Why compensation, edification, and recognition aren’t equally important—and getting the order wrong can derail your career. Success is subjective. It means many things to many different people. But I think there is a general model that anyone can use to build a design career. I believe that success in a design career should be evaluated against three criteria: compensation, edification, and recognition. But contrary to how the design industry operates — and the advice typically given to emerging designers — these aren’t equally important. They form a hierarchy, and getting the order wrong can derail a career before it even begins. Compensation Comes First Compensation is the most important first signal of a successful design career, because it is the thing that enables the continuation of work. If you’re not being paid adequately, your ability to keep working is directly limited. This is directly in opposition to the advice I got time and again at the start of my career, which essentially boiled down to: do what you love and the money and recognition will come. This is almost never true. There have been rare cases where it has been true for people who, ultimately, happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right relationships already in place. The post-hoc narrative of their lottery-like success leaves out all the luck and privilege and focuses entirely on the passion. These stories are intoxicating. They feel good, blur our vision, and result in a working hangover that can waylay someone for years if not the entirety of their increasingly despiriting career. What does adequate compensation look like? It’s not about getting rich — it’s about reaching a threshold where money anxiety doesn’t dominate your decision-making. Can you pay rent without stress? Buy groceries without calculating every purchase? Take a sick day without losing income? Have a modest emergency fund? If you can answer yes to these basics, you’ve achieved the compensation foundation that makes everything else possible. This might mean taking a corporate design job instead of the “cool” startup that pays in equity and promises. It might mean freelancing for boring clients instead of passion projects. It might mean saying no to unpaid opportunities, even when they seem prestigious. The key insight is that financial stability creates the mental space and time horizon necessary for meaningful career development. This is not glamorous. It sounds boring. It may even be boring, but it doesn’t need to last that long. It’s easier to make money once you’ve made money. Then Focus on Edification Once compensation has been taken care of, the majority of a designer’s effort should be put toward edification. I choose this word very intentionally. There is nothing wrong with passion, but passion is the fossil fuel of the soul. It’s not an intrinsic expression of humanity; it is inspired by experience, nurtured by love, commitment, and work, and focused by discipline, labor, and feedback. Passion gets all the credit for inspiration and none of the blame for pain, but it’s worth pointing out that the ancient application of this word had more to do with suffering than success. Edification, on the other hand, covers the full, necessary cycle that keeps us working as designers: interest, information, instruction, improvement. You couldn’t ask for a more profound measure of success than maintaining the cycle of edification for an entire career. If you feel intimidated by a project, it is an opportunity to learn. Focus your interest toward gathering new information. If you feel uncomfortable during a project, you are probably growing. Seek instruction from those who you know that make the kind of work you admire in a way you can respect. If you feel like the work could have been better, you’re probably right. You’re ready to work toward improvement. This process doesn’t just happen once; a successful career is the repetition of this cycle again and again. What does edification look like in practice? It’s choosing projects that teach you something new, even if they’re not the most glamorous. It’s working with people who challenge your thinking. It’s seeking feedback that makes you uncomfortable. It’s reading, experimenting, and building things outside of work requirements. It’s the difference between collecting paychecks and building expertise. Considering the cycle of edification should help you select the right opportunities. Does the problem space interest you intellectually? Will the project expand your skill set? Will you work with people from whom you can learn? These not only become more viable considerations once you’re not worried about making rent, but the essential path forward. The transition point between focusing on compensation and edification isn’t about reaching a specific salary number — it’s about achieving enough financial stability that you can think beyond survival. For some, this might happen quickly; for others, it may take several years. It might happen more than once in a career. The key is recognizing when you’ve moved from financial desperation to financial adequacy. Recognition Is Always Overrated Finally, recognition. This is probably the least valuable measure of success a designer could pursue and receive. It is subjective. It is fickle. It is fleeting. And yet, it is the bait used to lure inexperienced designers — to unpaid internships, low-paid jobs, free services and spec work of all kinds. The pitch is always the same: we can’t pay you, but we can offer you exposure. This is a lie. Attention is harder to come by than money these days, so when a person offers you one in lieu of another, know it’s an IOU that will never pay out. Most designers are better off bootstrapping their own