About two years ago, a friend of mine had a neon yellow backpack.
I couldn’t stop looking at the color.
I’ve always been drawn to things that are unusually bright, but something about that particular yellow felt especially right: energetic, slightly obnoxious, difficult to ignore.
Around the same time, I discovered that neonyellow.com might be available to buy.
I mentioned it to the same friend. Their immediate excitement about what that domain could become was enough to convince me.
So I bought it. At $700+ it was the most expensive domain I have bought to date.
Then I had to figure out what to do with it.
Nothing I did felt Neon Yellow
My first thought was some kind of creative studio or collaborative practice—something closer to a multidisciplinary design studio than another consulting company.
But I remember telling my friend that I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t think anything I was doing professionally was worthy of the Neon Yellow name.
That thought stuck with me.
Because it raised a much more uncomfortable question:
How could someone who thought of himself as a creative, vibrant person have so little of his actual work that felt that way?
I’d built a career as a digital strategist and consultant. I was good at helping other people clarify ideas, build systems and put interesting things into the world.
But increasingly, I wanted to make things myself.
Making the work I wanted to exist
Around the same period, I was learning more about my own neurodivergence and reconsidering some of the assumptions I’d made about how I was supposed to work.
I started giving myself considerably more permission to follow things simply because I found them interesting.
Make music.
Make art.
Make physical objects.
Buy a weird discontinued stapler from England because I couldn’t stop thinking about a staple I’d seen in Lisbon.
And instead of worrying about whether there were enough people around me interested in the same things, use the internet for one of the things it is exceptionally good at: finding the people who are.
Neon Yellow gradually stopped being a brand I needed to invent.
It became a place to put that work.
A marker
I’m not entirely sure what Neon Yellow will become yet.
That’s intentional.
Right now it includes art, music, experiments and physical products like the Ring + Loop System. Some things will work. Others probably won’t. I’m increasingly comfortable with that.
After spending much of my career as a consultant, Neon Yellow marks the beginning of something different for me: a creative practice in which making the thing is the work.
Maybe it’s a career transition.
Maybe it’s an art practice.
Maybe there’s a little midlife crisis in there too.
Neon yellow seems like an appropriate color for all three.