Writing

Field Notes on design, work, curiosity, and the strange connections between them.

Collage of oversized serif letters and numerals surrounding a torn-paper window where a hand writes lowercase letters on a type specimen sheet

Perfect is starting to look the same.

After making a typeface for my children’s book, I started wondering what makes creative work feel human in a world where everything can look polished.

Torn-paper collage of jasmine lifted from a small corten planter, its roots exposed, and moved into a much larger planter

Life

Sometimes you need a bigger pot

Repotting two jasmine plants reminded me that change doesn’t always mean something is wrong. Sometimes the life you’ve built is good, and you simply need more room to grow.

Collage of black-and-white photos—a hand holding a key, a house frame, moving boxes, a fork in the road—torn along a jagged edge where a small figure walks into a vast textured blue field

Life

There’s never a good time to leave

There’s always another reason to wait. Looking back, the decisions that changed me didn’t come with certainty — the leap came first.

Design

5 non-design jobs that helped me become a better designer

Kumon, Golden Corral, a car factory, resident life, campus communications — five messy jobs that taught me more about people than any design role.

Collage of hands tinkering with a rough taped-together prototype, a yellow streak of light leading toward a small sun over a mountain landscape

Product

Perfectly imperfect: How wabi-sabi fuels team velocity

Progress beats polish. Vulnerability beats perfection. Here’s how wabi-sabi can help early teams move faster — without tipping into chaos.

Surreal collage of a child with a red backpack climbing stone stairs through a doorway, while an adult hand holds a paper strip that turns into a green vine against grainy landscape and bold yellow, blue, and red shapes

Life

Building products. Raising kids.

Ten years ago I compared startups to raising children. Then I actually had two — and learned the parallels go even deeper.

Collage of adult hands wrapping a pencil in scrap fabric beside a child’s reaching hand, with rice, nail polish, a marker, and an eraser scattered on a cream table against yellow and magenta circles

Life

Growing up with less gave me more

Growing up with a single mom in San Francisco’s Mission and Tenderloin taught me there are no dead ends — only constraints that make you more creative.

A lone figure walks through a vast dark hall toward a brilliant golden portal of light, leaving faint blurred silhouettes behind in the shadows

Product

Manifesting vs. premortems

Premortems ask you to imagine failure before it happens. I’d rather spend that energy envisioning what I want — and reflect once the story is written.

Editorial collage of hands cutting through conveyor belts of mass-produced clothes, cups, and packaging to reveal a single handcrafted wooden bowl on a clean white space

Product

Fast food. Fast fashion. Fast product.

AI makes it easier than ever to create quickly. The real skill now is knowing what not to make.

Surreal collage split by a torn edge: a dense grayscale maze of stairs and doors on the left opens into a bright empty room with a single open blue doorway and a small window on the right

Design

Simplicity is the highest form of taste

On taste, restraint, and why the best work is the one where nothing else needs to be — especially in the age of AI.

A small child stands on a dark rocky cliff at night, looking out over misty water toward a bright golden light whose orange, pink, and purple trails stretch across a grainy black sky

Life

The future belongs to the curious

AI can cover the how. Curiosity still owns the why — and it’s the value I most want to pass on to my kids.

Collage of a hand placing a simple UI wireframe above stacked torn-paper layers of photos, diagrams, and research, with a blue path winding upward toward the sketch

Product

How to build your product intuition

One of the most underrated skills in product builders isn’t visual, technical, or strategic. It’s intuitive — and you can earn it.

Surreal collage of an open black doorway into a sunlit minimal room, with a flowing orange-to-blue ribbon path crossing the threshold past layered paper and plant scraps

Design

How feng shui could help build better products

Feng shui is about creating a harmonious household. Here’s how to make your app feel every bit as homey.

Scrapbook collage of torn photos and sketches—speaking, an animal print, an open book, handwriting, chairs in a circle, and an open door—linked by a winding orange line across cream paper

Design

Five realistic New Year’s resolutions for designers

Five habits that opened doors after leaving a design job with nothing lined up — and still hold up as resolutions worth keeping.