Why I rebuilt this site around a studio
After thirty years of building, I wanted a home that reads less like a portfolio and more like a working room. A studio you can walk into. A few plates on the wall. Some unfinished sketches on the desk.
Most personal sites are CVs in disguise. A neat grid of badges. A list of things I have done. A monument, gently maintained.
I have always disliked that genre. It rewards finish over thinking, and it asks the reader to admire from a polite distance.
So when I sat down to rewrite tarrysingh.com for the third or fourth time in twenty years, I tried something different. I asked: what does the room I actually work in look like — at four in the afternoon, with eight plates on the wall, a half-drawn diagram on the desk, three open proposals, two abandoned ones, and a cup of cold coffee?
That is the version I wanted online.
The shape of a working room
A studio has three properties that a portfolio does not.
First, it is not finished. A plate on the wall might be a sketch, a printer's proof, or a final piece — and the visitor can usually tell which is which. The room does not pretend everything is shipped. It shows what is in progress, and it shows what has been quietly retired.
Second, it has a voice. When you walk into a real working room, you can feel the hand of the person who arranged it. The fonts they chose. The way the books are stacked. Which pencils are sharpened and which are not. A studio is opinionated in a way a CV cannot be.
Third, it invites a slow look. A CV asks you to scan. A studio asks you to stay. You linger over one plate because something in it is unresolved and you want to figure out what.
Those three properties became my brief. Unfinished, opinionated, slow.
What I chose to keep
I kept the navigation deliberately spare — /, /about, /experiments, /synaptic — because every studio I have ever loved has three or four doors, not twelve.
I kept the experiments grid as a single chronological list, newest first. No tabs. No filters. If you want to know what I am thinking about right now, you scroll. If you want to know what I was thinking about three years ago, you scroll further.
I kept the editorial fonts — Gloock for display, IBM Plex Serif for the prose, IBM Plex Mono for the small caps — because those three faces together feel like a printed dossier, and a printed dossier is the closest analogue I could find for what I wanted the site to feel like in your hand.
What I dropped
I dropped the testimonial wall. I dropped the logo carousel. I dropped the "trusted by" strip. None of those help a visitor figure out whether I think clearly.
I dropped the dark-mode toggle. The studio has one light setting — afternoon, cream paper, slight grain — and the work was made under it.
I dropped the contact form. If you want to reach me, my LinkedIn is at the top of every page. Friction in that one direction is the right friction.
What I am still figuring out
The hardest part of this rebuild is not the code. It is the rhythm of writing in public again.
I have written hundreds of thousands of words in the last fifteen years — on LinkedIn, in client decks, in proposals, in private notebooks — and almost none of it lives here. That is a discipline problem, not a tooling problem.
So the experiment, going forward, is this: every plate I draw, every proposal I send, every conversation that reshapes how I think about a problem — it gets a short note here. Not a paper. Not a pitch. A note.
If those notes pile up into something more, good. If they stay loose, also good.
What matters is that the room is open, and the work is on the walls, and somebody can walk in and figure out — in under a minute — what I am actually doing right now.
That is the only thing a personal site needs to do.