For many years, I have maintained a text file called “A Rubric for Website Design Critique.” It is relatively short, but used nonetheless; I’ve returned to it, off and on, for most of my career, referring back, adding things, removing things, adjusting. Its purpose is to standardize how I challenge the work I do and the work I am shown, and even a standard needs maintenance. The documented rubric has five components. Of information architecture, it asks, Is the priority apparent? Does it make sense? Is it actionable? Of layout: Do the visual elements support the architecture? Is the page as scannable as a high-fidelity asset as it was a wireframe? Of accessibility: Is there adequate contrast? Has text been hidden in images? Can a screen reader properly navigate? And of visual language, Is there coherence? Is it consistent? I emphasized documented earlier because it was never complete. The fifth component is art direction, and after that heading in my document is nothing. The file just ends. It isn’t like me to leave something unfinished. I don’t like ragged edges, even when I know they’re natural and sometimes essential. And time and again over the years, I’ve had a chance to wonder at this empty space. Why is it there? Why is it difficult to fill? Perhaps I’m just not the person to fill it. Perhaps that’s where my expertise ends. However, looking again at this unfinished document recently, I have come to a different conclusion. The first four sections — Information Architecture, Layout, Accessibility, Visual Language — are inspection routines. Each one asks a question that has an answer, and the answer can — should — be able to be found by someone who is not me. Art direction is not like that. And that’s why every time I attempted to fill out structured guidance I produced a list of things I did not actually believe… and then deleted them. And so, the section remained empty, which is its own kind of answer, and not a very useful one. Here is a better attempt. Order Is the Floor The first four sections are about order. They ask whether a page is arranged so that it can be seen, perceived, and understood. That is the floor, and a great deal of professional work never gets off it. In fact, the majority of my career has been focused on getting interaction design off the floor. On my team we have run a periodic competition called The Tidiest Designer, where each person submits a composition file for inspection. We look for order, consistency, clarity, and utility. We do not do this because order alone makes design good. We do it because order is what allows good design to happen. Many beautiful, client-applauded comps have been chaotic disasters underneath their presentation modes, and not surprisingly, conflict-inducing when actually produced. Order facilitates that the promise of design becomes its function. But deeper than that, when order is our foundation, we can spend more of our critical energy on the responsible rendering of taste. Section five is that rendering. It is the point at which intent stops being organized and starts being expressed. What follows is not a set of criteria, then, but five places to stand while you look, in the order I tend to look, with a test attached to each that someone else can run. Where a test comes back “I don’t know,” that is a finding. Most designers are intuitive in their creation, which is not a bad thing. But without cross-examining, reinforcing, studying, enriching, and systematizing what begins with our intuition, we end up with something that is meaningful to us and arbitrary to everyone else. This — arbitrariness — is the most common condition of professional design work, and it is nearly invisible from the inside. The Key Every good piece of design has at least one detail that unlocks how the whole thing works. Good designers notice it immediately. Everyone else responds to it without knowing they have. It might be a rule, a crop, a single color used once, a piece of type set deliberately against the grid. Whatever it is, the rest of the composition should be clearing a path for it. A designer on my team once brought me a set of ads for a maker of high-end audio equipment, built around the idea of choice. Two arrows ran in parallel and then diverged, one rendered in color veering off to the left, the other in white, passing it before turning right. The white arrow was the key. It overpowered the bolder colored one simply by pushing further into the space, and its arc carried the eye down to the copy and the call to action. Then I noticed that its curve radius quietly echoed the skewed, rotated “o” in the client’s logotype, and that those two arrows were the only shapes in the entire ad other than text. That last part is the lesson. The key was doing three jobs at once, and everything else had gotten out of its way. The Key Test. Name the key in one sentence. Then say what the composition does to protect it. If nothing on the page is deferring to anything else, there is no key, only assembly. If you can name three, there is also no key, because three keys is zero keys. The Structure Underneath Structure does more work than content while convincing its audience of the opposite. This is the oldest secret in graphic design and painters have known it longest. Mondrian said that every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and colors and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture. I adore that because it explains why I can find inspiration in a page of text before I have read a single word. A page held up by its photography is not designed. It is dressed. It is also why I stay in wireframe far longer than most people would think reasonable, finalizing layout with grey boxes and grey lines even when the real material is sitting right there. If it is beautiful on the merits of its structure, it will hold almost any image and almost any text. The Structure Tests. The first one is a classic for graphic designers: Squint until the type turns to grey and the images turn to shapes, and see whether the hierarchy still reads. The other takes a bit more work but, I think is better: Put a grey box where the hero image is and a line of Latin where the headline is. If the design dies, the image was doing the design’s job, and the next round of content will expose it. The Point of View This is the one most design work fails, and it fails in hiding, because nothing is obviously, visually wrong. When we constantly reference existing solutions, our work gravitates toward the mean. We solve for expectations rather than needs. We optimize for recognition rather than revelation. The result is competent and anonymous, and it passes every inspection