What are you buying with a designer?
Every designer has a special superpower: a feeling. Our feeling about branding and visual direction and the only way to get it is through experience.
Every designer possesses a unique superpower—an intuitive sense of visual direction. This isn’t something that can be taught; it’s cultivated through years of hands-on experience, crafting designs, making mistakes, and learning from them. It’s a blend of intuition and ethical standards that enables a designer to see what a brand is and feel what it can become.
Personal values and moral principles guide us to judge what is right and what should not be done. In the process, we craft products and services guided by our moral compass, and it usually gets really personal. When all are aligned correctly, we know the final creation reflects our values.
My instinct is one of the most powerful abilities that I have developed as a designer. I can perceive it clearly, but ultimately, the choice comes down to my feelings—nothing more and nothing less.
Don’t miss the next essay. Signup for our newsletter
⸻ Newsletter signup
Both love and design require deep engagement
Both love and design require deep engagement, intuition, and personal experience to be fully understood.In other words you need to experience it in order to understand it
Everything beautiful is analog
We can't avoid digital; it is everywhere, and not all is bad, of course, but we are focused on it way too much, staring at our phones, for instance. Just think that everything beautiful that has ever happened to you was analog.
Art is Provocation: Raising Questions, without Giving Answers
Good art thrives on provocation, challenging societal norms, questioning authority, and sparking conversation. It pushes boundaries, inviting viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and rethink their perspectives.
Is it sexy?
The design is more than beauty; this is what I use when I describe good branding that is easier to understand and has everything I want to say in it.
Team 2 team
Business design is shifting from human 2 human to team 2 team; this is becoming more and more important; team spirit produces more results than any individual effort. B2B
Do What You Don’t Know
If you know exactly what you’re doing, you’re not creating — you’re repeating. Experience can be a beautiful curse. After 25 years in this field, I’ve learned how easy it is to hide behind what you already know. You get faster, smoother, safer — and slowly, you stop being dangerous.
The Importance of Emotional Intelligence
All too soon, most technical skills will be automated or heavily replaced by AI. We already use it daily, and it is rapidly integrating into nearly every aspect of our lives.