Jessica Carter

Jessica Carter is a singer and painter, and the music project I write and produce with her. This is a client engagement, still running, and it covers the lot: the strategy, the brand, the website, and the tools behind her content. It replaces The Great Howl, the concept that used to sit in this slot. That was a fictional artist made with AI. This is a real one.

Strategy, worked out in the lab

The strategy came out of two sessions in my diagnostic lab, three and a half months apart. Between them they ran the full chain: independent research, a structured debate between opposing voices, and separate checks on the money, the route to an audience and the legal position, before any recommendation.

• June: the music. Eight acoustic songs, and how to get a record heard. The verdict was performance first: play the songs live until they hold a room, record only what is proven, and release to the people who were there. House concerts came out as the strongest channel, and an email list she owns as the base.
• October: a critique of our own plan. It was right about the music and wrong about the order. The order changed: record the whole album, sell it direct to the list first, and release singles to streaming slowly.

A brand found, not invented

The visual identity didn't start from a moodboard. It came from photographs of her own walls, her paintings and the table after a gig. The palette was measured from those photos, and the rule they share fits on one line: a dark line in a pretty frame. The container is warm, domestic and handmade; the content is allowed to say the unsayable.

One name now covers her and the band, after a naming decision that weighed the options in writing. A voice guide keeps two voices apart, hers and the project's, so nothing written for her can pass as written by her.

The website: rough on the surface, never underneath

She didn't want a standard musician's page. The site had to feel like walking into her world: scanned paper and paint as texture, torn edges, her handwriting, phone clips left as they were shot. The risk with a brief like that is that "rough" spreads into the things that matter. A slow page, a dead button or grey text on black doesn't read as unfinished. It reads as careless.

So every rough element got one test: is it her, or is it in someone's way? The engineering side is held by checks, not by care. Every text colour pair is tested for contrast. Accessibility, keyboard-only and reduced-motion walk-throughs, a phone speed test and her own writing rules all run on every push. There are no cookies and no trackers, so there is no consent banner. She can post a clip from her phone through a password-protected page, and selling is built but switched off until she prices a piece.

Tools behind the content

Her videos are filmed on a phone while the sound is recorded properly on a separate mic. The phone's own sound is the weak part, so I built a tool that finds where the two recordings line up by matching their waveforms, swaps the good sound in, crops to portrait for TikTok and Reels, and levels the loudness for streaming. A night's takes are ready to post the same night, with no clapperboard and no lining up by hand. Captions and cuts still happen in an editor afterwards.

Why it's on a capability site

The same rule ran through every stage. AI does the research, the checking, the comparing and the dull work. It never writes as her. That is what made the engagement work: decide what must stay human, enforce everything else mechanically, and leave the rough edges where they belong.