December 31, 2025
We may not be very keen on climate change and a few other things getting worse and worse (we’re not) but changes and their challenges are what make life exciting and we’ve embraced a few at Hamiltro Website Design this year.
MORE ONLINE WORKSHOPS
Our online workshops have continued to be a great way for people to gather and learn together. The images you see above were the result of some experimentation in one of our AI image-generation workshops with a prompt that was:
“group of panhandlers sitting or standing on a city sidewalk, abstracted into angular geometric planes and metallic surfaces, fractured cubist composition with interlocking shapes, rendered in the style of industrial minimalism, cool desaturated palette of steel blues and greys with hints of rust and gold, sharp lighting and deep shadows, photorealistic texture of weathered metal and concrete, cinematic atmosphere, evoking empathy through abstraction, contemporary digital cubist realism in the style of [name of one of the artists participating in the workshop]”
The image on the left was generated by the text alone and the image on the right was generated by the exact same text but with a sample image of a painting by the “in-the-style-of” artist added for reference. The image on the left didn’t look at all like the work of the “in-the-style-of” artist and the image on the right still didn’t really look like a work the artist would make himself—but if you saw the image we’d added for reference, you’d understand how this changed the image the way it did.
Many of the artists participating in the AI image-generation workshops have no desire or commitment to use AI in their own work but have been curious enough to come and experiment together—and trying each other’s ideas together has been illuminating.
Other workshops this year have included several on artist archiving, using AI for beginners and using AI to help maintain your website. I’d like to do more for both AI usage and art archiving next year and, with the uptick in scams and hacks going on (one of the downsides of AI being so clever), probably at least one on web and email security issues. New workshops are posted here and clients and newsletter subscribers have free access.
ART ARCHIVING
After over 20 years of our main focus being designing portfolio websites for artists and solopreneurs, we’ve spent a few years accommodating requests to build custom private archival functionality into the backend of art websites.
The obvious need for this—both for living artists (managing their work inventory for proposals, exhibitions, sales, etc) and for artist estates (catalog raisonné/legacy)—led to a significant expansion of this work this year and we’ve been building out demo sites and taking on larger archival projects for artists, artist estates, and collectors.
Because of the particular way we build art websites for expandability, we’ve also been adding archival features to some of the older portfolio websites we’d built previously—enabling artists to maintain records for all the work they’ve ever done (that they have records of) and to keep all the information in one place. Also to create private pages and pdfs of selected works.
Here’s a sample backend page from one of the demo sites showing a selection process for the creation of a collection for private pages or pdfs:
Each archive is a snug fit for the kind of work the artist makes and the records and processes they need.
THE TEAM: ME AND AI
Over a year ago, my last long-term intern, Dharita Desai, graduated and was hired by Google (not the first intern to go directly from Hamiltro Website Design to Google). I haven’t replaced her with another human yet because I’ve been enjoying being able to work with AI for all the coding that I used to hand off to programmers.
Using AI for coding is very much like working with a human programmer. If you know what you want and you basically understand coding well enough to know how it needs to be achieved and what constraints need to be in place, the communication process is very similar. And it’s available on demand. So that’s how I’ve been working for over a year now and the “we” of HWD has for now become just me and AI.
The human:AI ratio will change again one of these days though, as
- the advantage of working with AI isn’t that you get to sit back and do nothing with some kind of new allocation of spare time; you just get to explore more territory than you could before, and
- we need to maintain entry-level jobs for AI-savvy computer science students and graduates and it’s unnecessary to do everything by myself (even though it’s been fun for a while) and
- I like working with people.
COACHING AND IN-PERSON WORKSHOPS
Without particularly aiming for this, 2025 turned into a year where I became more of a coaching kind of resource to people wanting help with how they handle their website design and digital marketing on their own—via both in-office coaching sessions and private workshops.
Working with people face to face is something I like very much so this has been another plus for the year.
WEBSITE DESIGN
Despite leaving this to the end the post, website design remains the core of what we do and I worked with some great clients again this year. Besides the new design work, I also worked on several websites that were previously designed by others but needed help to change or restore them. I won’t include the work done for those, but here’s a sampling from some of our brand-new websites this year:
I know there are plenty of things that are worrisome in the world but I’m grateful to be able to keep working, to have this exciting new technology at my fingertips, and to be able to help the kind of interesting, creative, and visionary people that I have somehow been lucky enough to have as clients.
May everyone have a year of inspiration and exploration in 2026.
