Version Eleven of Me: UK Creatives on the About Page They Can't Leave Alone

There is a particular kind of typing that happens at 11pm on a Sunday. It is not client work. It is not the invoice you have been avoiding. It is the fourth rewrite of your About page, and you are currently trying to decide whether " multidisciplinary" needs a hyphen or whether the whole paragraph should just be deleted and replaced with a single, breezy sentence.

For a page that occupies maybe 300 words on a website, the About page carries a strange weight. It is the only place on a creative portfolio where you are explicitly asked to explain yourself. Not the work, not the process, not the fee — you. And unlike a CV or a caption, it is public, permanent-ish, and updated far less often than the work it is meant to introduce.

The Page That Never Feels Finished

"I have rewritten mine eleven times since January," says Priya, a Glasgow-based illustrator whose site has a soft, hand-drawn feel and an About page that currently begins: "I draw small worlds and large feelings." She laughs when she says it. "That line has survived three versions. I keep trying to replace it with something more professional and then I put it back because it's the only sentence that sounds like me."

The About page is unusual because it is both a creative artefact and a practical document. It needs to tell a curator what you do, a client how to brief you, and a stranger why they should care. That is a lot of jobs for one paragraph. Most creatives end up drafting it in the same way they draft work: privately, obsessively, and with a bin full of earlier attempts.

The Third-Person Trap

One of the first things to go, for many people, is the third person. "[Name] is a London-based designer working across…" reads fine on a gallery wall. On your own website, it can sound like you are being introduced at an awards ceremony you did not attend.

"I tried third person for about six months," says Marcus, a graphic designer in Bristol. "It felt like wearing a suit that belonged to someone else. Every time I read it back I heard a voice saying 'Marcus is passionate about typography' and I wanted to close the tab." He now writes in first person, shorter sentences, fewer adjectives. "The About page got better when I stopped trying to sound like a studio and started sounding like a person who happens to run one."

That shift is not universal — plenty of makers prefer a neutral, third-person register, especially when the page is doing commercial work. But the tension is real: the voice that gets you taken seriously is not always the voice that gets you remembered.

What Gets Quietly Deleted

Ask UK creatives what they have removed from their About pages and the answers are revealing. The degree show prize. The six-month residency that did not lead anywhere. The client name that felt impressive in 2023 and slightly misaligned now. The personal detail that once felt brave and now feels like oversharing.

"I took out a sentence about being a parent," says Hana, a ceramicist in Margate. "Not because it isn't true or important, but because I realised I was using it to explain a slower pace of work, and I didn't want to apologise for the pace anymore. The work can just be the work."

Deletion, in this sense, is not erasure. It is editing. The About page is one of the few places where a creative gets to decide which parts of their story are load-bearing and which were only ever scaffolding. The best versions tend to be a little uneven — a list of clients next to a sentence about walking, a formal training line next to a confession that most ideas arrive on the bus.

The Useful Awkwardness of "Currently"

A small word does a lot of work on a good About page: currently. It signals that the page is alive, that the person behind it is mid-motion. "I am currently exploring…" is less impressive than "I specialise in…", but it is more honest, and it gives you somewhere to go next.

"I started using 'currently' because I kept having to update the old version," says Sol, a motion designer in Leeds. "Now the page admits it's temporary. It's a lot less pressure. I can add a project, change the focus, and the About page doesn't have to be a verdict on my entire career."

The trap is treating the page as a final statement. The creative practice moves; the About page lags behind; the gap becomes a source of low-level guilt. Naming that gap — "currently", "most recently", "at the moment" — turns the page into a snapshot rather than a contract.

A Page With a Back Door

Perhaps the most useful thing an About page can do is not close the conversation. The strongest examples tend to include a way in: what kind of collaboration you are looking for, how you prefer to be contacted, what you are not taking on right now. That is not admin. It is part of the introduction.

"Mine ends with a line about liking briefs that arrive with a messy question attached," says Priya. "It filters people. The ones who get it send better emails. The ones who don't probably weren't going to enjoy working with me anyway."

For a site like Isabel KM, where the portfolio is personal and the audience is a mix of UK collaborators, curators and curious passers-by, the About page is less a biography than a threshold. It should be warm enough to invite someone in and specific enough that they know what they are walking into. It does not need to be definitive. It needs to be true for now.

The Version You Don't Publish

Most creatives have a longer, stranger version of their About page saved somewhere — a notes app draft, a hidden page, a document called "about-old". These drafts are often better written and less useful. They contain the jokes, the doubts, the long explanation of why the work looks the way it does. They are the rehearsal, not the performance.

And that is fine. The published page is not the whole self. It is the friendly, accurate, slightly incomplete version that can survive being read by a stranger at a desk in another city. It will need rewriting again. That is not a failure of the page. It is the page doing its job: making room for the next version of the work, and the next version of you.

If yours is on version eleven, leave it there for a week. Then read it out loud. If it sounds like someone you would actually want to work with, it is probably done — for now.