Post context: I’m writing this blog post weeks late, from;

• my grandparents’ spare bedroom, 
• the public library, 
• and my current hotel room home. 

Since publishing The Welcome Mat page, but skipping the blog post and podcast episode (coming soon!), we’ve completed a couple more projects for the house website. 

IRL, I’ve been navigating being displaced from our apartment due to a structure fire in the building last month. We left with nothing at midnight and need to relocate. The cherry on top was my 8-year-old having an emergency appendectomy two weeks after the fire. Recovery is going well!

An ✨interesting✨ start to the summer… and life context to be world-building this fantastical house website in! It feels like a lifetime has passed since Sarah encouraged me to set dates to actually bring the website to life.

Corporate Creative Cuties Coming @ You!

The Office page is now live! Instead of catching up on The Welcome Mat post or jumping to The Bathroom reveal, I’m starting here for the sake of celebration. 

I couldn’t be more excited to share this one with you. Although not a website best practice, I live for a secret door, or in this case, an obvious drawer-door to a portal place! But before we’re in the weeds, let’s get one thing straight: this page is a threshold (aren’t they all?).

This one is extra special because it’s the meeting place that connects all the TOD relationships. It is both the act of being warmly introduced to the humans who will shape your digital home, and it honours the role the TOD team plays in co-creating that experience for clients.

Here’s what you should know: I love nothing more than a good ol’ party post! I seize every opportunity to ask Sarah to make graphics with foil balloons, party hats, and confetti. 

It’s threefold; 

1. She makes the best party posts.
2. I love celebrating our clients, their teams, and milestones. 
3. It feels great to both receive and give flowers (even digital ones 💐).

The Mood: More Than an About Page

Visually, I wasn’t sure what it would serve until we brought the desks and banner together. The Milanote board for this page was full-full but plain overall. Each piece of artwork on this page was crafted custom.

I knew what would live on this page, but it took a few turns. Along with life. 

Creating the desks felt out of my wheelhouse, so I put Rupi and I in the hot seat with a big questionnaire moment and asked Sarah to bring the vision to life.

Like all brilliant custom collaged artwork, these desks are so fun to explore, thanks to Sarah the page is serving gallery.

The Function: Fantasy Desk Flay Lays

Each team member’s desk space is a customized visual expression. We wanted visitors to feel like they’ve stepped into the TOD house and are looking down at each team member’s corner. 

The spaces are intimate, curious, and stylized, but they aren’t exposing or overly personal. After all, not everyone on the team started a business named after themself.

A nugget of Tara lore: when I owned a home nail studio, I also included my first name in the business name — Hand Jobs by Tara. Camp and a great conversation starter.

Back to the point… The items on and in our desks are a mix of:

1. office supplies at our desks,
2. ‘signature’ objects/characters (think pets, beverages, or paper bag puppets),
3. and less explicit easter eggs referencing our personhood, special talents, work accomplished on TOD team, hobbies etc.

The desk drawer functionality felt like a valuable touch. Mirroring the ‘but wait there’s more’ vibe of the Hallway and Kitchen sections of The Welcome Mat page. It was built into the planning.  

The drawers are their own thresholds. Each team member’s desk artwork is like meeting someone at their workstation and immediately getting a feel for their vibe.

Then the canvas drawer reveal is a clickable element that opens their bio, accompanied by a note from yours truly. My vision was to celebrate what makes each team member essential to making your digital presence feel like home. But, unlike this blog post, in a short, digestible way!

The Process: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

The banner artwork was a big question mark when it came time to work on this page. I didn’t have a vision for what it would look like initially. The structure of what needed to be included on this page was set from go, but ended up remixed along the way. 

In conversations with Sarah, I landed on the corporate cutie drag queen birds as the banner. And while she pointed out that there probably isn’t a corporate office inside the TOD house, I thought bringing our drag queen bird selves to the office could make it make sense. 

Sure, maybe there isn’t a corporate office in the TOD universe… To be fair, there really isn’t any physical space in the TOD universe. 

And right now, I’m especially untethered. 