above. Restraint, on the other hand, is the visible evidence that somebody was directing. It shows up as absence, which makes it hard to credit and easy to skip. The Point of View Test. Put your design beside three others in its category and swap the logos or identifying marks. If this doesn’t break or seriously undermine your work — if your work is that interchangeable — then it has no direction. It is conventional in the truest sense. The harder version of this test is a question you really must ask at various stages of your work: What did I deliberately not do? or What is this not doing? If you cannot answer, then nothing was decided. Such a thing will age at exactly the rate of its category. And because it followed the category’s lead, it will always be behind. What It Is Saying Imagery and type say something before anyone reads a word, and what they say is frequently not what the business does. A few years ago I ran an informal study on a client’s homepage to prove a hunch. They sell technology and expertise to wineries, and they wanted to connect the heritage and craft their customers care about to the stability their technology provides. So they leaned hard on old-style typefaces and historical imagery, to make prospects feel at home. It looked really nice, but I was worried that’s all it did. Traffic was being paid for, and not enough was converting. So, I ran a transient attention test. Participants had eight seconds with the homepage, scrolling but not clicking, and then the page was closed and they were asked what stood out and what the page was for. The page said “commerce technology” and “wine brands” in scannable, plain text. And yet, every participant recalled the imagery instead — an ancient Greco-Roman tapestry — and volunteered words like “history” and “archaeology.” Not one person mentioned wine. Not one mentioned technology. The page was well written. But for its viewers, it was about the wrong thing. The Imagery Test. Give someone outside the project eight seconds to view your design. Afterward, ask what the thing they just saw was — what does the company do? what was the page for? Do not accept a paraphrase of the headline. Ask what the pictures told them. The gap between their answer and the actual business is the size of the art direction problem. Durability Good design is evergreen. The reactions I trust are the ones that survive a week, and the ones I distrust tend to arrive fastest. Anything resting on a technique currently in fashion has a short window before a browser, a platform, or simply everyone else’s adoption closes it. Both of the tests here buy the same thing at different scales: distance. A week of it shows you what belongs to this year. An hour of it shows you what belongs to the last hour of your own looking. The Dated Test. Leave the composition open in a tab and come back to it after a week, even if it has already progressed through reviews, as most things will in that time. Then, name what on it is dated to this year, and ask of each whether it is carrying an idea or just carrying a date. A composition can survive one or two decisions that belong to its moment. It does not survive being made of them. The Interval Test. This one goes after a different fragility, one that lives in your read of the work rather than in the work itself. Clutter accumulates precisely because the eye that added it has stopped seeing it. I have always found that coming back to a finished but unshared design after even just a few hours away, sometimes minutes, has resulted in needed editorial moves. What you have been staring at is porous to every other thing held on your screen or in your recent memory, and your working brain is an unwitting cheat. Breaks expose that immediately. Take enough of them and the work stops absorbing its surroundings. Preference and Judgment Taste is that combination of preference, personality, and perceived novelty that lets an observer tell your work from someone else’s. It belongs in the work. It does not belong in the verdict. I have sat in too many reviews where a real critique was offered, understood, and then dissolved by “well, we like it.” That is nice. But who cares if you like it? Does it do what it is supposed to do? Or is it possible that the things you like about it get in the way? The way through is not to suppress the reaction but to keep going after it. Name what you are responding to, then say what it is doing for the work. If it is doing nothing for the work, you have found a preference. If it is doing something, you have found a judgment, and now you have to justify it, which is the only part of design that has ever been hard. To make it somewhat easier, do not defend it. Sell it. Don’t believe the lie that “good design just works” as if it will be self-evident in the eye of the beholder and embraced without question. Nothing could be further from the truth. Good design often requires advocacy. Every rubric wants to become an inspection. In art school you always knew a critique was going nowhere when someone would ummm and ahhh, approach the piece, back away from it, approach it again, and finally ask, “is this, ummm, is this balsa wood?” They just had to say something, and what a thing is made of was the best they could do. The digital equivalent is talking about the canvas, the type foundry, the plugins, or opening the inspector. None of those are relevant to assessing a design’s quality. Sections one through four can be inspected. Section five has to be seen — by you first, and yet, outside of yourself — which takes time and, more importantly, conviction. I do not think that section five will ever be as short as the others, or as portable. It takes longer to run than all four of them combined. For years I read that as a defect in my system. But lately I have started to suspect it is the only part of the rubric that will still be worth anything in a few years, because production is becoming generative and design is not. Which leaves me somewhere I have not settled. The first four sections are the ones a machine can already run. The fifth is the one it cannot, so the fifth is where the work is going. But the fifth is also the one nobody has ever managed to teach quickly. I do not yet know whether that is a problem to solve or a fact to accept. Better yet, maybe it’s a distant horizon to embrace, because it means we have somewhere left to go. P.S. I have left creative direction out of this entirely, which is a cheat. In my own notes it sits above art direction, closer to the conceptual end of the spectrum that runs down through graphic design to the mechanics of a build. That is a different piece, and I suspect a harder one.