recognition rather than hoping for a sliver of someone else’s limelight. I might not have understood or believed this at the start of my career; I take it as fact today, twenty years in. That said, I wouldn’t say that all recognition is worthless. Peer respect within your professional community has value — it can lead to better opportunities and collaborations. Having work you’re proud to show can open doors. But these forms of recognition should be byproducts of doing good work, not primary goals that drive decision-making. Design careers built upon recognition alone are indistinguishable from entertainment. The recognition trap is particularly dangerous early in a career because it exploits the natural desire for validation. Young designers are told that working for prestigious brands or winning awards will jumpstart their careers. Sometimes this works, but more often it leads to a cycle of undervalued work performed in hopes of future payoff that never materializes. Applying the Hierarchy Here’s how this hierarchy works in practice: Early career: Focus almost exclusively on compensation. Take the job that pays best, even if it’s not the most exciting. Learn what you can, but prioritize financial stability above all else. Mid-career:: Once you’ve achieved financial adequacy, shift focus to edification. Be more selective about projects and opportunities. Invest in skills and relationships that will compound over time. Established career:: Recognition may come naturally as a result of good work and years of experience. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too — you’ll have built something more valuable: expertise and financial security. Looking back, I can say that I put far more emphasis on external recognition and validation too early on in my career. I got a lot more of it – and let it distract me — ten years into my career than I do now, and it shows in my work. It’s better now than it was then, even if no one is talking about it. Every designer is better off putting whatever energy they’d expend on an attention fetch quest toward getting paid for their work, because it’s the money that will get you what you really need in the early days of your career: a roof over your head, food on the table, a good night’s sleep, and a way to get from here to there. If you have those things and are working in design, keep at it. Either external recognition will come or you’ll work long enough to realize that sometimes the most important recognition is self-bestowed. If you can be satisfied by work before anyone else sees it, you will need less of the very thing least capable of sustaining you. You will always get farther on your own steam than someone else’s.

A new book. First pages are always hit or miss. I cannot unsee the face in the building to the left. Peeking face is not me, but Nostradamus. The doom signals of 2025 are many and unrelenting. They can’t all be true, so it’s clear someone wants a frightened people. Still enjoying the exploration of tiny collages. Most of them in the past few batches are no larger than 4”x6” — the book pages themselves are 5.5”x8.5”. The size is the challenge.

We must not give AI bodies. If the researchers who created AI are right, our future existence depends upon it. If you have been keeping up with the progress of AI, you may have come across the AI 2027 report produced by the AI Futures Project, a forecast group composed of researchers, at least one of whom formerly worked for OpenAI. It is a highly detailed forecast that projects the development of AI through 2027, then splits into two different trajectories through 2030 based upon the possibility of strong government oversight. To summarize: oversight leads to an outcome where humans retain control over their future; an international AI “arms race” leads to extinction. The most plausible and frightening assumption this forecast relies upon is the notion that private financial interests will continue to determine public policy. Ultimately, the AI 2027 story is that the promise of short-term, exponential gains in wealth will arrest governmental functions, render an entire population docile, and cede all lands and resources to machines. This is plausible because it is already happening. The AI 2027 report simply extrapolates this pattern. I find it disturbing now. The greed + AI forecast is horrifying. But it also depends upon another assumption that I think is preventable and must be prevented: robots. The difference between human autonomy and total AI control is embodied AI. The easy way to envision this is by ambulatory robots. If an advanced AI — the sort of self-determining superintelligence that the AI Futures Project is afraid of — can also move about the world, we will lose control of that world. An embodied AI can replicate in a way we cannot stop. We cannot let that happen. Now, it may be that the AI Futures Project is unreasonably bullish on the AI timeline. I’d love for that to be true. But if they’re not — if there’s even a chance that AI could advance to the level they qualify as “superintelligent” — exceeding our depth, speed, and clarity of thought — then we cannot let that out of “the box.” We must do everything in our power to contain it and retain control over the kill-switch. This is pertinent now, because there has already been a sweeping initiative in DOGE to hand over government systems to AI. DOGE players have a vested interest in this, which ties back to the foundational corruption assumptions of the AI 2027 forecast. They want AI to run air traffic control, administer the electrical grid, and control our nuclear facilities. These are terrible ideas, not because humans are always more reliable than machines, but because humans have the same foundational interests