In our milli-second world of compressed timelines, deliverables, design systems, and doing more with less — Design (with a capital D) has forgotten the ancient gods: Pan, wild, intuitive and untamed, Ptah, a willful maker with vision, Athena; clever and precise.

True creativity is instinctual, dogged and intentional. 

Those skills form the bedrock of the practice of product design — visual design, user experience, strategy, business impact, brand and communication design are vastly under skilled in today's working product designers. Design has over specialized, homogenized, and many emerging designers don't have the ability to build experience in the critical areas — not because they are not good — but because we haven’t helped them.

Product design is not about Figma competency. AI is not craft. We've sacrificed intuition and instinct for KPIs and adoption metrics. In a decade and a half, product design has undesigned itself into ephemera.

Our work feels temporary — our teams feel disposable.

We've conflated tools with creativity, confused experience with expertise, removed the binds that breed groundbreaking design. We’re deeply entrenched experts in minutia — office hours are FAQs, workshops are oration & theater. But this is not a critique, this is lighting the beacons. Product designers and creatives are calling for aid and I have hope.

Because I’m still here. 

I’m not a Brian Collins. I’m not a Paula Scher. I’m not a Jessica Hische. I’ll never be a Hoodzpah or Tad Carpenter. Those are all folks I admire greatly, but game recognize game. Funny enough though — they’ll also never be a me or a you. I’m a solid designer, I’ve worked across marketing, brand, and product for two decades, and I’m 100% sure I will never be an industry name. I chase creative whims and hobbies, I prefer making stuff for fun, I get restless if I’m not doing — and at the extreme end — intense and obsessive. But I love designing. 

I’m still here, not because I’m a once-in-a-generation designer, I’m here because I’m stubborn — I’m here because creativity is adaptable. The magic is not my program fluency or hustle culture — my magic is making. My comfort following a hunch and enjoying the path. 

The times I feel lightest in the world is when I’m in a quiet space jamming.

"Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.”

Charles Eames 

The creative culture at the agencies I've worked at is — if you don't have it and need it — make it. Creating icons, redrawing flattened assets, creating illustrations for info-graphics, drawing lettering when fonts wouldn't do, storyboarding photo comps — all this fell on the visual design team and it was where my visual design chops played a large part in developing my diverse skill set.

Hack it together. 

As an early product designer those same skills were critical for success — we were / are hybrid beings that grew up on the weird wide web and had the visual chops and intuition to connect the static surface to interaction and experience. Flying the plane as the industry built around us. 

That culture of making informed my aesthetics, developed my take on design, and most importantly informed my creative process that I've used everywhere I worked. 

When I started as a designer at Ogilvy I can remember being so intimidated by the Creative Directors and Design Leads around me. I had worked for a few years as an Art Director focused on brand and got cozy in my role at a small start-up. Then I sat in my first agency brainstorm. Everyone was so quick at conceptual thinking and when one person started talking everyone would jump in — and thirty minutes later they had five teams exploring ten options.

Having never done anything like this on this level, I felt like an absolute beginner and terrible — no way I can do this. I didn't have the fortitude for that — collaboration and crits were daunting and anxiety inducing — especially with some particularly harsh Executive Creative Directors. But that is the point — you gotta cut your teeth.

I did not get these skills at school despite getting a BFA. This is only learned by watching other people do it really well. And I couldn't — at first. But there is necessity in being terrible and soon I was speaking up and pitching in with everyone's encouragement. And wow, I was shit at it — but I was supposed to be. 

I can't learn anything without fucking up over — — and over — — and over again. But I’ve never been scared to take those risks — it's colors and fonts. Let it rip. Do it again. 

“This is not great — this is what I would do…”

“Here is how I think about thirds in layouts…”

"Your kerning needs work — flip the page upside down and look at the negative space…"

“I’m swamped, can you give retouching notes on this and I’ll look them over later…”

This was my second design school. My 10,000 hours of honing my craft. Learning through watching. Taking someone else’s file and deconstructing it to figure out how they pulled off something so slick. Doing and doing and repetition. Learning to be “me” as a designer — my taste, my aesthetics. And this is the biggest tension in product design industry right now — designing at scale, repeatable flows and delivery only engines that most large design orgs have turned into do not provide a balance for designers to build these instincts. 

WTF is the wtf? Where is exploration and iteration when the design system is already built? 

Where is being terrible when AI can pump out passable UI?

If we lose these crucial moments of growth for creative — particularly those who are design practitioners who did not attend art school — where are we leaving the next generation?

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Starting a sketch book is impossible for me — still. There is almost nothing harder than starting from zero. 

I’ll make a note on the first page about how I’m feeling and then I turn the page. No sketch — no ideas. Just a step. Then, the second page doesn’t have that indecision for me. Also a fun easter egg for you to find later when you are digging through your obsessively hoarded sketchbook collection from the past 21 years. 

In reality though — I see that same problem everyday but with creatives encountering a vague ask, or net new work or even something that is “outside” the design system. Most do not know where to start and you can see the paralysis of choice overwhelm them or they fall back on what they know — applying tokens and creating passable experiences but failing to innovate. 

It falls into those two big buckets often — blank page syndrome or color-by-numbers. 

