Just finished designing a full visual system for Superteam Australia. Templates for welcomes, announcements, events, partnerships and workshops across square, 16:9 and story formats.

The whole thing is designed to hero Australia. Uluru. The Sydney skyline. Our landscapes. Our people. Every template uses iconic Australian imagery with a green and gold duotone treatment that ties it all together and makes it unmistakably ours. I want people to scroll past a Superteam Australia post and know exactly where it came from before they even read the text.

Every other Superteam chapter looks the same. We shouldn't. We should be recognisable. We should be proud. This system gives us that.

The tone is Australian. "Say g'day mate" not "welcome to the community." We talk like we actually talk. Aussie slang, casual energy, no corporate bullshit. Because that's who we are and that's what makes people want to be part of it.

Design wise I kept it stripped back. Negative space doing the heavy lifting. Bold type, minimal elements, let the imagery breathe. Less is more, always. The green and gold palette carries the identity without needing to overload every frame with logos and gradients and noise. The system is flexible enough to work across every format but tight enough that everything feels like it belongs together.

12 templates. One system. Built different mate.

Download the brand system ↗

What a fucking week. Three consecutive 18-hour days. Sleeping between 1 and 3am each night, back at the desk by 7. Eyes burning, coffee doing absolutely nothing anymore, but the work was flowing and I wasn't about to stop it. When you're in that zone where everything is clicking and the design is just pouring out of you — you don't stop. You ride it until it's done.

Had a hard deadline on a UI that needed to be finished and handed off to the dev team. No wiggle room. No "can we push it a few days." It needed to be done. And honestly? That pressure is where I do my best work. Always have. Give me a comfortable timeline and I'll overthink every decision for three weeks. Give me a deadline that makes me sweat and I'll ship something I'm genuinely proud of in three days.

It's finished. Handed off. And now I'm sitting here on Good Friday morning waiting for the devs to build it and send it live. That bit is always the hardest — the waiting. You've done your part, you've poured everything into it, and now it's out of your hands. But I'm really fucking proud of this one. The kind of proud where you keep opening the file just to look at it again even though it's already been exported.

Those three days were brutal but they made me feel alive again. Like properly alive. Not just going through the motions, not just pushing pixels because that's what I do — actually creating something that matters. That feeling is why I got into this. It's easy to forget when you're knee-deep in revisions and client feedback loops, but when you strip all that away and it's just you, a blank canvas, and a deadline that doesn't care about your feelings — that's the purest form of design there is.

In other news, Quinn finished her first term of kindy this week. She is so unbelievably proud of herself and honestly so am I. Watching her walk out on the last day with her little bag and this massive grin on her face — mate, that hit harder than any design win ever will. She's growing up so fast it's terrifying. Feels like five minutes ago she was drawing on my iMac screen with her finger and now she's got friends and a lunchbox routine and homework. Homework. She's four.

Happy Easter if you celebrate it. I'll be spending the long weekend doing absolutely nothing productive and I cannot wait. The laptop is closing after I post this and it's not opening again until Tuesday. Billy, Quinn, chocolate eggs, and zero figma files. That's the plan.

Loving being back working in the Solana ecosystem. Properly in it again, not just building side projects on top of it but actually contributing to something that matters in the space. Has me reminiscing a lot honestly. The energy, the pace, the people who just get it. There's something about working with genuinely forward-thinking people that makes you raise your own bar without even realising it.

Had a breakthrough idea today. One of those moments where you're staring at the screen and something just clicks and you go "oh fuck, that's it." Can't say too much yet but I think it's going to be amazing. I could be completely wrong. Guess we'll have to wait and see. But that gut feeling when something lands — that's the feeling I got into design for in the first place.

My design process has always been the same. Strip it back. Then strip it back again. Every time I catch myself overcomplicating something or adding shit that doesn't need to be there, I stop and ask "is this actually necessary?" and nine times out of ten the answer is no. Less is more. Always has been for me. The breakthrough today came from removing things, not adding them. That's always how the best ideas show up — you take away everything that's not the idea and whatever's left is the thing.

As little design as possible. That's how I work. And it applies to everything — UI, user flows, brand systems, even how you present your thinking to a client. The less noise, the more the signal cuts through. I'd rather ship something clean and intentional than something busy that's trying too hard.

Been a great week. One of those ones where you finish Friday and actually feel like you moved the needle instead of just surviving. Here's to many more of them. Now I'm going to close the laptop and go wrestle my kids before bedtime. Quinn will probably win.

