About me

I would spend an hour picking one shade of pink over another, or matching two riso inks that were only ever meant to misalign a little.

For a long time that felt like a guilty pleasure next to the actual design work. I do not think that any more. Colour and texturetexturetexturetexturetexturetexture are not decoration on top of an idea - for a tarot deck, a board game, or a zine, they are the idea. If a page or a card does not make someone want to pick it up, nothing else about it gets a chance to work.

TAROO started as a joke about the people who buy tarot decks for the art rather than the fortune - people like me. Designing all 22 Major Arcana meant building one visual system that could hold a wandering fool, a tired hermit, and a triumphant sun without ever reading like three different decks.

Packaging came with its own logic: a box has to survive being opened dozens of times, and a deck has to feel different in the hand than it looks on a shelf. That is still design work, just measured by touch instead of a task time.

Suglar asked a stranger question: what does a piece of candy feel like as a rule? Sour became risk, sweet became safety, and the board ended up looking more like a dessert table than a rulebook.

The Alcohol Directory zine is smaller and slower - one riso spread per drink I actually had in New York, printed the way the drink tasted. A zine has no users in the product sense, but it still has a reader turning a page, which is its own kind of interaction design.

None of this means I do not care whether something works. A brand system that only looks good in a mockup is not finished, and a game board nobody wants to touch will never get played.

I just start from the opposite end of the process than a lot of designers do: I want the colour and the shape to earn someone's attention first, and the logic underneath to keep it.

AI has mostly changed the middle of my process, not the start. An idea for a palette or an illustration still comes from looking at real things - fabric, old packaging, a drink menu - never from a prompt on its own.

What it is good at is getting me from a sketch to something I can actually print or playtest much faster, so more of the ideas that used to stay in a notebook get to exist.

That is the kind of visual designer I want to keep being: someone who still starts with colour and texture, and lets the slow parts of making something real catch up to the idea instead of the other way around.