Design Philosophy
Five things I believe to be true about making things.
Design is a verb.
The noun-ification of our craft — ‘a design’, ‘the design’ — has done tremendous damage to how we think about our work. Design is not a thing you make. It is something you do: a relentless act of shaping the relationship between people and the world they inhabit. Every decision is an argument. Every pixel is a position.
Motion is meaning.
How something moves is inseparable from what it says. Speed implies urgency or ease. Direction implies hierarchy or flow. A logo that snaps into frame communicates something different from one that breathes into view. The kinetic vocabulary of a brand is as important as its color system — and far more neglected.
3D is a way of thinking.
Working in three dimensions changes how you reason about space, material, and light. You’re no longer composing — you’re building. This shift in process produces ideas that would never emerge in 2D. Even for flat work, I return to 3D thinking: Where is the light source? What is the material? How does this object exist in the world?
Constraint is generosity.
The most creative constraint is often a tight brief. Limitations force specificity. When you cannot rely on visual complexity, you must rely on conceptual clarity — and that clarity is precisely what makes work memorable. I have never done my best work when given unlimited freedom. I have done my best work when given an impossible problem.
The invisible is the work.
The user never reads the design. They feel it. The best design decisions are the ones that go unnoticed — the rhythm that makes a page comfortable to scan, the transition that makes navigation feel inevitable, the color temperature that creates trust without anyone knowing why. Success in design often looks like its own absence.