July 2025

This month began with the tail end of a 2-week break, and it took me a long time to get back into the rhythm of things. Here are a few thing my feeble brain has been chewing on.

Never present an idea you wouldn’t actually want to do

I think every designer has learnt this at some point. Even so, it’s easy to fall into presenting 3 options for something just because you feel like you have to. It happened again this month when presenting options for how a piece of work could be handled.

I think it comes from wanting to show that you’ve exhaustively considered all the possibilities. Or maybe even thinking that having a rubbish option makes the other ones look good. Don’t do it kids. I’ve had people choose the rubbish option too many times. Or a bit of the rubbish option mixed with the good one. Use whatever control you have of your own destiny!

Design and tech newsletters

I ask my small readership a lot of questions in this note, in the vain hope of response.

I’m wondering if anyone has any good email newsletters they subscribe to about design or tech. I stopped using Instagram (for like the 3rd time), so I no longer have the daily drib-drab of luxury fetish objects to passively thumb through to make me feel like I’m aware of what’s happening out there.

This might just be withdrawal symptoms, but if you do subscribe to anything interesting, let me know.

Ay ay ay

I’ve been delving into so-called AI safety recently. Not in a particularly useful or positive way – deja vu the nuclear-war-escalation-scenario doom loop I fell into after finally watching Threads last year.

This AI 2027 speculative choose-your-adventure was published in April but only reached my luddite eyes a few weeks ago. Jesus. Then I got into reading about ideas like d/acc and it’s hardly got me brimming with excitement about the future.

There’s loads more going on in this area than I’m aware of, but so much of the development of AI is happening in a different world to the one most of us inhabit. I still haven’t read an optimistic account of how AI might pan out that doesn’t seem ludicrously naive. I am very up for reading more. Optimists, where’s your optimism coming from?

Making

I made a few changes to this website recently. I’ve really been enjoying playing around with HTML/CSS/JS again, with some restrained vibe coding on the side.

I’m not sure about the fuzzy blobs that make it look like your screen is broken, they’re sort of cool and sort of annoying at the same time.

I may even get onto publishing some case studies next. They already exist in PDF portfolios. I suppose this is where I should just upload it all to Claude and let it do the work, but I can’t help but feel it’d flatten my voice in the process.

(Obviously there’s a ruddy great contradiction here in light of the previous section. I’m using AI for certain specific tasks because it’s a useful and interesting tool unlike any I’ve used before. Like many I also have anxiety that I’ll get left behind in some way if I don’t learn to exploit it. However, at this moment in time I think that we have far more to lose than we have to gain from it as humans in general. I am part-selfish, scared and confused.)

This isn’t going away any time soon, stay tuned for future updates!

Consumption roundup

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