We were lucky to catch up with Scott Werley recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Scott thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

The inevitability of landing upon my business’ fungi-friendly name Sporulate Design goes back to over a decade ago when my wife and I were living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

My interest in fungi began in the spring of 2014, when a friend randomly introduced me to the culinary world of morels. After relocating from the San Francisco Bay Area to Portland, Oregon two years later, I spent much of my free time foraging for choice edible mushrooms throughout the Cascade and Coast Ranges.

Every fall, my family camps along the northern Oregon coast to forage porcini. During last year’s outing, I noticed our dog Mabel was fixated on the sword ferns bordering the trails. On closer inspection, I discovered hundreds of fuzzy orange-brown clusters beneath the fronds—structures known as sori, which house spore-producing sporangia.

Until then, I had assumed spores were exclusive to fungi. This discovery revealed a much broader biological truth: sporulation is a widespread evolutionary strategy used by a variety of organisms across the tree of life, including plants, bacteria, protozoa and algae. I was struck by the scale and significance of the role of spores in sustaining life on Earth for over 2.5 billion years.

This realization arrived at a pivotal moment, as I was grappling with chronic burnout in my career. I found a powerful metaphor in the resilience of spores—their ability to survive harsh conditions, adapt to their environments, and spread to new, more hospitable ground.

I chose the name Sporulate Design as a reflection of that insight. It symbolizes adaptability, regeneration, and forward momentum—values that now guide both my personal journey and professional work. Sporulate’s tagline “Disperse your brilliance” speaks to my mission of helping clients share their ideas, identity, and impact widely and effectively through thoughtful, strategic design.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a multidisciplinary designer residing in Portland, Oregon with over 15 years of experience in branding and WordPress web design and development. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I have lived in many geographically and culturally diverse metropolitan areas throughout my life including Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Simple beginnings

My fascination with the web goes way back to the mid 90’s when I was a young kid learning the basics of HTML and publishing websites on Homestead. The web was a blank canvas for freely expressing myself and developing my own unique identity. I grew up within a traditional middle class household in Midwest suburbia and experimented with web projects on my family’s Dell desktop computer.

My family moved three times before I turned 16 due to my father’s work in the insurance industry. My mother, a homemaker, has profusely apologized to my older brother (a scholar/musician) and me for subjecting us to so much change during our youth. Looking back, I don’t recall holding a grudge for the choices they made. These relocations were opportunities to build confidence and character, refine my identity, and expand upon my social networks. Adaptability as a core value was imprinted onto me at an early age.

Around 2004 when I was a junior in high school, a close friend introduced me to WordPress. It had just been released the year prior. With my friend’s help, I built personal websites showcasing my DSLR photography, graphic design and electronic dance music mixes. I had my hands in a lot of different interests and WordPress allowed me to share those experiences online. Being able to create and upload novel content to the web felt like a superpower during those early years.

After graduating from St. Norbert College in 2009 with a BA in graphic design and photography, I began working independently with WordPress. My first web design client was a roommate in his late 20’s who was a skilled glassblower and potter. He had a kiln and a potting wheel in the basement of our shared house. I offered to create his WordPress-powered gallery website for $200. This was my first paid project that positioned me on the path of entrepreneurship.

Risks and rewards

I took my first leap of faith when I was 23 and drove south to North Texas to be with my long-distance girlfriend Lindsey while she finished her masters in vocal performance at UNT. I opened my design studio Scott Werley Creative and worked as a solopreneur, developing brands and WordPress websites for other small business owners and entrepreneurs from all walks of life. I embodied my craft and established the foundation of my career as a creative professional.

In the summer of 2012, Lindsey and I took our next leap of faith together and moved west to the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked as a contractor with Razorfrog Web Design for a year and was hired as the firm’s first full-time employee in 2013, just a month after getting married. This was an era of explosive growth as WordPress reached a 58.8% CMS market share. I honed my technical skills while working out of a bustling coworking space in downtown San Francisco’s financial district.

The Bay Area’s crowded BART commutes and exhausting, fast-paced lifestyle quickly wore on me. In early 2016, Lindsey consented to my casual proposal to relocate north to Portland, Oregon. She received a full-time job offer just a day before we moved in late June. I continued to work remotely for Razorfrog out of coworking spaces in Portland until the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the doors in 2020. Working from home was a shift that yielded deep focus for reevaluating my creative priorities and career goals.

