This is a creative diary of my website journey with astrologer, sound healer, writer and community guide, Kali Higgins of Cosmonia.

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The Back Story

I’ve followed Kali for years.

Like a lot of friendships these days, ours started on Instagram. I can’t even remember who followed whom first, but I do remember joining one of her New Moon Wish workshops back in 2022. Before the workshop began, she offered everyone a short astrology reading and I remember sitting there thinking, she really knows her stuff. It wasn’t that she was making grand predictions or saying anything dramatic. She simply came across as someone who had spent years immersed in something she genuinely loved.

Since then I’ve looked forward to her monthly astrology forecasts because of the way she approaches them. Her writing has always felt thoughtful rather than sensational. Even when she’s talking about the movements of the planets, it somehow becomes a conversation about paying closer attention to yourself and the season of life you’re in.

Over the years I found myself following her personal account as well, watching new ideas emerge, seeing community projects take shape and noticing how often our paths seemed to overlap. More recently she began studying Inner Child work with Robin Grille, someone I’d first discovered through my Aware Parenting mentor, Rebecca Sheikh, and it felt like another one of those funny moments where two completely different parts of my world unexpectedly met.

So when I reached out to ask whether she needed a website, I wasn’t surprised when she said yes. If anything, the timing felt remarkably good. Kali had reached a point where her work had grown well beyond astrology. Sound healing, flower essence therapy, tea ceremonies, workshops, collaborations and writing all sat alongside one another, and it felt as though she needed an online home that could hold everything without making it feel cluttered or disconnected.

The Name Came First

One of my favourite parts of this project happened before we’d designed a single page.

It was finding a name.

I’ve worked with clients who choose a domain in ten minutes and never think about it again. Kali was never going to be one of those people. Every possibility had to feel right, not only aesthetically but energetically too. She thought carefully about symbolism, numerology and the feeling each name carried, which meant weeks of messages backwards and forwards, checking domain availability, contacting brokers, investigating websites that looked abandoned and wondering whether certain names were worth pursuing or whether they had disappeared for good.

Some names looked perfect on paper but never quite settled once we’d lived with them for a few days. Others sounded lovely until we imagined them becoming a business that would hopefully still exist ten or twenty years from now. Looking back through our messages now, I realise we weren’t really discussing domains at all. We were trying to find a name spacious enough to grow with Kali rather than describing only who she happened to be today.

Eventually she landed on Cosmonia.

The more we used it, the more inevitable it felt. It didn’t box her into astrology or sound healing or any one offering. Instead, it created room for all of those things to exist together, and for whatever comes next as well. Those weeks spent searching probably taught me more about Kali than any design brief could have. She doesn’t rush important decisions. She gives them time, pays attention to how they feel, and waits until something genuinely fits.

Learning How Kali Sees the World

One of my favourite conversations had absolutely nothing to do with websites.

It was about the colour black.

Kali told me she rarely wears it because, in her understanding of astrology, black belongs to the Earth element while her primary element is Air. She joked that it might sound slightly maddening, but I loved hearing her explain it. I love how deeply she considers things and how naturally she looks for alignment between what she believes and how she lives. It’s something I value too.

Most people would probably dismiss that as overthinking a wardrobe.

I didn’t.

If anything, it reminded me that the things people brush off as insignificant are often the things that tell you the most about them. By the time someone reaches out to me for a website, they usually have a rough idea of the colours they like or the fonts they’ve pinned on Pinterest. What I’m much more interested in is everything underneath that. The things they almost apologise for mentioning because they seem too small to matter.

They usually matter.

Websites are built from hundreds of tiny decisions. Typography, spacing, colours, illustrations, photography, navigation, even the way headings are worded. None of those decisions change a website on their own, but together they create a feeling. A few messages after our conversation about colours, Kali thanked me for being open to working with those little details. I don’t think she realised it at the time, but she’d just described exactly why I love this work.

The Creative Process

This project also came with an interesting challenge because Kali’s friend, Jan, had already created a full HTML concept before I became involved.

I’ll admit that opening those files was a little intimidating.

Jan had produced something genuinely lovely. The typography was beautifully considered, the spacing felt editorial rather than corporate, and every page had a calm confidence that immediately drew me in. My job wasn’t to redesign it. It was to understand why it worked so well, then recreate it inside WordPress using Beaver Builder without losing the feeling of the original.