Back into the thick of it. Spent today sketching. Yeah, by hand. Actual pen on actual paper like some kind of caveman. Rough flow diagrams, wireframe scribbles, arrows pointing everywhere, crossed out bits, little notes in the margins that only I can read. And fuck it was fun. I genuinely forgot how much I missed this part of the design process.

There's something about working on paper that Figma just can't replicate. No constraints. No snapping to grid. No overthinking whether the corner radius is 8 or 12. Just pure thinking. You sketch an idea in 30 seconds, look at it, go "nah that's shit," flip the page and try again. The speed of iteration is insane when you take the tools out of the equation.

I must've gone through about 15 different flow variations today. Most of them were garbage, which is exactly the point. You have to get the bad ideas out before the good ones show up. That's something I think a lot of designers forget — you don't jump straight to the answer. You wade through a heap of wrong answers first and eventually something clicks.

And something clicked today. I've got a really clear vision now for how this user journey should feel. Not just the layout or the structure — the actual feeling of moving through it. How one section breathes into the next. Where the pace picks up. Where it slows down to let something land. It's going to genuinely change the experience and make the whole thing more fluid and inviting. I can see it now which is always the moment where the excitement properly kicks in.

Now it's time to get stuck into Figma and start translating these sketches into proper wireframes. That's always a weird transition — paper to screen. Some ideas survive, some don't. The ones that work on paper but fall apart in Figma weren't strong enough to begin with. That's the filter.

Oh and the house was empty yesterday. Kids were out with the missus. Just me, a desk, and silence. You'd think that'd be the dream right? Nah it was too quiet haha. I kept looking over expecting Quinn to walk in and demand access to my screen or Billy to come and shove his arse in my face. Turns out the chaos is part of the process now. Weird how that works.

Big day. Good day. The kind of day that reminds you why you got into this in the first place.

So it looks like I've landed a contract to work on a piece of UI for a pretty major player in the web3 space. Can't say who yet because nothing is fully locked in, but it's looking really promising and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't buzzing about it.

5 years building in web3. Five years of chaos, rugged timelines, 2am roadmap pivots and designing entire brands in 72 hours. It feels well overdue honestly, but that doesn't make it any less exciting. If anything it makes it more so because I know exactly how much work it took to get here.

Hoping it leads to more with them, but my work will have to do the talking on that front. Always has. I don't pitch. I just ship and let people decide.

One of the best parts about this one is their push to explore ideas and get genuinely creative. Like actually creative, not "here's a Figma template, make it blue" creative. They want concepts. They want to push things. That's something I fucking crave and it's something that is so rare in the real design world. Most clients want safe. These guys want interesting. That's the dream brief.

Once it's done and I can talk about it, I cannot fucking wait to share it with the world. Watch this space.

Oh and unrelated but Billy is talking more and more every day. Little guy is becoming a proper legend. He said "dad" in his sleep last night. Just quietly, half asleep. Dreaming about me. That hit different. That's the stuff that matters more than any contract ever will.

Today felt like life was closing in on me. As a designer. As a builder. As a dad. As a husband. All of it, all at once, all demanding 100% of a person who's already running on about 40%.

I pride myself on being super present with my kids. Like properly present, not half-watching them while I check Figma on my phone present. I pride myself on my design work and my creativity. I pride myself on shipping things, on being the guy who actually builds the stuff he talks about. I pride myself on a lot of things honestly. But I'm starting to realise it's near on impossible to be all of these things and also look after myself. Something always gives. And lately that something has been me.

I need an outlet. This thoughts page might end up being it. I'm fucking sorry if you're reading this, but sometimes you're my anonymous therapist. I didn't plan for this page to become that, but here we are mid-afternoon and I'm typing instead of doing actual work so make of that what you will.

Started reading Atomic Habits. Hoping it helps me balance shit out. Tiny wins, systems over goals, all that. We'll see. The daily twelve thing I built on my experiments page was kind of born from this same feeling — the need to feel like I did SOMETHING on the days where everything feels like it's underwater.

Working on some cool new things which is exciting, daunting and also refreshing, if that even makes sense as a combination of emotions. Not sure which ones will stick. Throw shit at the wall and see I guess lol. That's basically been my entire career strategy if I'm being honest.

There's a Steve Jobs quote that always sticks with me. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." I think about that a lot. Especially on days like today where nothing feels like it's connecting and everything feels scattered. You just have to trust the process. Trust your gut. Keep building. Keep showing up.

Looking to find some balance in a world where sometimes balance isn't possible. If you're reading this and you feel the same way — you're not alone. We're all just winging it. Some of us are just more honest about it than others.

