The reason I built alotté
The name alotté is a quiet nod to my children’s names and grew out of something that has followed me for most of my life. Not the site itself, but the instinct behind it. Years ago I wrote a running blog called Cheeky Running. It jogged along quite happily on Wordpress for five years until I accepted that there are only so many ways to describe tempo runs and the emotional arc of a Sunday long one. I retired it, but the habit of writing never went anywhere.
I’ve always been drawn to words. To shaping ideas until they make sense. It is my equivalent of building something with my hands. Some people carve wood. Some paint. I make things out of words or photographs.
The pull of images
Photography has always sat alongside the writing. I love how an image can change the mood of a piece. How it can warm it, cool it or tilt it slightly off-centre. A photo can shift an entire story without altering a single sentence.
GenAI has simply expanded that palette. I enjoy the prompt engineering, the scene-building, the attempt to coax a mood into place. It's a creative extension, not a replacement. Most of the images you see on alotte are created by me through GenAI, unless I say otherwise, and all the photography is mine. The writing is mine too. I do use GenAI as a sparring partner, the way a writer might bounce ideas off a friend, but the voice and the thinking are my own.
The joy of building
Beyond the writing and images, there's the quiet satisfaction of building the site itself. The tinkering. The endless micro-adjustments no one else notices. Tweaking layouts, nudging CSS, testing pages on devices that seem to multiply weekly. Cleaning up sitemaps. Watching which pages Google chooses to index and which it politely pretends not to see. It feels like tuning an engine until it hums. The mix of creativity and mechanics suits me perfectly.
alotté isn't a niche blog or a manifesto. It's a place to think in public. A notebook with better typography. The themes that surface are the ones I keep circling in my own mind.
Creative work and the craft behind it. Creativity has shaped most of my working life, and I’m interested in the truth behind it. Why some ideas land and others collapse. What sits at the centre of good work. Not the jargon. The human part. The observations you only make when you’ve done this long enough to see the patterns. I want to write honestly about the creative process in a way agency decks never quite manage.
Culture, memory and the Gen X lens. I return to the music, films and cultural touchpoints that shaped me. Not out of nostalgia, but because they form a kind of emotional scaffolding. Growing up during the Cold War. The strange mix of optimism and dread in eighties pop. The cultural fingerprints that stay with you and subtly shape how you see the world and raise your own kids.
Stories from life. I like exploring stories that never make it into a CV. Small turning points. Early jobs. Odd encounters. The unglamorous but revealing bits of life that often teach you more than the big milestones. These are the pieces that slip out when you stop writing for an audience and write for clarity instead.
Technology, GenAI and the evolution of creativity. I write about GenAI from the point of view of someone who works with it daily. Not breathless hype. The practical side. How it expands imagination. How it functions as a sketchbook. How it will sit alongside photography, writing and design as the tools continue to evolve.
Work, leadership and the realities people rarely say out loud. After years in agencies, corporates and the liminal spaces between, I have strong views on culture, leadership, ethics and communications. I’m not interested in corporate gloss. I’m interested in the honest version, the messy one. These are the conversations that matter, and too often they happen in whispers.
A space to think out loud
And that, really, is why I’m doing alotté. I needed a place where all of this could live. Somewhere to write without a brief. Somewhere to experiment with imagery and ideas. Somewhere I can build and rebuild until it feels right.
Working on it feels like being nine again, building an enormous Lego rocket in my pyjamas and forgetting to stop for lunch. It's my creative outlet, my digital workshop and a place to think out loud. And I enjoy every single part of it.
Thank you for reading, I’m always open to connection.