I spent far longer than I’d like to admit studying tiny details. The spacing between headings. The way the handwritten typography was used sparingly. Some people probably would’ve opened the mock-up and started rebuilding immediately. I found myself slowing down instead, trying to understand the thinking behind every decision before I recreated it.

The funny thing is that the finished website still looks remarkably like Jan’s original concept, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. She’d already captured the editorial style so well that there was never any reason to start again. The work became much more subtle than that.

As Kali and I refined the copy, expanded the site structure and talked more deeply about where her work was heading, dozens of tiny adjustments started to appear. A warmer tone of brown. A slightly different heading. Additional pages that hadn’t existed before. A hero image that immediately felt more personal. Most visitors would never notice those decisions individually, but together they shifted the personality of the website. By the time we finished, it still spoke Jan’s design language, but it unmistakably sounded like Kali.

The Moment Everything Clicked

There always seems to be a point during a project where everything suddenly comes together.

For this website, it was the hero image.

We’d already refined the typography, colours, navigation and page layouts, and although everything was working, there was still a tiny part of me that felt as though we hadn’t quite met Kali yet. Then she sent through the illustration that’s currently sitting on the homepage while her final branding is being developed.

I dropped it into the design, leaned back in my chair and smiled.

That was it.

Nothing else needed explaining.

The website had found its person.

More Than an Astrology Website

One of the things I enjoyed most about this project was watching the website grow alongside Kali’s own clarity about where her work was heading.

When we first started talking, we were building an astrology website.

By the time we finished, it had become somewhere people could discover astrology readings, flower essence therapy, sound healing, tea ceremonies, community gatherings and future collaborations without any of it feeling disconnected. The more we talked, the clearer it became that astrology wasn’t the centre of everything she did. It was one thread running through a much larger body of work centred on curiosity, community and helping people understand themselves.

Kali is also writing a book, continuing her studies and creating more opportunities for people to gather together, so it felt important to build a website with enough flexibility to grow alongside her. In many ways, this launch feels more like the beginning than the end. Over the coming months we’ll be adding a blog, an online shop and a learning portal for her courses, and I have no doubt there will be more ideas after that. Kali is one of those peop]ele who is constantly learning and creating, so it only made sense to build her a website that could keep up.

What This Project Gave Me

One of the unexpected gifts of this work is that I never finish a project unchanged.

Watching the way Kali approaches community made me think differently about my own mentoring work. She has so many different ideas unfolding at once, but none of them feel scattered because they all come from the same place. There’s a consistency in the way she shows up, whether she’s writing about astrology, hosting a tea ceremony or studying something completely new, and I found myself reflecting on that long after we’d finished the website.

It’s one of the reasons I still enjoy designing websites after all these years.

Yes, I’m building something practical.

But I’m also spending weeks paying close attention to another person’s work, values and way of seeing the world.

I always leave having learnt something.

Watching Someone Bloom

I’ve watched Kali’s work from a distance for several years now, and looking back it feels as though everything has been slowly leading towards this season.

She’s teaching, writing, studying, creating community and following her curiosity wherever it takes her. Creating Cosmonia has been a privilege because it feels less like building a finished website and more like creating the foundations for everything that’s still to come.

Thinking Beyond the Brief

The longer I do this work, the more I realise I’m not especially interested in making websites that simply look good.

I’m interested in creating online homes that feel like the people who live in them.

Sometimes that means rebuilding an HTML concept with as much care as the person who designed it originally. Sometimes it means paying attention to conversations about colours that other people might dismiss as irrelevant.

None of those things appear in a project proposal.

But they nearly always end up being the details that make the finished website feel unmistakably personal.

And if there’s one thing this project reminded me of, it’s that those little details are rarely little at all.

Connect With Kali

If you’re curious about astrology, sound healing, flower essence therapy or one of Kali’s community gatherings, I’d encourage you to spend some time exploring Cosmonia. I have a feeling it’s a website, and a body of work, that will continue to grow for many years to come.

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And if you’re looking for someone to create a website that feels considered, personal and unmistakably yours, I’d love to help.

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