About
BlackCat is
one person.
My name is Carlos Jones. Thirty years of design work, and for the last several of them, a small studio built specifically for businesses that are just getting started or finally getting serious.
Thirty years, and the useful part is knowing what to leave out.
Experience is usually sold as a list: the disciplines, the software, the client logos. That list is real, and it is also not what you are actually buying.
What you are buying is somebody who has watched enough projects go right and wrong to tell you, in the first conversation, which half of your list matters and which half is going to waste your money. For a business in its first years, that judgment is worth more than any single skill on the list.
What the years are for
Three things a long career actually buys a small business.
Knowing what to skip
The most expensive mistakes in a first website are the things that did not need to be there. Somebody has to be willing to talk you out of them, and that only comes from having built them before and watched them go unused.
Doing all of it
Brand, website, print, campaign and motion under one roof means no handoffs, no version drift, and nobody blaming the other supplier. It also means the sign, the site and the flyer look like the same company.
Having seen it break
Expired domains, lost logins, migrations that took the email down, launches that slipped. None of these are theoretical, which is why they are planned around rather than discovered.
Being straight about it
I am not an agency, and that cuts both ways.
Worth knowing before you write, because for some businesses this is exactly right and for others it genuinely is not.
What you get
The person who does the work
- No account manager between you and the designer
- My actual opinion, including when it is not what you hoped
- One person who knows your whole setup by heart
- Decisions in a day, not after an internal review
- Prices that do not carry an office and a sales team
What you do not get
A department
- Round the clock coverage. I sleep, and occasionally take holidays
- Ten people who can absorb a sudden enormous deadline
- Every discipline in house. Paid advertising I bring a specialist in for, and heavy custom development I turn down
- Somebody else to blame when something is wrong
If a project genuinely needs more hands than I have, I will say so in the first conversation rather than three weeks in. That has happened, and it is a better outcome for both of us than finding out late. Where I do bring somebody in, like the specialist who runs paid campaigns, you are told up front and you still only ever deal with me.
How I work
Five rules, and they are the same for every client.
Plain language, always
Nobody should have to nod along to words they do not know in order to buy a website. If I use a term you have not met, that is my failure, not yours. Ask.
I will tell you what you do not need
Including when the honest answer is that you do not need me yet. It costs me a job occasionally. It has also brought people back a year later, ready.
Changes are part of it
You will not always know what you want until you see it. Feedback is expected and built into the work, not billed by the hour as a penalty for changing your mind.
Your work is yours
The domain is in your name, the site is on software nobody owns, and the logins are yours the day you ask. Nothing here is designed to make leaving difficult.
Within 24 hours
Every enquiry, every question, every "quick thing." Not always with the finished answer, but always with a real reply from a real person.
Small
business
is the
point.
Some of the work in my career has been for companies with marketing departments and national budgets. That work taught me a great deal, and almost none of it is why BlackCat exists.
The businesses I like working with are the ones where the owner answers the phone. Where the decision is theirs, the money is theirs, and getting it right actually changes something. That is a different job from making a large company look slightly better, and it is the one I would rather do.
The thinking is the same either way. That is the whole argument, and there is a case study that makes it.
Elsewhere
The rest of the thirty years lives somewhere else.
Personal portfolio
carlosvjones.com
Three decades of design work: art direction, campaigns, motion, and clients much larger than the ones on this site. It is a separate thing on purpose. BlackCat is about small businesses, and mixing the two would make this site about me instead of about you.
Visit carlosvjones.com →Start here
Tell me what
you're building.
You do not need to know which service you need, or have everything figured out. Describe the business, and I will tell you where I would start and what it would cost.