Here's a scene from today. I'm midway through an intricate brand mark in Illustrator. Bezier curves looking clean. Spacing is perfect. I'm in the zone. And then Billy — my 18-month-old — climbs onto me, spins around, and proceeds to push his butt directly into my face. He thinks this is the funniest thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity. He's crying laughing. I've got a toddler's arse on my nose and a half-finished logomark on screen. This is my life.

Quinn is four and she's convinced every screen in this house belongs to her. I made the mistake of giving her my iPad with Procreate when she was two. She took to it immediately and now thinks she has full access to every design program I own. She'll walk up to my iMac mid-flow, try to draw on the screen with her finger, and look at me like I'M the problem when it doesn't work. "Daddy it's broken." No Quinn, it's a desktop computer. "But I want to draw." I know. On YOUR iPad. "No. On yours." Every. Single. Day.

And then there's the tag team moments. Both of them will decide — at the exact moment I'm deep in a UI flow in Figma, like properly locked in — that it's time for WrestleMania. Just full on wrestling on the floor right next to my desk. Screaming. Laughing. Someone inevitably gets hurt, cries for 11 seconds, then they go again. It drags me straight out of whatever creative headspace I was in and I'm back to being a referee instead of a designer.

But here's the thing nobody tells you. The work is better now. Not despite the kids — because of them. When you've got maybe four solid hours a day instead of eight, you stop faffing about. No more "exploring options" for three hours. No more pixel-nudging nobody will ever notice. You make decisions faster. Ship faster. You learn what actually matters versus what's just your ego talking. Quinn doesn't care about your kerning. Billy doesn't care about your grid. The work that survives two kids climbing on you is the work that needed to exist.

But these two are the reason I do what I do every single day. They are my entire world and I love them more than words could ever explain. Every late night, every weekend build session, every product I ship — it's for them. I work to make sure that one day, they have the best possible start to their lives. Everything I build is for Quinn and Billy. Everything.

Quinn just asked me what I'm writing. I said "a blog post about you." She said "make sure you say I'm the boss." Done. She's the boss. Billy's the chaos agent. I'm just the bloke in the middle trying to push pixels while dodging butt-to-face attacks. Wouldn't change a damn thing.

I've been a designer for over 13 years now. In that time I've had portfolios on Behance, Dribbble, Webflow, custom builds... you fucking name it, I've stressed out over it and rebuilt it 10 times over. Clean case studies. Thoughtful grids. "The brief was to reimagine the brand experience across all touchpoints... yada yada fkn yada." They were 90% fabricated and every designer reading this knows exactly what I mean.

Here's what actually happened on those projects: the client changed the brief 14 times. I designed the final version in 3 days, not the 3 months the case study says. The "user research phase" was me asking my homie if he could find the checkout button. And the shipped product looks nothing like the Figma mockup because the dev team had 48 hours to put it all together. But fucking sure. Let me spend three weeks writing a 2,000 word case study with custom animations about my "process."

The portfolio industrial complex has convinced an entire generation of designers that the presentation of work matters more than the work itself. We're spending more time documenting projects than actually shipping them. We're lying about timelines, inflating impact metrics, and writing "increased conversions by 340%" with absolutely zero data to back it up. And everyone knows. Hiring managers know. Other designers know. We all just pretend and don't talk about how the most impressive design work in our 'portfolios' was the stuff we did that WE actually liked and enjoyed doing.

So I burned it the fuck down. Killed the portfolio. Deleted my Behance. Deleted my Dribbble. Built something else entirely. A personal site that's part vent space, part experimental lab, part proof that I actually build things — not just screenshot them. It runs on Vercel. It's static HTML files and a monospace font. There's a subtle grid background because I'm a UI designer and I physically cannot help myself.

The first experiment: a generative art engine powered by live Solana blockchain data, inspired by Dieter Rams' design principles. You click a button, it fetches a blockhash from mainnet, the hash seeds a composition. Is it useful? Nah probably not. Was it fun? Yeah. Did I learn more building it in a weekend than I would writing another case study? Without a fucking doubt I did. Heavily inspired by Jack Butcher and the amazing shit he does, he made me realise I was starting to hate design, it wasn't fun anymore.

Nobody hires you because of your folio layout. They hire you because you can think clearly, build competently, and communicate honestly. The best designers I know don't even have or fucking need portfolios. Their work is scattered across the internet in the form of things that actually exist and function — not screenshots with drop shadows.

I now look to hire designers for ad-hoc shit and to help my workload, and I am fucking starving for honesty. Just tell me what you actually think. Build something real. Show me the messy version.

