[ EXPERIMENT · WRITE-UP ]

I tailored my portfolio for one reader.

A company posted a role for a designer who could do two things at once: conversion and AI. That mix is most of what I’ve spent fifteen years on, so a cover letter felt thin. I answered in the medium instead: one page, built for the people who’d read it, and no one else. Here’s one, up close.

The posting was live, so the clock was running. I worked with what I had: my own site, already built around behavior and a few psychological models I keep coming back to. This company sells online, so I borrowed their language. I put myself inside a product card in the header, the kind of module you’d tap to buy something, and let the visitor meet me the way they meet a product.

Portrait of Laurens, presented as a product in the card header — The header card. You meet the designer the way you meet a product.

Then I changed the things that only make sense when you know who’s reading. On my public site, the primary call to action is open: get in touch. It has to be, because I don’t know who you are. Here I did know, so the primary action became something else: a switch that turns on the behavioral layer. The persuasion cues stay off at first, because all of them at once is noise. One deliberate action reveals them, and because it’s the brightest thing on the page, most readers will reach for it. The reveal is the demonstration.

The switch

Off, you get the product element on its own. Turn the behavioral layer on and the same lines are named and explained, the persuasion shown rather than hidden.

Only a few weeks open this quarter.
Trusted by teams in banking and transit.
Warm, plain, and on your side.

Turn the switch on to reveal the behavioral layer.

The header animation carries the same idea. A single dot rolls out of the copy and into the card, onto the portrait. It moves your eye exactly where I want it, onto the thing being offered. Every persuasion cue on the page is labeled out loud: scarcity, social proof, liking. For a reader who already knows Cialdini, a hidden trick reads as either manipulation or naivety. A named one reads as craft.

Portrait of Laurens, presented as a product in the card — The dot leaves the copy on the left and rolls into the card, onto the portrait, pulling your eye to the thing being offered.

Not a one-off

This isn’t a one-off trick, it’s how I work. Give me a reader and a role and I tailor the page to them: read the vacancy, find the question underneath it, match it to what I’ve actually done, and make that match impossible to miss. The tailoring is the work, not the trick.

The same move produces very different pages. One version turns me into a product in a shop card. Another, a file moving through a review. Another, a live readout on a control panel. Different surface, same idea: meet the reader in their own language.

What makes it repeatable is AI. A page shaped this precisely used to be too expensive to build more than once. Now it’s an afternoon. I use AI to explore the angle, draft the variant, and stand up the prototype. Then I decide what’s true and what stays, which is the part it doesn’t do for me.

A segment of one

Here’s where most people overreach, so let me be straight. I can’t prove a page like this converts. I send one link to one reader. There’s no traffic to split, no plain version running beside the tailored one, nothing to measure it against. That’s not an A/B test. It’s personalization taken to the end of the line: a segment of one.

The bet isn’t blind. Everything I know about behavior says a page that feels made for you beats one made for everyone. That’s not a hunch, it’s the pattern I’ve watched for fifteen years: the more personal it feels, the better it converts.

Being this specific also let me do things a public page can’t:

show my skill set directly, which aimed at everyone would be overkill
name every persuasion cue instead of hiding it
make the page behave like the product it describes

For one known reader, all of that reads as intent. For everyone, it would just be noise.

Most of my work lives on the side where data settles the argument. This one lives on the other, where you design from what you know about one person and accept you’re making a bet. Both are real. Knowing which one you’re doing is the job.