Write Your About Page Like You're Still Breathing

Go read your About page right now. I'll wait.

I'd bet good money it's written like a eulogy. "Jane is an award-winning designer with over 12 years of experience..." "Prior to founding her studio, she led teams at..." "Her work has been featured in..."

Past. Tense. Achievements. A resume wearing a party hat. It's the kind of copy you'd read at a retirement dinner — or worse, a funeral — someone summarizing a life already lived, for an audience that's just there to pay respects.

Here's the problem: you're not done. So why does your About page sound like you are?

The Eulogy Formula (And Why We All Copy It)

The standard About page follows a template so universal it's practically folk wisdom:

1. Credential stack
2. Name-drop of impressive clients or employers
3. A tasteful quote about passion
4. Photo where you're either arms-crossed or laughing at a joke nobody told

We copy it because it feels safe. It signals legitimacy. Nobody ever got fired for writing a boring About page.

But safety has a cost. Eulogy-style pages do three quiet kinds of damage:

They make you sound finished. If everything on the page is behind you, readers subconsciously file you under "has-been" rather than "up-and-coming."

They erase your personality. Achievement lists are interchangeable. Ten thousand designers have "worked with brands like Nike." Almost none of them have your actual point of view — which is the only reason anyone should hire you.

They give the reader nothing to join. A eulogy is a closed story. Nobody reads a eulogy and thinks, "I want in on that."

The Alternative: Write Like You're Mid-Sentence

The fix is simpler than most people expect, though it requires a small act of courage. Write your About page in the present tense, oriented toward what you're doing and building now — and where you're headed.

Let me show you what I mean.

Before (eulogy mode):

"Marcus is an award-winning photographer based in Chicago. His work has appeared in national publications, and he has over a decade of experience shooting editorial and commercial campaigns. He is passionate about storytelling."

Fine. Forgettable. Reads like a plaque.

After (alive mode):

"Right now I'm obsessed with a question: what happens to portraiture when nobody's posing? I spend most of my weeks in Chicago neighborhoods photographing people who forgot I had a camera. I just wrapped a series on third-shift workers that I can't stop thinking about, and I'm looking for one more editorial client who wants images that feel caught, not staged. If that's you, keep reading."

Same person. Same credentials, honestly. But the second version has a pulse. It has a present, a project, and an invitation. You know what Marcus cares about this year, not just what he accomplished in 2016.

Three Questions to Resurrect Your Page

Rewrite your About page around these:

What are you actively working on right now? Not your greatest hit — your current obsession. Specificity is magnetic. "I'm rebuilding my studio practice around small-batch client work" beats "passionate about quality" every single time.

What are you figuring out? Admitting you're mid-investigation doesn't undermine your authority — it humanizes it. People trust people who are visibly learning. The eulogy version pretends to have arrived; the alive version lets people watch you move.

What do you want next? This is the one almost nobody includes, and it's the most powerful. Tell the reader what kind of projects, clients, or collaborators you're hoping to find. You're not bragging — you're giving them a way to help. Every About page should end with a door, not a period.

The Deeper Payoff

Something shifts psychologically when you write this way. The eulogy page forces you to look backward and measure yourself against your own history — which is a slow recipe for creative stagnation. The alive page forces you to articulate your trajectory, which is a surprisingly clarifying exercise. You can't write "here's what I'm building next" without actually deciding what you're building next.

I've rewritten my own About page three times now, and each rewrite has doubled as a career course-correction. The page is a mirror.

So here's my challenge: this week, rewrite your About page like you're still breathing. Present tense. Current work. An open question you're chasing. A door at the end.

Save the eulogy for much, much later. Ideally, decades.