During this unprecedented time, new challenges began to surface within the web industry. Digital accessibility became a legal liability, especially for business owners in California where ADA lawsuits were ramping up. I began “shifting left” with WCAG – the most prominent technical standard for accessibility on the web – to proactively incorporate accessibility into the early stages of our firm’s design and development workflows. This completely changed my perspective on what defines quality design on the web. As a passionate advocate for accessibility, I spearheaded Razorfrog’s brand refresh and website redesign, helped our clients meet their accessibility conformance goals, attended a11y conferences, and blogged to summarize key takeaways.

Like nearly every other company in the field of tech, burnout became a prominent issue that significantly impacted Razorfrog’s work culture. I chose the path of self-kindness to prioritize my health and protect my peace. Near the end of 2024, I decided it was time to create my own design company grounded within the magnificent world of fungi.

The Rise of Sporulate

At the start of 2025, I decided to return to my solopreneur life and launched Sporulate Design, a fungi-inspired design studio in Portland. As the owner and creative director, I work with small and medium-sized businesses, startups, nonprofits and entrepreneurs to build strong, high-performing brands and accessible online presences rooted in privacy by design. Sporulate is my calling to authentically serve businesses that dare to be themselves. My focus is on creating design solutions that capture the diverse and extraordinary qualities of my clients.

My services include brand development, WCAG-conformant WordPress web design and development, accessibility audits and remediation, and optimizing performance for search engines. I also provide website management for the WordPress sites I create, as well as for those built by other agencies looking for a new home. Running Sporulate as a one-man studio allows me to keep overhead minimal and ensure exceptional value to those whom I serve.

I’m deeply proud of my new brand—both as an opportunity for professional growth and as a metaphor for the resilience of life. Fungi are the definitive symbol of adaptation, with spores serving as a remarkably effective survival mechanism. Life as we know it is indebted to their incessant dispersal.

There’s substantial wisdom to be gleaned from fungi in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Their evolutionary success is an unwavering reminder that we should never stop adapting to our constantly changing environment. In order to retain our meaning, it’s imperative that we master the artistries that machines will never possess: creative direction, strategic thinking and human storytelling. Sporulate embodies this ethos to its core.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Consistency and intuition, for sure.

Consistency is the invisible thread that has allowed me to perform at a high level over the past two decades. It has helped me to build powerful habits, achieve deep focus, develop new skills, maintain lifelong relationships, strengthen bonds of trust, and overcome countless challenges.

Even in small increments, consistent effort leads to meaningful achievements and lasting results. The value of steady forward momentum—applied over weeks, months, and years—should never be underestimated. It’s a powerful force that can transform your business and supercharge your success.

Intuition offers valuable insights and helps me to quickly generate new ideas based on previous experiences. It is an indispensable tool for making critical decisions and solving problems. Much like a muscle, intuition can be improved upon and benefits from routine self-reflection.

To strengthen my intuition, I spend ample time in nature—identifying life, observing patterns, and nurturing my curiosity. I also regularly float in sensory deprivation tanks to still the movement within my mind. This allows new solutions to effortlessly coalesce. Additionally, tabletop board games have been exceptional tools for visualizing my thoughts, identifying possibilities, and strategizing more efficiently.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Maintaining the confidence to approach a blank canvas as an open invitation to freely explore ideas, in order to produce something completely unique, meaningful and lasting.

As children we’re innately creative—building vibrant worlds, creating memorable characters, and establishing intricate plots. While we age, society does everything it can to squeeze this lustrous quality out of us. It’s incredibly beneficial to maintain this wonder as it allows us to continually see the world with entirely original and fresh perspectives. Ideas remain our primary currency.

Thankfully, being an artist or a creative doesn’t require asking for permission. It just requires movement. And if you allow yourself enough movement, you can accomplish anything you set out to do. Living in a place of imagination, inspiration and inventiveness is very rewarding. There’s never a dull moment to be had!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sporulate.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sporulatedesign/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sporulatedesign/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sporulate-design
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/sporulate-design-portland
• Other: https://bsky.app/profile/sporulate.com

  https://profiles.wordpress.org/swerley/

Image Credits

Studio portraits – Rachel Hadiashar

All other photos and images – Scott Werley