Building Tilleywood

The Challenge

Jackson Tilley is a Los Angeles-based author and marketing consultant whose brand strategy and creative development work spans campaigns for industry leaders like Netflix and Roblox. In a saturated market, a conventional portfolio would have made him look like everyone else. He needed a site as varied and unique as he is, one that showed the authenticity of his personal brand instead of just describing it. With a network of friends in high places, Jackson calls himself “Mr. LA”, so we made that sense of place the foundation of the site’s identity.

The Approach

We started with a deep dive into the architecture and landscape of Los Angeles, collecting key locations and studying existing 3D isometric cities, then used MidJourney to fuse Vaporwave and Art Deco references into a single visual direction. An early “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” concept evolved into a “Sim City” approach that better suited the content. To make the site feel like a 90s computer game, we wireframed and prototyped a heads-up display, information pop-ups that work on desktop and mobile, and an unobtrusive header for navigating the map. The design system blends Vaporwave colour with Art Deco typography. Then we designed and illustrated every detail of the interactive map ourselves, one by one and with great care: the base map, the roads, terrain and mountains, each landmark Jackson chose, and the palm trees, cars and crowds that bring the city to life, with hidden Easter eggs nodding to his personal life. Every landmark houses a different area of his work. Finally, we built the whole experience in custom code.

The Results

Tilleywood is a fully explorable LA where visitors click and drag around the map and step into his favourite haunts, from Musso & Frank to the Griffith Observatory, to discover his partnerships, branded entertainment, strategic communications and talent advisory work. It turned a portfolio into an experience that is unmistakably his. In Jackson’s words: “They took a really vague and complex idea, and then managed to execute against it brilliantly. I’ve managed dozens of multi-million dollar agreements with blue chip creative agencies and I can say easily that the team beats them every time.”