Dylan Wahbe

251 Visions

Founder, freelance web design & development
2020-2023


Portfolio

NYU CLAWS, progressive labor coalition
Campus Climate Network, climate justice nonprofit
Katie Simmons, photographer
CRACS, research lab at NYU
Kendall Maddox, actress

Background

In 2020 a family friend needed help with her website. I didn't know anything about web deisgn and development, but it was the start of lockdown and I was trying to find new things to do. She is an amazing photographer, so luckily, the photos spoke for themselves.

Shortly after publishing her site, I realized lots of small businesses struggled with building their websites. Professional agencies were often too expensive for them so they typically resorted to mocking something up themselves. This almost always resorted in inaccessible, hard to read, and seldom responsive sites.

When deciding on a name I needed something that was memorable, unique, and to be honest, had great SEO results. I decided on 251 Visions. 251 (ii-V-i) is one of the foundational chord progressions in jazz. The 2 chord is minor, the 5 dominant or suspenseful, and 1 is the resolution. Essentially, a player goes from melancholy to suspense to resolution. The idea was I could take your exsisitng website, from something hard to read and inaccessible, to a nice resolution, ultimately bringing your vision to life.

While fun, the name didn't have quite the memorablity I thought it would, and as a universal rule of life, most people don't like jazz. C'est la vie.

Nevertheless, I continued 251 Visions throughout my time at NYU. Between 2020 and 2023, I had over 20 clients, including therapists, a music school, a salon, a few professors, labor unions, and multiple nonprofits. I also began to help my clients with email campaigns, social media, and other marketing. By 2022, I was being hired by larger companies as a contractor. I would work with their in-house marketing team to design and build their site. This was the first time I was designing websites in a team, which taught me a lot about collaboration.


When I started at Hack Club in 2023, I began to wind down 251 Visions. I am very grateful to all my clients who trusted me to build their sites, esspcially the one's at the beginning when I had no portfolio. And to this day, I still help friends and family build their sites, most recently, a simple site for my brother's wedding.