The absurdity of this imaginal office space and my family’s current life circumstances reflect the fact that all of this is truly so weird and wonderful. From this place of finding myself at the ultimate blank slate, it is so funny to present this to you, now.

Something I didn’t anticipate when we started, but that I’ve come to understand through this process (especially on The Welcome Mat page) is we’re really creating two websites. There isn’t always a major difference between the mobile and desktop versions of each section, but they tend to require *some* adaptation. On the TOD Office page, I love the animated aspect of the bird banner on mobile. 

Is There Compatibility Here?

Over the past four-going-on-five years, I’ve learned again and again that the best predictor of success is the client relationship. While I’ve improved at extending offers only to aligned clients, it’s a lesson I continue to learn. As recently as last summer, when I processed TOD’s first refund. 

We worked on this 9-grid project for a group practice owner client. They hired us after being unsatisfied with their last contractor, stalling them from launching their online presence (which still does not exist). After we did moved through the project timeline, plus, some back and forth I simply offered to refund the non-refunable deposit.

The 9-Grid Post Concepts:

The 9-Grid Sketch Artwork Sarah Designed:

Working on this project was fun, until it wasn’t. Sharing the work with you here, now, validates it wasn’t time wasted. I celebrate it to see the light of day even in it’s half-together state. Of course, it comes with an important reminder: we are not for everyone, and everyone is not for us.

So, serving up this, a dream house website, that you can poke around and hangout in, feels like an opportunity for you to see our headshots AND the rich-inner-world-weirdness on full display. Like a performative but true dating app profile. The show must go on, in style.

What better way to make this page fun and encourage potential clients then to interrogate their visit to the TOD house website? It serves as a vetting process for determining if there’s real compatibility here! Matchy-matchy dating app invite sections, at the top of this page, support the website in both attracting and repelling clients who aren’t our best fit, and us for them.

As a young, single person who is regularly confused about their sexuality and interacting with other humans, I often find myself with creative dating app sparks…

only to never join…

while also never making willing or intentional eye contact in public..

So this is filling my own cup on some level (mirroring my hotel photoshoot moment) 👇. 

Most recently, in May, the bio would read: 

“Like Natalie Wood in Penelope, but with loose skin and vyvanse

Seeking companionship, fun dates now

And ultimately looking for someone to sing Best Guess by Lucy Dacus to”

Then again, in June, I had a creative moment in the hotel when my kids went to their Dad’s:

“POV: The apartment building I live in had a structure fire, and I’m living in a hotel. You’re impressed by the creativity and flair of my impromptu hotel photoshoot solely created for this dating app bio (what’s a little more novelty rn?). You’re impressed that I executed it without a tripod, you know I must be tired, and so you buy me dinner. Very cool, thank u!!! I save my KD cups for lunches since I work from home (the hotel room).”

While you won’t catch me on an app (at this moment), I can’t help but draw the connection that this website exists to serve the same purpose as these bio moments. 

The inner world is so rich, so unserious, so absurd that presenting it feels a little silly and a lot vulnerable. Building a structure, the TOD dream house website, with hidden doors, leading to secret places makes it magic. It’s a deliberate choice. Creating and sharing magic is a deliberate choice. 

Sarah came through with desk spaces that are dynamic, thoughtfully designed, and SO beautiful. They represent each of us as individuals and as a team. I don’t have more words. Only confetti, and probably flowers. The desk artworks are what make this page for me. They’re a reflection of what I desire the whole website to be: whimsical, fun, and exciting to look at. True and beautiful. 

Playing with the drawers and opening portals to each team member’s world (bio) was fun, but I was stumped working on my own. Choosing the right image, vibe, and drawer colour. Ultimately, life circumstances were a fab reminder: everything is perfect, not permanent. 

Writing comments for Rupi and Sarah’s desks was another highlight. It is truly unreal and worthy of the biggest virtual party moment that I met and am privileged to work with the TOD team. 

Rupi’s Origin Story: Tumblr Era Cool Girl

Rupi is my big city neighbour! We live nearly 500km apart from each other in Alberta. When I was hiring for her position last summer, Rupi was the first interviewee I met with. One of the questions I asked was: What’s your fave social media platform?

