Case Study
110 podcast episodes, 30+ published essays, a custom AI tool, an e-book, speaking slots across Europe. How do you build a website that speaks to a body of work like this?
The Challenge
Veslemøy Klavenes-Berge is a former petroleum geophysicist who left the industry after the 2015 oil crash and spent the years since building a career-transition practice in Norway. 110 episodes of the Stories for the Future podcast, with guests from cabinet ministers to energy-transition engineers to writers on the future of work. 30+ published essays on Substack. A custom AI tool for people navigating their own in-between. An e-book. Speaking slots at Tekna, B Leader, and Electronic Coast. One of the most considered bodies of writing on career reinvention in Europe — built quietly, over the years.
The question wasn't what to make. The material was already there. It was how to build a website that speaks to it.
Two design problems followed. The first was attention. Any website for a podcast-and-essay practice faces the same cliff — a visitor lands, and is immediately invited to commit to a thirty-minute listen or a fifteen-minute read. Most aren't ready to make that leap cold. The front door needed a staircase: a one-minute moment, a three-minute piece, a fifteen-minute read, a thirty-minute episode — an ascending sequence a reader could pace themselves through.
The second was frame. A coach's website wants to look authoritative, capable, structured. But Veslemøy's writing isn't any of those things — it's quiet, reflective, generous, slow. The site needed to feel like a magazine you'd read over coffee, not a coaching page you'd scan.
The Approach
Audience
The build was framed around a mid-career professional — a programme manager, an engineer, a policy lead — realising that AI and industry shift are quietly compressing her role. She's been processing it for months. She opens the site at 10pm, with three other tabs already loading, and she needs to feel in five seconds that this is a place where someone who has been through it herself will take her seriously. Everything downstream serves her reading pace.
Structure
The homepage had to earn its reader's next minute, then the next. A one-minute opening scene. A three-minute section on The Quiet Pivot. A fifteen-minute essay. A thirty-minute episode. Behind all of it, a curation — Veslemøy's full body of work read cold and sorted into the themes she returns to, offered as thematic routes through the archive rather than a chronological feed. A reader climbs through her worldview at their own pace.
Creative
Veslemøy's writing has a specific register — quiet, reflective, generous, slow. The site had to carry the same feel. Paper-white ground with a noise-grain texture. Fraunces italic for section headings, set as her own recurring questions. Full-bleed photography. Gentle CTAs. A voice throughout that's lifted from her essays, not dressed up for the web.
The body of work was already there. The job was to design a way through it.
The Build