Musings, photos, and things seen on the way.
Not a portfolio or a feed. Writing, inspiration, and half‑finished ideas picked up on the way to somewhere.
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Gift guide
The 2026 gift guide
Things worth giving this year: how they’re made, why they’re wonderful, and what they’re like on the 400th use.
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Essay
The handoff tax
Everything a design loses between approval and execution, and the five forms it takes. Nobody budgets for it but everybody pays it, which is why the thing that ships is usually an inferior version of the thing everyone agreed to.
Not published yet -
Essay
Taking off my Apple Watch after ten years
One day it hit me that I’ve never really enjoyed this object.
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Essay
Anyone can be bold on a blank page
The design industry’s prestige runs toward the unconstrained brief, but almost no real work looks like one. The case for renovation as the harder discipline, and for constraints as the material the work is made of.
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Essay
Timeless is not something you can only say afterward
A website built in 2016 was still running in 2024: same type system, same markup, same job. We can design for timelessness on purpose and it’s possible to avoid being the reason a thing gets torn out, even in the digital design space.
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Essay
Ambition shaving
Why the most distinctive idea in a design is usually the first one cut. The fix is boring, but it works.
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Teardown
Value engineering and ambition shaving
The first teardown, deliberately not software. A built space set against its renderings, exploring where the design lost the fight and who was in the room when it did. Construction already has a name for this: value engineering.
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Essay
What a mockup owes an engineer
The questions a design file should answer before anybody has to ask them, written from both ends of the handoff. The short version is the Build Test; this is the reasoning behind it.
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Studio note
What we won’t do
Exploring the four kinds of work we turn down. It costs us projects and it’s the clearest description there is of the work we do take.
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Gift guide
The 2025 holiday gift guide
Our first holiday gift guide, and we're proud of it. Full of wonderful, timeless, and intentional ideas to spread holiday cheer.
Not published yet
Got a weird idea? Let’s go make it.
No brief, no client, no invoice. A zine, a risograph run, a walk with two cameras and a rule about what we’re allowed to shoot — if it sounds fun and slightly unwise, I’m in.