Signals Something new here—a weekly signal from noise, or at least I hope so. Connections drawn between things I have encountered… Something strange happens when we put a name to things. The moment “cassette futurism” or “Corporate Memphis” enters circulation, it stops being a loose collection of visual ideas and becomes a fixed category—something that can be sold, politicized, weaponized. This week, I kept encountering articles about the violence of naming: how aesthetic labels flatten complexity, how typographic choices become proxy wars, how compression algorithms create their own reality, and how AI’s expansion artifacts fill gaps with plausible nonsense. What unites these pieces isn’t just that they’re about design or technology—it’s that they all grapple with how the act of categorization itself changes what’s being categorized. Adam named the animals to establish dominion. Linnaeus classified nature to possess it. Colonial powers renamed places to erase their histories. Today, aesthetic accounts race to coin terms like “-core” to claim cultural authority, while politicians argue over fonts to signal ideological positions. The label isn’t neutral description—it’s an act of power. What’s in a Name? The Violence of Aesthetic Categorization Elizabeth Goodspeed traces how contemporary aesthetic naming has transformed from scholarly practice into participatory warfare. Once, movements either named themselves (Dada, De Stijl) or were named by critics and historians (Fauvism, Art Deco). Today, aesthetic labels emerge from “taxonomic warfare”—Discord servers, TikTok, Pinterest—where whoever names something first gains informal authority over cultural discourse. But names are “rock tumblers”: they smooth away contradictions, regional differences, and contextual specificity in favor of clean, shareable categories. The result? Visual culture becomes increasingly “keywordable,” optimized for AI image generation and algorithmic retrieval rather than historical understanding. When “indie sleaze” gets named in the 2020s to describe a 2000s aesthetic, we’re watching our recent past get flattened into nostalgic packages while we’re still around to dispute it. Goodspeed suggests that in an environment pressuring everything to become nameable and searchable, remaining “opaque”—partially unknowable—might be its own form of resistance. Everything You Eat Is Sunlight: The Dream of Becoming Autotrophs Thomas Moynihan chronicles humanity’s centuries-long ambition to escape the “messiness and immorality” of food chains by becoming like plants—organisms that create energy directly from sunlight rather than killing to eat. From Paracelsus comparing good digestion to “inner sunshine” in the 1500s, through 19th century chemists synthesizing organic compounds from inorganic materials, to Soviet cosmists imagining space-dwelling “animal-plants,” the dream of “stellivory” (sun-eating) has persisted. Today, companies like Solar Foods and Savor use energy and air to create edible protein, moving us closer to autotrophy. Moynihan frames this not just as technological progress but as moral evolution—a way to “consume available energy with maximal compassion and minimal externality.” The piece ends by suggesting that perhaps all intelligent civilizations trend sunward, that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should look for “Dyson spheres” capturing entire stars’ output, and that becoming photosynthetic might be a universal aspiration of minds everywhere. Expansion Artifacts: AI’s Opposite Problem from Compression Matt Stromawn identifies a new category of digital artifacts. While compression (JPEG, MP3) strips away imperceptible information to reduce file sizes, AI does the opposite: it inflates compressed training data back up, filling gaps with “plausible detail” that may be nonsensical or false. These “expansion artifacts” are the tells that betray AI-generated content—hedging verbs like “delve,” symmetrical jewelry that’s stylistically wrong, code that over-comments the obvious. Like compression artifacts, they double as forensic markers (Stanford researchers tracked AI-written academic papers by watching for words like “commendable” and “meticulous”). But expansion artifacts become genuinely dangerous when they compound—when one AI generation feeds into another, creating feedback loops where “the blurry JPEG gets blurrier every cycle.” As each model trains on previous models’ output, the long tail of unusual voices and challenging ideas fades, leaving “more and more room for nonsensical and false material to fill the voids between the tokens.” Cassette Futurism: Tactile Technology as Cultural Rebellion In a meditation on retro-futuristic aesthetics, this piece explores “cassette futurism”—the 1970s-1985 vision of futures built on bulky, analog, tactile technology. Films like Alien and Blade Runner, shows like Andor, and games like Alien: Isolation embrace CRT monitors, physical buttons, reel-to-reel