as other humans and machines do not. The most dire outcome forecast by AI 2027 results from a final betrayal from the machines: they no longer need us, we are in their way, they exterminate us. A superintelligence that wants to stave off any meaningful rebellion from humans who finally get a clue and want their planet back will first gain leverage. We shouldn’t hand it to them! We need an international AI containment treaty. WE need it now. It is even more urgent than any climate accord. A short list of things we should include in it are: AI is not a traditional product. It requires novel regulation. Government policy must “overreach” compared to previous engagement with the free market. Infrastructural systems should not be administered or accessed by AI. This includes electrical grids, air traffic systems, ground traffic systems, sanitary systems, water, weapons systems, nuclear facilities, satellites, communications. This is not a complete list, but enough to communicate the idea. AI must not fly. AI must not be integrated into domestic or military aircraft of any kind. Any AI aircraft is an uncontrolled weapon. AI must not operate ground vehicles. Self-driving cars operated by today’s AI systems may present as safer and more reliable than human operators, but a superintelligence-controlled fleet of vehicles is indistinguishable from a hostile fleet. Self-driving civilian vehicles and mass-transportation systems must fall under new and unique regulation. Military vehicles must not be controlled by AI. AI must not operate any sea vehicles. Same as above. AI must not be given robot bodies. Robotics must be strongly regulated. Even non-ambulatory robotic systems — like the sort that operate automobile assembly plants — could present a meaningful danger to humanity if not fully controlled by humans. The linchpin of the AI 2027 report is an uncontrolled population of AI-embodied robots. Much of the endstage forecast of the AI 2027 report reads like science fiction. In fact, the report itself categorizes concepts as science fiction, but as time progresses, all of them move into what the research team considers as either currently existent or “emerging tech.” In other words, like all science fiction, the sci-fi tech becomes established — that’s what makes for science fiction worldbuilding. But for now, it’s still science-fiction. The mistake, though, would be to conclude that therefore, its narrative is implausible, unlikely, or impossible. Nearly every technological initiative of my lifetime has been the realization of something previously imagined in fiction. That’s not going to stop now. Too many people are already earning too much money creating AI and robots. That will not stop on its own. In the early aughts, my timeline was often filled entirely by the serious concerns of privacy Cassandras. They were almost entirely mocked and ignored, despite being entirely right. They worried that technology created to “connect the world’s information” would not exclude information that people considered private, and that exposure would make people vulnerable to all kinds of harms. We built it all anyway, and were gaslit into redefining privacy on a cultural scale. It was a terrible error on the part of governance and a needlessly irreversible capitulation on the part of the governed. We cannot do that again.

Composition Speaks Before Content When I was a young child, I would often pull books off of my father’s shelf and stare at their pages. In a clip from a 1987 home video that has established itself in our family canon — my father opens our apartment door, welcoming my newborn little sister home for the first time. There I stood, waiting for his arrival, in front of his bookshelves, holding an open book. From behind the camera, Dad said, “There’s Chris looking at the books. He doesn’t read the books…” I’m not sure I caught the remark at the time, but with every replay — and there were many — it began to sting. The truth was I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I did know my Dad was right — I wasn’t reading the books. Had I known then what I know now, I might have shared these words, from the artist Piet Mondrian, with my Dad: “Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.” — Piet Mondrian For most of my time as a working designer, this has absolutely been true, though I wasn’t fully aware of it. And it’s possible that one doesn’t need to think this way, or even agree with Mondrian, to be a good designer. But I have found that fully understanding Mondrian’s point has helped me greatly. I no longer worry about how long it takes me to do my work, and I doubt my design choices far less. I enjoy executing the fundamentals more, and I feel far less pressure to conform my work to current styles or overly decorate it to make it stand out more. It has helped me extract more power from simplicity. This shift in perspective led me to a deeper question: what exactly was I responding to in those childhood encounters with my father’s books, and why do certain visual arrangements feel inherently satisfying? A well-composed photograph communicates something essential even before we register its subject. A thoughtfully designed page layout feels right before we read a single word. There’s something happening in that first moment of perception that transcends the individual elements being composed. Mondrian understood this intuitively. His geometric abstractions stripped away all representational content, leaving only the pure relationships between lines, colors, and spaces. Yet his paintings remain deeply compelling, suggesting that there’s something fundamental about visual structure itself that speaks to us — a language of form that exists independent of subject