Open ten landscape architecture about pages in a row. Nine of them start with the word “we”, followed by some form of passionate, committed, or inspired. “We are passionate about creating inspiring outdoor spaces that enrich communities.” “We are a multidisciplinary practice creating meaningful places.” “We are committed to designing landscapes that connect people with nature.” The exact phrasing moves around. The shape is identical.
Trade those three sentences between three different firms and nobody would notice. That is the problem. An about page that doesn’t take a position positions the firm against nothing. A firm that won’t say what it does, who it does it for, and what it would rather not do hands the comparison work to the reader. Most readers will not do it.
What the about page is doing for the reader who matters
The visiting reader is almost never a stranger. They are a referred prospect. Someone they trust mentioned the firm by name, and they opened the site to check. They want to know whether the firm has done work like theirs. They are also, almost always, comparing the firm against one other studio someone mentioned in the same conversation.
A generic about page makes that reader do all of the comparison work themselves. They have to infer the project types from the portfolio, guess the client mix from the team photos, and decide whether the firm sounds like the kind of place their architect would have meant. Some readers will do that work. Most will not. They will glance, fail to place the firm, close the tab, and let the referral cool. A specific about page does some of that work for them. It says, in plain words, what the firm does and who hires it. The page that refuses to say either one is the page that loses the referral before the phone call ever happens.
The question that fixes most about pages
What would the firm’s best client use if the firm didn’t exist? The answer reveals what the firm actually competes on. A firm whose best clients would otherwise hire a multi-disciplinary architect-led practice is in a different competition from one whose best clients would otherwise hire a sole-practitioner heritage specialist. Those are different competitions. The about pages should look different. Almost none of them do.
That question also sorts out the language. Vision statements about shaping the future of public space belong in award submissions and conference talks. They are the investor frame. The visiting client is in the customer frame, and the customer frame is present tense and specific. Have you done a project like mine. Who in this office would actually run it. What happens once I email. None of that gets answered by a paragraph about a commitment to community.
Specific over abstract, named over implied
The about page is where a firm names its work. Project types. Streetscape upgrades, school estate masterplans, mixed-use ground planes, regional park renewals. Regions. Auckland, the Waikato, Brisbane, regional Victoria. Client types. Council asset managers, mixed-use developers, school estate planners, infrastructure leads inside large architecture practices. Generic language reads as evasion, not modesty. The firms that name their work look more confident on the page because they are more confident off it.
The harder half of the same exercise is naming what the firm does not want. A firm that has decided it is finished with one-off private gardens should say so on the about page. A firm whose senior staff no longer take small residential subdivisions should say so. Refusing to name what the firm has stopped doing is the refusal that costs the most. It is also the one the reader can feel in the writing even when nothing is said directly.
An about page that doesn’t take a position positions the firm against nothing.
Most about page rewrites get framed as a copy problem. A new writer, a sharper draft, a fresh headline. The real fix is upstream. The firm has to decide what it wants more of and what it wants less of. Once that decision exists, the page writes itself in an afternoon. Until it exists, no copywriter can save it, and the page keeps doing what it has been doing for years, which is nothing.