DigitalSand has been online since 1998 and has been redesigned more than once. This time it was rebuilt from scratch over a few days in October 2026, and I spent a few hours on it myself. AI did the work, in the cloud and on my laptop: ChatGPT wrote the brief and the critiques, Claude Design drew the pages, and Claude Code built the site. My part was mostly looking at the site, reviewing it and giving critique, plus the words and the photos.
How the work split
| Tool | What it did |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Wrote the creative brief and an assessment of the old site, then critiqued each round of the design and, later, screenshots of the built pages. |
| Claude Design | Drew every page as a working mockup and kept the design decisions in one handoff document. |
| Claude Code | Built the site in Hugo from those pages. It read the design but never changed it, so the design stayed the one source of truth. |
What changed
The first site, in 1998, was HTML written by hand; CSS and JavaScript came in later versions. The 2024 site used a Hugo theme and a blog that rarely got posts. The new one has no theme; every template was written for it. What it holds changed too:
- Apps gets its own section, with a page for each of the five apps, the oldest from 2010.
- Gear & Notes lists the things I own, starting with the big-ticket gear. Each has a page with the maker’s specs, and the only photos and opinions on it are mine. Buy links are labelled as paid.
- Projects is for things I’ve made and how they got made, starting with this one.
- The old posts are gone, except the site’s first page, from December 1998.
Where the logo came from
The hourglass started with a designer who drew it for me in 2013. For this redesign Claude Code redrew it as geometry on an isometric grid. One script now writes every version of the logo from that single definition, from the favicon to the image a shared link shows.
By the numbers
Between October 19 and 23, 2026, the build took 102 commits. The design went through five versions first.
What worked, and what didn’t
The first three versions, spread over the past few months, weren’t what I wanted. Each time I set the work aside and came back to it later with fresh eyes. What made the difference was writing things down. I kept the briefs and the creative direction, and each time I came back I took them to ChatGPT to talk through what I actually wanted before anything got drawn.
HISTORY
- Written in the last days of the build, before the new site went live.
- Build started.