range is not the same as vagueness.
• A portfolio is an argument, not an inventory.
• Say what you are curious about, then show the receipts.
• If a project does not fit the argument, either the argument is too small or the project is.
• Nobody has ever hired me because my niche was tight. They hired me because something on the site sounded like a person.

I am not against specialising. If one lane genuinely holds everything you want to make, take it — you will have an easier time with search engines and a slightly harder time at parties. But the idea that a generalist practice is a failure to commit gets the causality backwards. The commitment is to the throughline. The projects are simply where it shows up, week after week, in whichever shape the work arrives.