Indianapolis · Creative Work & Projects
Design.
Plants.
History.
Creative work, digital products, and ongoing projects — spanning botanical arts, family history, document design, workplace dynamics, and Victorian book digitization.
Where to shop
Services · Available Now
Creative Services
Document design, photo editing and restoration, custom forms and digital templates — fixed-price tiers for fast turnaround. I know the difference between a file that looks finished and one that actually is. Most clients need something cleaned up, formatted properly, or rebuilt from scratch. I can do all three.
See what I offer
Photography · Design
Kathryn Ellis Photography
Photo restoration, editing, and original work. Operating since 2007.
Visit the site
eCommerce · WordPress · eBay
Kate's Plant Shop
Operating since 2022. Custom WordPress site, researched care guides, eBay reviews integrated directly. Specializing in coleus.
Visit the shop
eBay · Coleus · POD · Vintage · Etsy soon
eBay & Etsy Store
Coleus cuttings and rooted plants, print-on-demand products, and vintage clothing. Three distinct inventory streams, one storefront. Etsy store coming soon.
Shop on eBay
Documents · Templates · Forms
Custom Document Work
Forms, templates, reports, proposals, presentations — designed from scratch or rebuilt from something that wasn't working. Fixed-price tiers, fast turnaround. Twenty years of making files that are actually ready: ready to print, ready to send, ready to hand off. If it needs to look professional and function as a real document, this is the work.
See document services
Digital Product · Live Demo
Website in a Weekend — Nail Tech Edition
A complete done-for-you website guide for independent nail technicians — content, structure, and copy all included. Six switchable color themes. First in a planned suite for creative small business owners.
Preview & purchase
Personal Site · Nine Rooms
Cabinet of Curiosities
Historically, a cabinet of curiosities was a room where someone kept the things that refused to fit anywhere else. Plants and color theory. Family history. Music and instruments. Victorian books. Civil rights history. Vintage objects and the stories embedded in both.
01
Botanical ConservatoryThe living collection — plants, colour, botanical history
02
Colour LuminariumWerner's nomenclature, pigment, the Color Codex project
03
Craft AtelierPhotography, design, making things with hands and tools
04
Field ObservatoryEssays and microsites — The Canary, Read the Room, Signal & Noise
05
Working LaboratoryProjects in progress — digitization, print on demand, tools
06
Ancestral HallThree family lines, two centuries, Highland County Ohio
07
BibliothecaDigitized books, reading shelf, public domain archive
08
The CommonsFree tools, public domain resources, and copyright guidance
09
MiscellanyEverything else that refused to be categorized
Colour · History · Microsite
The Color Codex
A color classification and naming system built on Werner's 1814 Nomenclature of Colours — the same system Darwin carried on the Beagle. Pigment families, historical names, real color values. An ongoing study of how color gets named and what those names carry.
Open the codex
Family History · Ongoing
The Ellis Herbarium
A naturalist's approach to family history — three converging lines, two centuries of name changes, a convergence point in Highland County Ohio around 1883. Organized as a botanical specimen collection with open research map.
Explore the archive
Identity · INFJ · Essay
The Canary
On being the one who knows first — and what that costs. A visual essay on sensing what isn't yet nameable, absorbing what others miss.
Read the essay
Workplace · Visualization
Signal & Noise
A visual map of how information actually moves — and gets lost — in a complex multi-system work environment. Dark canvas animation.
View the map
Field Guide · Workplace
Read the Room
A field guide to workplace dynamics for people who notice too much and feel it too hard. Terrain, biases, self-advocacy, building reputation.
Open the guide
Essay · Framework
Peripheral Optimism
The universe tends to unfold as it should.
Read more
Media · Journalism · Essay
Stop the Press
On how news gets made, filtered, and lost — and what that costs. A visual essay about information, framing, and the gap between event and story.
Read the essay
Psychology · Biases · Star Atlas
Cognitive Atlas
A star atlas of cognitive biases — each one mapped as a constellation, named and charted. Navigation for a mind that knows it can be wrong.
Open the atlas
Public Domain · Digitized · Annotated
Digitized Archive
Public domain texts taken from scan to fully annotated interactive microsites — organized, navigable, with restored illustrations and contextual notes. Each book gets more than a scan: it gets a reason to be read. Also a potential service for institutions and independent researchers.
Talks About Flowers
Mrs. M. D. Wellcome · 1881
A Victorian flower garden guide serialized in the Boston Journal. Includes a remarkable Coleus essay written in the voice of the plant itself.
Open the book →
Hotten's Slang Dictionary
John Camden Hotten · 1869
The first serious scholarly dictionary of Victorian street language — criminal cant, rhyming slang, trade jargon, class markers. Annotated for the modern reader.
Browse the dictionary →
Dictionary of Quotations
Rev. James Wood · 1893
28,000+ aphorisms, proverbs, and maxims. Every entry unlocks a layered annotation — a cryptic clue, historical context, and a precise modern echo.
Open the dictionary →
Pennsylvania Heroines
Henry W. Shoemaker · 1922
Recovering Mary Jemison, Regina Hartman, Molly Pitcher, and others lost to the historical record. An address to the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Read the address →
Coming soon
Flora's Feast
Walter Crane · 1892
A masque in which every flower becomes a theatrical character. Illustrations being restored. Also developing as archival art prints.
Coming soon
The Fairy Room
Victorian fairy art
Victorian fairy art and the inhabited natural world — from folklore roots through Richard Dadd to the Cottingley hoax.
Microsite
Shakespeare's Flowers
Elizabethan & Jacobean
Every flower and herb across the Shakespeare canon. Forty plates by Walter Crane, 1909. Annotated edition with archival poster prints.
Full reading room →
Curated · Reading Shelf
The Reading Room
A curated shelf of books worth knowing about — not a complete inventory, just the ones that have done something. These are modern copyrighted works — links go to catalog pages where you can find them, not read them for free.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari · 2011
A brief history of humankind. Every summarized version changes how you think about something.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
The book behind half the vocabulary people use to talk about how decisions actually get made.
Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Bringhurst · 1992
The reason some things look right and others don't has a name, a history, and rules. This is where they live.
The Botany of Desire
Michael Pollan · 2001
Plants as agents with their own agenda. The tulip chapter has been described to me by at least three different people.
Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes · 1980
A short book about what photographs actually do to the people looking at them. Written by someone grieving. Essential.
Art of Looking Sideways
Alan Fletcher · 2001
A designer's lifetime of collected thinking in 1,068 pages. The kind of book you fall into rather than read.
Online since
before it was easy.
My journey started with learning the internet itself — long before modular CMS platforms existed and everything had to be hand-coded.
There are always projects in motion. The depth and breadth of what I build has accelerated sharply since adding AI to the workflow — more output, tighter execution, faster iteration. I'm building an empire one system at a time, and I'm just getting started.
The kind of person who gets underestimated — right up until the work lands.
Work with me