I’ve worked with so many amazing designers who were the absolute best at creating elegant solutions for business and users challenges. Their work was focused on massive problems with mind-boggling scale, but — all within a robust design system with established patterns and documented interaction. They ate up PDRs and came up with incredible solutions. When it came to designing 0→1 surfaces, designing aspirational experiences or pushing into strategy — removing the design system and documentation — the emperor suddenly has no clothes. The team churns and swirls spinning work that ultimately is throw away. They fail to connect the larger strategy ask to their designs and can’t build the foundational steps of creating 0→1 work. I’ve also encountered the color by numbers mentality when teams simply want to be told what to do and entirely abdicate their design responsibility. Again — not because they are bad designer but that is their strength. Their idea of strategic design thinking is give me the color to make this background when the real problem is why is there a background at all? The juicy problems go unsolved because they are recreating the solution a design system already provides and are simply an executional agent. 

The risk in both of these is design comes off at best as ineffective. Replaceable at worst — especially in a shitty time in the industry.

Pushed delivery windows means wasted money. Missed launches mean missed targets. 

When design fails the costs multiply and it’s very rarely a “more bodies problem” to be solved with allocation and resources. If design is operating 2-sprints ahead of dev then those missed launches have a multiplying effect to all the connected XFNs and related projects. 

It’s investing in craft. It’s investing in skills. It’s about hiring diverse creative weirdos. 

The failure of not enriching our team’s skills is as measurable as a bad Net Promoter Score.

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One of my first projects in my university’s foundation drawing course was simple — draw a house key in 100 different ways. No two can be the same. Simple enough prompt with widely divergent outcomes — every single student’s variations different and getting more abstract. Everyone had the same key the first 10 to 20 rounds but then it got wild. Hundreds and hundreds ideas of a key.  Bizarre — fun — weird — abstract — challenging. 

Starting with an idea and letting it have space to grow. Creativity is following your hunches, doing the work and ultimate trust in the process.

Trusting in the process also means trusting your path and believe me — the doubt can be strong — my path has meandered a lot. In the past, I’ve encountered folks who have criticized me for not specializing or truly focusing on one area. That is what actually makes me a dangerous creative — I know who I am because of what I’ve learned from not overly specializing.  

We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

David Epstein

My first design portfolio was my IMDB page. No joke. 

I pivoted to web design, then to art direction with brand orgs, then leading logo redesigns and national campaigns as an ACD, shifting to product design and working with emerging AI, scaling design craft in international teams to transforming banking for 90M people. 

At every stop on that path I learned, grew, begged, borrowed and stole. Not other people’s work but ideas that I saw in practice. And maybe anything a studio was throwing away — thanks for all the Photo-Lettering books Ogilvy. I wasn’t learning “programs” — I was learning “thinking.”

Even things I didn't anticipate playing a role in my career anymore come back up all the time. My foundation in a BFA environment hammered the creative process into my DNA. I studied film in university focused on experimental animation — I pivoted away from that career path long before to focus on visual design. But that ability to think through ideas as a story — how film uses transitions and cuts, thinking of experiences as scenes not screens, all through the nuances of motion and how to animate a solid bounce play a massive part in product design. I'm looking at you Lottie and bottom sheet timings.

Strong silhouettes — crucial for blocking movement film, theater and animation are a key aspect of product design. I like to call it the squint test. Is this UI telegraphing its meaning and intention? Is it dead-simple to know what to do next?

All these wide spots on the road I’ve stopped have given me something — even a lesson in what not to do.

Your unique journey is our only true unique skill — no one else in the world took exactly the same path as you. 

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The projects I’m proudest of in my career — and the ones that are most effective — are the unique times when all the recesses of my brain get engaged and I can morph from one role to another. 

A huge scope of work I’ve delivered over the past couple of years has been forming the strategy of how we elevate brand moments within the Chase experience. I got to blend across strategy, creative direction, motion, interaction and even system design — jumping into delivery mode as and shifting back to a strategy lens when needed. 

I was given a ton of trust and a long leash to collaborate with partners when needed and go hands-on when I was able to operate with agency. Flexing across multiple business orgs at Chase and creating something that is already having a profound impact on the future of our experience. The work zooms all the way down to component and tokens to build into our massive design system. From sharing work in C-Level strategy sessions to smoothing motion bezier in After Effects.

I was jamming — moving at pace, self-reliant, and able to pull in XFNs for coded POCs and making scores and scores of prototypes. This is the work I love doing — in my lane, moisturized, thriving. Wild outdoor cat energy.

The work is still delivering and has created scope for additional headcount for my org. It’s one designer operating with agency horizontally and making massive business impact. This is the type of work designers uniquely can handle when they are working as creatives — not delivery SMEs. 

And they might not be sitting in your product and tech org — they might be in brand, or motion, or communication design. Hunt for creativity. Skills can be taught, taste can't be. Product design is equal parts UX, visuals and brand — shit UX can ruin incredible aesthetics and pedestrian design and brand can be elevated through intuitive interaction. Product designers need to think with all of their brains.

Humans have been creative and making art long before AI arrived. 

Let's teach designers — all designers — creative thinking — not just rules. 

Let’s embrace the old gods — shed our tamed ways, prioritize cleverness, amplify willful voices, have fun and make some rad stuff. 

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This private publication is not affiliated with my employers or professional associations. Personal blog, personal opinions. Not speaking for anyone but myself. ✌️