The Journal
Notes
Essays and notes on product design, craft, and what it takes to ship something people love.
Reflections from P26What stuck with me after P26 — the ideas, conversations, and second-guesses worth writing down.We're in the speedboat model (and that means duplicative work)Small fast teams racing in parallel get speed — and pay for it in overlap. Naming the tradeoff honestly.Team offsite — Cabo 2026Notes and photos from the team offsite in Cabo — what we made, what we talked about, what we brought home.What does brand mean in the world of agents?When the primary user is a model, not a person, what's left of brand — and what suddenly matters more.Why is a rebrand (often) everyone's least favourite project?Rebrands are high-stakes, high-opinion, and rarely thanked. Why they're so hard — and how to make them less painful.Why is AI brown?Every AI product seems to reach for the same warm beige-and-brown palette. A short investigation into why.Working with an agency sucksThe agency black box — weeks of silence, no idea what's happening or when you're needed. Here's how we do the opposite.Designer-dev is so 2026The designer-who-codes was the last era's hire. What's the next one?Good, fast, cheap — pick twoThe oldest tradeoff in the business, and what it actually means when a project has to choose.I speak chair, tooWhy an industrial-design background still shapes how I design for screens.Interesting ElderTech, 2026A look at the aging-tech products worth paying attention to right now.How to spot AI slop in design (and how to stop it)The tells of generic, AI-generated design — and the habits that keep your work from reading like everyone else's.Things AI-native companies doPatterns I've seen inside AI-native teams — what actually makes them different.Want a check from bread?We're founders at heart, and we bring that mentality to every project — sometimes it turns into equity, not just an invoice.What is FemTech?A plain-language intro to FemTech — starting somewhere unexpectedly ordinary.Who we areThe origin story — where the studio came from, and why we work the way we do.Writing my first DESIGN.mdWhat actually goes into a design-system doc, and what I learned building one from scratch.A place to write things downStarting a small home for essays, notes, and the thinking behind the work.