Dear Designer:
This is a love letter to designers who are struggling, designers who are searching, designers who seek change and designers who want to create something different.
Dear Designer is a newsletter about design and designers, typography and typing, wellness and worry. And art.
Why me?
I’m a ragpicker. I’m a trained artist but a designer by choice — and necessity. As a generalist, I gather, garnish and grow. Things are made from nothing and I have a deep appreciation for the magic of making.
I took a circuitous path here as a designer. 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 adored printed matter.
I also have a romantically realistic view of technology. We need tech — websites, AI and social — to be doing much better by us. I focus on this as creative director at Mangrove Web.
Even though I ran my own design studio for 20 years, I don’t believe in the purity of “user experience”. I also don’t believe in the received definitions of “branding” or “brand engagement”. Much of this commercial discourse borders on nonsense or malfeasance: words that others — those outside of design and communications — have foisted on us to extract and extort.
Instead, I see graphic design — and that’s my focus here and elsewhere — as an artistic practice, based on real standards and guidelines, and fuelled by the human urge to connect and coordinate.
Dear Designer is a love letter about design and its chronicled impulse — to change the way that we interpret the world for ourselves and the way we change the world for others. It’s an urgent ask for us designers to go back to basics — typography, open discourse, social change, printed matter and mental wellness — and to embrace possibility.
This letter 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 automation.
A few years ago, my previous newsletter at Gornisht had this on its About page:
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 could use 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?
This letter will be personal. It will speak 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 a personal letter of love and encouragement and a cry of hope in the face of political and economic adversity in a time of deep social and technological transformation.
Thank you for taking a sidewise journey with me.
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I’m grateful to have you here.
(づ ◕‿◕ )づ
Updated November 5, 2024