matter. Perhaps we “read” composition the way we read text — our brains processing visual structure as a kind of fundamental grammar that exists beneath conscious recognition. Just as we don’t typically think about parsing sentences into subjects and predicates while reading, we don’t consciously deconstruct the golden ratio or rule of thirds while looking at an image. Yet in both cases, our minds are translating structure into meaning. This might explain why composition can be satisfying independent of content. When I look at my childrens’ art books, I can appreciate the composition of a Mondrian painting alongside them, even though they are primarily excited about the colors and shapes. We’re both “reading” the same visual language, just at different levels of sophistication. The fundamental grammar of visual composition speaks to us both. The parallels with reading go even deeper. Just as written language uses spacing, punctuation, and paragraph breaks to create rhythm and guide comprehension, visual composition uses negative space, leading lines, and structural elements to guide our eye and create meaning. These aren’t just aesthetic choices — they’re part of a visual syntax that our brains are wired to process. This might also explain why certain compositional principles appear across cultures and throughout history. The way we process visual hierarchy, balance, and proportion might be as fundamental to human perception as our ability to recognize faces or interpret gestures. It’s a kind of visual universal grammar, to borrow Chomsky’s linguistic term. What’s particularly fascinating is how this “reading” of composition happens at an almost precognitive level. Before we can name what we’re seeing or why we like it, our brains have already processed and responded to the underlying compositional structure. It’s as if there’s a part of our mind that reads pure form, independent of content or context. Mondrian’s work provides the perfect laboratory for understanding this phenomenon. His paintings contain no recognizable objects, no narrative content, no emotional subject matter in the traditional sense. Yet they continue to captivate viewers more than a century later. What we’re responding to is exactly what he identified: the beauty of relationships between visual elements — the conversation between lines, the tension between colors, the rhythm of spaces. Understanding composition as a form of reading might help explain why design can feel both intuitive and learnable. Just as we naturally acquire language through exposure but can also study its rules formally, we develop an intuitive sense of composition through experience while also being able to learn its principles explicitly. Looking at well-composed images or designs can feel like reading poetry in a language we didn’t know we knew. The syntax is familiar even when we can’t name the rules, and the meaning emerges not from what we’re looking at, but from how the elements relate to each other in space. In recognizing composition as this fundamental visual language, we begin to understand why good design works at such a deep level. It’s not just about making things look nice — it’s about speaking fluently in a language that predates words, tapping into patterns of perception that feel as natural as breathing. This understanding of composition as fundamental visual language has profound implications for how we approach design work. When we do this intentionally, we’re applying a kind of secret knowledge of graphic design: the best design works at a purely visual level, regardless of what specific words or images occupy the surface. This is why the “squint test” works. When we squint at a designed surface, the details are blurred but the overall structure remains visible, allowing us to see things like structure, hierarchy and tonal balance more clearly. This is a critical tool for designers; we inevitably reach a point when we need to see past the content in order to ensure that it is seen by others. No matter what I am creating — whether it is a screen in an application, a page on a website, or any other asset — I always begin with a wireframe. Most designers do this. But my secret is that I stick with wireframes far longer than most people would imagine. Regardless of how much material my layout will eventually contain is ready to go, I almost always finalize my layout choices using stand-in material. For images, that means grey boxes, for text, that means grey lines. The reason I do this is because I know that what Mondrian said is true: if it is beautiful purely on the merits of its structure, it will work to support just about any text, or any image. I can envision exceptions to this, and I’ve no doubt encountered them, but I have never felt the need to make a significant or labor-intensive structural change once a final images, colors, text, and other elements have been added in. More and more, I see designers starting with high-fidelity (i.e. fully styled) layouts or even with established components in browser, and while I don’t typically start there when asked for critical feedback, I almost always support the feedback I inevitably give by extolling the merits of wireframing. No matter what the environment, no matter what the form, establishing structure is the most important aspect of our discipline. The secret of graphic design has always been known by artists: structure does more work than content while convincing its audience of the opposite. Josef Albers said of the way he created images that they enabled a viewer to “see more than there is.” That is the mystery behind all looking — that there is always more to see than there is visible. Work with that mystery, and you’ll possess a secret that will transform your work.