Designer Things

Light academia isn’t just about wearing beige cardigans and pretending you’ve read Plato. I used to think the whole aesthetic was performative

I used to think angelcore was just another internet aesthetic—another pastel filter slapped onto clouds and Renaissance paintings. Turns out, it’

I used to think warning labels were just there to check a regulatory box. Then I started looking into the actual design requirements behind tobacco packaging

I used to think design systems were just fancy style guides—collections of buttons and color palettes that designers obsessed over while the rest of us

I used to think pottery was just, you know, bowls. Then I spent three days in a cramped storage room at the Maxwell Museum in Albuquerque, surrounded by

I used to think package design was just about making things look pretty on a shelf. Turns out, every box, bottle, and wrapper tells you exactly what people

I used to think grunge was just about flannel shirts and Nirvana. Turns out, the aesthetic that crawled out of Seattle’s music scene in the early

I used to think adaptive clothing design was just about bigger buttons and elastic waistbands. Turns out, the visual systems behind these brands are doing

The Universal Grammar of Getting Lost in Terminals I’ve spent maybe forty hours of my life wandering through airport terminals, following arrows

I used to think functional design was just another tech buzzword—one of those things developers threw around at conferences to sound smart. Turns out, there’