I’m a ragpicker. I pick things up as I go. I learn what I need and put down what I don't. I am a trained artist but I am a designer by choice — and probably necessity.
I took a circuitous path here. I didn’t go to design school. I never learned Adobe’s tools inside and out. I made my first website in 1995 after making zines and artists books. I started a newspaper in high school. I have always loved printed matter (and the store Printed Matter).
I also have a romantically realistic view of technology. We need tech — websites, AI and social media — but we also need it to be doing much better by us.
Design is an artistic practice
Even though I ran my own design studio for 20 years, I don’t believe in the church of “user experience”. I also don’t believe in the received definitions of “branding” or, worse, “brand engagement”. Much of this discourse borders on nonsense or, worse, malfeasance: terms that others have foisted on designers to help them extract more money, ideas and resources from "users".
I see graphic design as an artistic practice, based on values, standards, and guidelines, and fuelled by the desperately human urge to connect and coordinate. Design is also a spiritual act. Its scientific impulse is better understood than its aesthetic one.
We don't know how design actually works.
Dear Designer is a love letter about design and its storied impulse to change the way that we interpret the world for ourselves and the way we change the world for others. The newsletter is an urgent ask for us designers to go back to basics — things like typography, open discourse, social change, printed matter, and community — and to embrace our own possibility as practitioners.
Th newsletter is also a call to withstand the economic forces meant to demoralize designers, to use the tools at our disposal to create art and dialogue, and to resist succumbing to sheer automation.
We badly need designers that can help shepherd us through the next few difficult decades.
Designers need to be better prepared and more fearless if we are to address massive challenges like climate change and social and economic inequity. We need to advance a shared practical and ethical foundation for navigating the hellfires (and heavenly winds) of client work, dealing with the rapid advancements of automation, and supporting one another in our creative work.
What else?
Dear Designer is personal. It speaks to the shit I’ve gone through, the things I’m seeing now, and the worries I have for myself and others in the field of design.
Designers are excellent at adopting and adapting. Dear Designer is my letter of love and encouragement, and a spirited cry of hope, in the face of political and economic adversity and deep social and technological transformation.
I hope you'll consider signing up. If you do, thank you for taking a sidewise journey with me.
A note about writing
I do not use AI to write Dear Designer. Also, all opinions herein are my own.