If you're a designer reading this and your portfolio hasn't been updated in two years because the thought of getting everything into perfect mock-ups and adding some lies about your process makes you want to throw your iMac through the fucking window — I get it. Delete it. Build a playground. Make weird things. Write about them. Link the live URLs. Let people see your brain working in real time for the first time since you became a designer.

The portfolio era is over. The playground era is here. Fuck the template. Build the playground.

AI is not coming for your job. Your complacency is. The tools have changed every five years since I started — Photoshop to Sketch, Sketch to Figma, Figma to whatever fresh hell comes next — and every single time the same designers panic while the same good designers just adapt and keep shipping.

I've watched grown adults spend more hours tweeting about whether Midjourney can replace a brand designer than actually doing brand design. Thats the problem right there. You're so busy being terrified of the machine that you forgot to get better at being human.

AI can spit out a thousand logo options in ten seconds. Sick. Can it sit across from a founder who has absolutely no idea what they want, pull a coherent vision out of that mess, and make them feel like you read their mind? No. It can't. And it won't for a long time.

Your taste. Your judgment. Your ability to look at something and say "this is shit, bin it." That's the job. That was always the job. The medium changes. The standard doesn't. Stop doom-scrolling prompt engineering threads and go talk to a real user. Remember what thinking feels like without autocomplete.

Dieter Rams wrote ten principles of good design in the 1970s. They're perfect. They're timeless. And roughly 98% of working designers have never actually applied a single one of them in production. We print them on posters. We cite them in case studies. We do not follow them. Not even close.

"Good design is as little design as possible." Cool. Now open your latest Figma file and count the bullshit. The decorative gradient nobody asked for. The icon that means nothing. The toggle that toggles another toggle. Yeah. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

Minimalism is hard because it requires you to say no. No to the client. No to the PM. No to your own ego when it wants to add one more thing. Every element you remove is a fight. Every pixel of whitespace is a negotiation. Rams made it look effortless because he spent decades getting there. We want the output without the years and it shows.

Best work I've done in 13 years is the stuff where you can't see the work. Nobody emails you saying "wow that negative space is incredible." They just use the thing without thinking. That's the job. Invisible design. If Rams walked into most design teams today he'd walk straight back out. Fair enough honestly.

I've had this conversation maybe 300 times. Client looks at the design. Points at the gap. "Can we put something there?" No mate. That space is doing more heavy lifting than the CTA you want to cram into it.

Whitespace isn't absence. It's presence. It's the pause between notes that makes the music. Every great piece of design — from the OG iPod box to the Nothing Phone packaging — uses negative space as a deliberate structural decision. Not laziness. Architecture.

The urge to fill comes from fear. Fear the design looks "unfinished." Fear the CEO thinks you slacked off. But stuffing more shit into a layout doesn't make it more useful. It makes it a car crash. You're not designing a newspaper from 1997.

Next time someone asks you to fill the whitespace, pull up google.com circa 2004. One field. One button. Two trillion dollar company. The space was not wasted.

1972. Massimo Vignelli redesigns the New York subway map. Geographically? A disaster. Central Park was a square. Brooklyn looked like it floated to New Jersey. The East River went on a diet. New Yorkers absolutely lost it.

But it worked. As a piece of wayfinding it was a masterclass. It prioritised the user's actual task — getting from A to B on a rail network — over geographic accuracy that nobody needs when they're underground. You don't need to know Manhattan's exact shape when you're transferring at Times Square. You need the coloured line. Thats it.

This is the tension we live in. Accuracy vs clarity. Completeness vs usability. The map got replaced because the public couldn't get past the distortions, but Vignelli's thinking changed how every designer since approaches information. Sometimes you distort a little to communicate a lot.

Every dashboard I design, I think about that map. What does the user actually need right now? What can I simplify or kill entirely? The answer is always more than you think.

Custom tokens. Semantic colour naming. Responsive spacing scale. Auto-layout on every frame. Beautiful documentation page. Used by exactly zero people after week two. Sound familiar?

Design systems fail for the same reason diets fail. High initial motivation, unsustainable execution, and six months later everyone's duplicating frames and eyeballing padding again. I've built systems for five-person startups and 500-person orgs. The failure mode is always the same: nobody owns it after launch. Every single time.

Here's the dirty secret. Design systems aren't a design problem. They're an org problem. They need governance, ownership, and someone whose literal job is maintenance. Most teams can't or won't resource that. So the system becomes a museum — nice to visit, irrelevant to actual work.

Start way smaller than you think. Five components. One colour scale. Consistent spacing. Done. A system that covers 60% of use cases and actually gets used beats one that covers 100% and gathers dust every single time. Ship the minimum. Maintain it. Add things when the pain is obvious. And for the love of god stop naming your design system. It doesn't need a brand. It needs to work.

