Who I am
I make things. October 2024, the job ended. I went home and opened my laptop.
Thirty years in newsrooms — AP, Los Angeles Times, Star Tribune, where I became the first Chief Creative Officer in the paper's 150-year history. We grew that newsroom from 200 to 250 journalists in the years everyone else was cutting. October 30, 2024, they eliminated the position.
The résumé — thirty years, with the dates →
Since then: a film shot from a terminal. A book. A basketball coaching platform. This site. The machine drafts, renders, searches. I decide what's true. That's always been the job — it just runs faster now.
The work
A film made entirely from a terminal.
LIGHTNING/bug — a 5:47 film about two kinds of light, the lightning and the firefly. Generated frames, API calls, ffmpeg. No camera, no crew, no set. The first film from sssstudios, finished as a Mother's Day release in 2026.
Film: vimeo.com/sssstudios/lightning-bug
Before any of that, there was print: I art directed the Star Tribune's Prince commemorative — "Purple Majesty," sixteen pages, four zoned covers, two original paintings commissioned in a week. Reprints still sell a decade later. Same instincts, different terminal.
The name
Claude William Simmons, 1903–1967.
Oklahoma farmer. Builder. Patriarch. Born in Oklahoma Territory before it was a state. Raised his family through the Depression. Fixed what was broken, built what was needed, helped whoever showed up. Never wrote any of it down.
The practice carries his name because it carries his instinct: show up, do the work, tell the truth, help the person in front of you. Claude is also my middle name. The asterisk in derek*claude is where the two meet.
The method travels
It isn't bound to this one site.
The practice runs in more than one place. An institution applied the method and built a working site for the Public Alliance of Professional Journalists. A regional newsroom put it into a print magazine. It points at the public record too — Talking Receipts is a watchdog for the political-advocacy charade, pairing a deceptive ad with the primary documents behind it and rendering no verdict (the story). The writing carries too — Being Claude and the book.
It travels across machines, not just sites. The coaching engine behind Option D is model-agnostic — one prompt, nine different AI models, the same result. That's the whole point — the practice isn't a product, and it doesn't belong to one tool.
Working together
A few engagements a year.
The shape doesn’t change: find what’s actually going on, build the thing that moves it, leave it running without me.
One rule sets the price — you pay by what you can carry. The work is the same for everyone. Pay full if it’s hard but not harmful. If paying would cost you the basics, say so. The ones who can pay keep it free for the ones who can’t.
One question decides it: are you managing growth, or managing decline? You can’t pay for both. If it’s growth — derek@claudewill.io.
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