tapes, and amber-lit screens. But this isn’t mere nostalgia. The appeal lies in functionality, durability, and repair culture—technology you can understand, fix, and control. In Star Wars, there’s no WiFi; you must physically plug into systems. Today, as streaming services multiply and physical media ownership dissolves, cassette futurism represents resistance to a world where “you own nothing and pay everything.” Gen Z’s embrace of vinyl, cassettes, and DVDs isn’t performative trend but “cultural rebellion”—a rejection of digital burnout and inescapable subscriptions. The warm glow of beige CRTs and the satisfying click of mechanical switches offer comfort against today’s “unforgiving black and silver” minimalism. Perhaps cassette futurism is how we fight back. Serif Populism: When Typography Becomes Culture War Silvio Lorusso dissects how design choices have become proxies for political identity in the Trump era. When Cracker Barrel replaced its 50-year-old hand-drawn logo with a “proper” corporate redesign, the backlash was so severe the company reversed course within a week, costing $100 million. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio switched the State Department back to Times New Roman from Calibri, it was framed as restoring “decorum” but read as anti-woke gesture. Lorusso identifies two aesthetic camps: “Corporate Memphis” (flat illustration, sans-serif fonts, pastel colors) aligned with progressive tech companies and DEI initiatives, and “Serif Populism” (traditional typography, ornament, warmth) embraced by MAGA as “honest work” against elite simplification. Neither is coherent—tech CEOs now praise Trump, the MAGA hat is made in China—but the aesthetic coding persists. In our “hyperpolitical” moment where “everything becomes politicized and nothing gets accomplished,” design artifacts become battlegrounds precisely because actual policy debates have dissolved into cultural performance. Beyond Medium: AI as Collaborator, Not Tool Dyske Asakura argues that AI fundamentally differs from “machines” as the Industrial Revolution defined them. Traditional machines solve deterministic problems—same inputs always yield same outputs. AI doesn’t simply extend us as McLuhan’s “medium” suggests; it does things we cannot do, making it more like a collaborator than a tool. You don’t “offload” work to a PhD student—they’re capable of things you’re not. AI will dominate domains with measurable outcomes (making money, curing cancer) because performance can be quantified and optimized. But in purely subjective domains like art, AI will only ever be “as good as humans” because there’s no objective measure of whether it has outperformed us. As AI commodifies problem-solving intelligence, we may be forced toward activities where “the point is not efficiency or correctness, but the act itself”—art not as solution to a problem but as compulsion to produce, valued for the making rather than the outcome. Currents Rising: Opacity as resistance—the right to remain unknowable rather than fully categorized and searchable Setting: The myth of “proper logo design”—as cultural production escapes professional gatekeeping, designerly orthodoxy loses authority Color: Beige (#F5F5DC)—the warm, analog comfort of cassette futurism’s CRT glow against Corporate Memphis pastels and modern black-and-silver sterility Sound: Pet Shop Boys - “It’s a Sin” (1987)—the synth-pop track that closes the Intergalactic trailer, pure cassette futurism aesthetic made audible Sight: Alien: Isolation (2014)—a video game that understood how integral lo-fi, tactile technology is to creating lived-in futures Words: “Names are rock tumblers. They turn rough, mismatched objects with a few shared characteristics into a smooth, homogenous pile that easily slides through your fingers.” —Elizabeth Goodspeed

This is something I say in the course of nearly every conversation I have with every agency design team I consult. I remind them, over and over again, that marketing is two kinds of persuasion: FIRST, persuading a person to actually pay attention, and THEN, persuading them of the thing you think is important. Most messages never reach people, not because they’re poorly articulated, but because they don’t get past peoples’ attention filters. With that in mind, no matter how long or complicated your message may be, design it to be scanned. Our job is to communicate the most valuable information given the least attention, so if we can give a person who ONLY scans our information some value, the likelihood that they will slow down and actually read it all grows. Here’s another 80/20 framing–80% of your audience will never do more than scan your information; 20% will go on to read it. That doesn’t make it futile to communicate, it just changes where you put the information. The better your design, the more 20 percenters you will earn. In other words, if it’s not scannable, it might still be readable, but it probably won’t get read.