I used to design interfaces I wanted to look at. Now I design interfaces that disappear. That shift took eight years and a lot of user testing sessions where people completely ignored the thing I was most proud of. Humbling as fuck.

When someone completes a task without friction, confusion, or conscious thought about the interface — that's the highest achievement. The design was so good it became invisible. Nobody writes you a Slack message saying "the padding on that card was perfect." They just finished their task. That's the win and you'll never hear about it.

This is fundamentally at odds with how our industry works. Dribbble celebrates visual spectacle. Awards celebrate animation. Nobody celebrates "user completed checkout in three seconds and didn't notice the design." But that IS the actual goal.

Aesthetics matter — they build trust, signal quality, create emotion. But when they come at the cost of usability, you've made a painting, not a product. Last time I checked, paintings don't have conversion rates. Design for forgettability. I'm dead serious.

Sketch died because it couldn't collaborate. Not because Figma was better — early Figma was rough as guts — but because Figma understood that design had become a team sport while Sketch still thought it was a solo act. The tool that wins is never the most powerful. It's the one that fits how people actually work.

So will AI kill Figma? Nah. AI is a feature, not a product. The thing that kills Figma will be whatever correctly identifies the next shift in how design teams operate. And I reckon that shift is the death of the design-to-dev handoff.

The handoff is where design goes to die. Pixel-perfect Figma files get interpreted by developers working on completely different mental models. The result is always a compromise. Always. The tool that makes design and code the same artifact wins everything. We're seeing early versions — tools that generate production code from design, tools where designers work in code without knowing it.

Figma knows this. That's why they're pushing dev mode, variables, code connect. Whether they get there fast enough is the question. History says incumbents rarely do.

Oliver Reichenstein said "web design is 95% typography" in 2006. Nearly two decades later designers are still spending most of their time picking colour palettes, tweaking gradients, and arguing about border radius. Meanwhile the type is 16px system font with default line height. Mate. Come on.

Typography is the foundation of visual hierarchy. Nail it and everything else falls into place. Get it wrong and no amount of colour theory saves you. A well-set piece of type on a white background will always outclass a poorly-set piece on a gradient mesh with glassmorphism and parallax and whatever other bullshit you saw on Dribbble this morning. Always.

My process: start every project in black and white. No colour. Just type, spacing, hierarchy. If it doesn't work without colour, it doesn't work period. Colour is seasoning, not the meal. You wouldn't pick paint colours before building the house.

Pick a typeface with intention. Set it with care. Give it room. That alone puts you ahead of 80% of designers out there. I guarantee it.

"So you make websites?" Sort of. "Like an artist?" Not really. "But you use a computer?" Yes. "So you're a developer?" No. "What do you actually do?" ...I make things easy to use and nice to look at. "Oh like decoration?" I need a beer.

This conversation has haunted me for 13 years. The industry hasn't helped either. We rebrand ourselves constantly. Graphic designer. Web designer. UI designer. UX designer. Product designer. Design engineer. At some point we'll run out of prefixes and just start using emojis.

The core problem is that good design is invisible. People notice bad design instantly — confusing nav, broken flows, ugly layouts. But good design feels... normal. Expected. So the better you do your job, the less anyone understands what your job is. What a beautiful paradox to live in lol.

I've stopped explaining. Now I just say "I solve problems you didn't know you had, with tools you've never heard of, for people who'll never thank me." Gets a laugh usually. Sometimes a concerned look. Either way, conversation moves on and I can get back to arguing about whether 4px or 8px grids are superior.

Agency life: brief, research, ideation, concepts, refinement, presentation, revision, revision, revision, sign-off, delivery. Six weeks minimum. Usually twelve. Sometimes six months for a damn logo. Sometimes longer lol.

Web3: you have three days. Community wants to see progress tomorrow. Founder changed the roadmap at 2am. Token launches Friday. There's no brand guideline. No style guide. Barely a brief. Go.

And honestly? Best thing that ever happened to my work. Not because chaos is good — it's obviously terrible — but because it forced me to strip design back to fundamentals. When you can't hide behind process, you rely on taste. On instinct. On the decade of reps that tells you "this works" before you can even explain why.

Web3 taught me speed without sacrificing quality. Taught me to ship imperfect and iterate publicly. Taught me that a beautiful product nobody uses is worse than an ugly product everyone uses. Most importantly it taught me design is a service, not an art form. You serve the user, the product, the business. In that order. Always.

Every designer should spend six months in a high-velocity environment. It'll either break you or forge you. The ones it forges are dangerous and thats who I want to work with.