This one answer totes sealed the deal! Rupi answered Tumblr. It stood out because no one else answered this way, and she had a following there from the Tumblr heyday (the mid-2010s). As a cusp millennial who wasn’t a Tumblr girly, I knew this was code for ‘Rupi is a cool and understands internet culture’. 

And turns out, a year later, it remains a good pick. You might think choosing trending audio is a minute detail, and you’d be right, still, we’re in the business of taming the power of the small. Making thoughtful, well-suited decisions is the crux of what we offer our clients at TOD. 

Rupi’s role covers more than this, and that’s the core of the celebration. We couldn’t clean up nicely and post on time without Rupi’s help! Cheers to one year! 

Sarah’s Origin Story: Better Than Everyone Illustrating Art Therapist on Instagram

Also, forever in her cool girl era, just a hop, skip, and jump away (~3700km away) in Ohio. In 2020, the early days of TOD, I found myself on Sarah’s Instagram profile. In awe of her artwork. So I told her. Except I didn’t just slide into her DMs. Instead, I shared her work on my Stories… twice! And the rest is, well, 5 years of history!

I simply couldn’t put into words the impact of this relationship and watching Sarah’s journey over the past five years. However, I think the full circle of making friends, from loving her artwork in Instagram-sized graphics to hiring her create Instagram-sized artwork for the TOD team, says something — maybe not enough, just on the surface, but something.You can meet Sarah, more deeply, here.

The TOD Origin Story: 2019 Me Would be like “Lol Wut?”

Refer to the section on the TOD Office page, here, for background. I’ve written, told, and rewritten this body of text countless times over the past five years. 

Sometimes in great detail. Sometimes omitting the ugly, the trauma and the possibly triggering. Although this iteration shares the personal nitty-gritty, it really glosses over the core of the work that’s happened here, virtually, over the past 5 years. 

I’m tempted to list the accomplishments, name-drop, and shout about the genuinely cool stuff TOD has been a part of, but it doesn’t feel like the most genuine or necessary thing to do, here, now. 

Because what deciding to do this work, to work with each person or entity I have up to now REALLY did was:

afford me, Tara, the human, the time, space, and energy to pour into knowing, loving , and trusting myself.

I lived in the now charred apartment-building-time-capsule for 3.5 years. Physically, the space was my sanctuary, my cocoon, a place of rest, decline, atrophy. And in other ways the exact opposite. A valley, a place to gather, to plug in to connection. But as a self-proclaimed person of the internet who curated a stylish lil place and ordered all her groceries for delivery, please understand how important home was and is to me. 

Yet, even in tragedy (or maybe divine comedy, when you throw emergency surgery in the mix), the celebration script is still running. With detachment I will curate, care for, and pour over our new home with all the Love in the universe. Thanks for letting me borrow yours for a min! 

The seeds sewn here, in this post, on this website, with Love, will do what they were lovingly, and intentionally planted to be, do and create.

The Invitation: Something on Strength

If you’ve poured over these blogs, the new website, the fruity interns, the drag birds and you’re still reading, you’re probably gay. Just kidding, but seriously, I’ve heard straight people don’t Google ‘am I gay?’.

If you’re still reading, we might vibe! So I’ll leave you with my lesson gleaned from this moment in time:

Even when, and maybe especially if, life feels hard or challenging, celebration is worth the effort. Because this life, and this job, and this team who live very far away from me couldn’t be possible without seeing and celebrating the magic that brought it all to life. 

So the invitation for this post is to poke around, see what we’ve published, and if there’s perceived compatibility apply to be a Welcome Mat client. 

But there’s also a gratitude, a thank-you, from me to you: Thank you for witnessing me in my Strength as I navigate this weird, out of time, life changing and challenging situation. Thank you for cheering for me and celebrating this website update with us. I’m moving in to a new home soon, on July 15th, with another single mom and her children. A Jupiter in Cancer adventure? See you for the next reveal posts! Coming soon, arriving in perfect timing.