Design Literacy

This fusion of obsession and insight made him more than a boat builder. Every detail served a larger vision—he was a designer of both products and the company that brought them to life.

When he built boats, he wasn’t selling fiberglass and chrome—he was selling performance, adventure, and freedom. Many customers wanted a piece of this world, drawn in by his passionate, authentic vision of what boating could be. My favorite of his taglines captures this energy: “The ultimate off-road vehicle.” The t-shirt featured a gleaming sportf... See more

These founders recognize that company design goes beyond playbooks, case studies, or podcasts. Consider how modern startups approach product development: A technically proficient team might build perfect features, but design-literate founders create experiences that make users feel something when using the product. Notion succeeded not through tech... See more

Often, we see this brilliance in early versions of products—born from founder-built brute force and passion—only to see it fade with scale. Ultimately, you are only as good as your team, so you better craft it intentionally and with heart. The company becomes your great work. The best designed of these organizations become durable as they scale and... See more

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” – Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility 1935

His gift was communicating this vision with infectious enthusiasm while maintaining craft in every detail. He spent hours equally on factory floors and at sales shows—examining the technical through to the tactile. This isn’t just perfectionism that AI could replicate; it was a distinctly human integration of engineering pragmatism, market understa... See more

Design as literacy

Design and the profession of the designer must transform from a specialist function pushing pixels into a universal attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness. We move beyond asking if designers should code to embracing design as a universal capability. This mindset adapts to any medium and isn’t focused on acquiring technical skills, tools, or ... See more

While AI can generate endless “perfect” outputs, the crucial design decisions are innately human: which questions to ask, guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and aligning execution against context and strategy. AI might generate hundreds of landing page variants, but it takes design sensibility to know which will genuinely... See more