PlainBlack Creative

10/06/2026

The people resisting AI today, will be championing it tomorrow…

10/06/2026

I'm not saying we've been working Jay hard, but: "I went outside twice today, that's a good day. I even went to the letterbox"

10/06/2026

We published 759 new pages in 10 weeks. Around 65 blog posts. Around 25 tools. Hundreds of directory pages.

Not to win an output award. To test one boring idea: activity creates activity.

Here's the part nobody likes hearing. You can't optimise a page you never published. You can't fix a tool nobody's used. The perfect plan never arrives, so the showing up never starts.

The pages started talking to each other. Conversations started that wouldn't exist if we'd waited.

But volume alone is worthless. 759 pieces of beige paste is still invisible. Every page has to do a specific job for a specific person, or it's just louder confusion.

You don't need 759. You need the rough specific one, shipped this week.

09/06/2026

We've told clients for years that consistency on social sparks action.

We'd never actually tested it on ourselves.

So we ran a build challenge: make something new every day, blog it, post it on two channels. We hate the word 'leads', so let's call them new friends.

The new friends showed up. Cold market reached out unprompted. Quiet conversations restarted. Old enquiries came back warm.

Here's the awkward bit. The reward for showing up consistently is more work. And more work is the exact thing that makes you stop showing up.

The strategy worked. Then it nearly broke us. The real challenge was never starting. It's not quitting the moment it pays off.

03/06/2026

We really do have the best clients.

Not because they say nice things.

Because sometimes they send feedback that starts with:

“Holy s**t. I fu***ng love it.”

Which, frankly, should be an official design approval category.

There’s “approved.”
There’s “approved with minor changes.”
And then there’s “client has entered tiny emotional breakdown territory.”

That last one is the good stuff.

But the line that matters most is this:

“Fantastic attention to detail.”

Because that’s usually where good work either lives or dies quietly in a ditch.

The spacing.
The flow.
The way the page answers the next question before someone has to ask it.
The words that sound like the business, not like an AI intern got trapped in a brochure factory.
The small choices most people don’t consciously notice, but absolutely feel.

That’s what makes something work.

Not just the big pretty reveal.

The little decisions underneath it.

Anyway, we’ll be over here pretending to be calm and professional.

Badly.

03/06/2026

This one made our day.

Not because it says “your websites are amazing,” although yes, we will absolutely be emotionally dining out on that for longer than is healthy.

But because of this bit:

“The way it’s all been thought out.”

That’s the bit.

Pretty is nice. Pretty gets attention. Pretty makes people pause for half a second before their thumb returns to its regularly scheduled doom-scroll Olympics.

But thought-out is where the work actually lives.

A good website is not just colours, fonts, buttons, and some lovely little sections stacked on top of each other like a digital lasagne.

It has to make sense.

It has to guide people.
It has to answer the quiet objections.
It has to feel intuitive before anyone can explain why.
It has to make the business feel like someone finally put the right bones underneath it.

That’s what we care about.

Not just making things look good.

Making things feel obvious once they exist.

Which is, annoyingly, the hard bit.

And yes, “blow smoke in your ass” is now technically client feedback.

We don’t make the rules.

01/06/2026

Du*****es! You will all resist until it hits your part of the bell curve, and then tell the world you were one of the first to embrace the new technology. Rinse and repeat.
I've seen the same post 5 times today (human written or so they claim). The post:

Clients can tell when you present with AI. Clients want trust not AI. And then some version of: We're a people agency, clarity versus blah blah blah.

Let's go back ten years... Clients can tell when you use templates...

Let's go back 20 years... Clients can tell when you use the internet for ideation...

Let's go back 50 years... Digital photos will never replace film.

Here's the hot take (or not so hot) depending on your point of view.

The client actually doesn't give a s**t. The client wants outcomes, not the journey.

If you know the rules, if you have the knowledge and skills, you have always been able to use the new tools to enhance your workflow and still be a human.
Because human creativity enhanced with the speed of computers is kinda what we've been doing for the past 50 years, but you know? Keep your head in the sand and don't integrate AI into your workflow.

30/05/2026

We have ADHD and a business to run.

So naturally, we built something dangerously close to useful.

It started as a way to stop PlainBlack from living across 14 tabs, 6 tools, 3 spreadsheets, and whatever cursed little corner of the brain stores “I’ll remember that later.”

Then it turned into a full business hub.

Customers.
Invoices.
Tasks.
Calendar.
Notes.
Marketing.
Ideas.
All in one window.

No monthly subscription.
No onboarding ritual.
No productivity guru whispering “optimise your workflow” while your soul leaves your body.

We call it the Attention Directed Holding Device.

Yes. ADHD.

The public demo is now live.

You can poke around, break fake things, make fake customers, send fake invoices, and quietly wonder why your actual business is currently held together by tabs and vibes.

Start here:

Day 30 of the build challenge. We turned the system we run PlainBlack on into a public demo you can play with. One window, your whole business, without the tab graveyard.

30/05/2026

Our blogs are genuinely excellent. We post them here for you to read them.

You don't.

You're in the ute. Between jobs. Doing the dishes.

Fair enough.

The blogs are good. The format is just wrong for a chunk of the people we're trying to reach.

So if you'd prefer digesting what we're cooking via aural stimulation while your eyes are pre-occupied - just click the play button.

Same valuable message. Same link. Same sultry voice.

No separate app needed.

In saying that...Spotify Audioblog coming soon.

29/05/2026

Week 4 done.

Six tools. One shared worker. Four of them fixing the same hole in the funnel.

Also: we found our own contact page had the exact dead thank-you problem we had just spent a day building a tool to fix. Fixed it the same night.

Honest numbers and full debrief on the blog.

https://www.plainblackcreative.com/blog/week-4-report