I use the word “cool” constantly. In critiques. In writing. When I’m trying to explain why something works or doesn’t.

“That’s cool.” “Wouldn’t it be cooler if…” “That’s weirdly cool.”

It’s shorthand. A lazy word doing a lot of heavy lifting. It stands in for a thousand micro-preferences I make every day without fully articulating them. And for a long time I let it stay vague, because vague felt fine.

But the longer I work in design, the more I’ve realized that vague is useless. When I tell a client I want something to feel “cooler,” I’m asking them to trust an instinct I haven’t bothered to explain. When I push back on a direction because it doesn’t feel cool enough, I’m making a judgment call I can’t always explain. That’s a problem.

So I started pulling the word apart. Asking myself what I actually mean when I reach for it. Because the more clearly I can explain why something is cool, the better my chances are of learning from it, borrowing from it, and recreating it on purpose instead of by accident.

Here’s what I found. Cool isn’t one thing. It has strains. Versions. Each with its own logic, its own examples, and its own traps. Seven of them, as far as I can tell.

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classically cool

This one has to come first and probably requires the least explanation. It's the timeless things. The stuff that's worked for decades and still works now. My definition of this type of cool is decidedly Americanized: white tees, Levi's, Chucks, Wayfarers. Basically 50s-60s ephemera. The first foray into graphic design I ever had was going to the local antique mall in Canyon Country and buying vintage LIFE magazines. I'd scan the ads and make these collages. This is where I got my first education in this version of cool. In editorial layouts and ads with big bold black and red type.

This kind of cool doesn’t follow trends because it came before them. It’s the source material. The thing everyone else keeps remixing. Post-war Americana, with military grit and a Hollywood polish. Steve McQueen, Elvis, Buddy Holly, James Dean.

It’s often about restraint. Fewer moves, bolder decisions. The trap here is wanting to improve it. To modernize it. To “put a spin on it.” The whole point is that you don’t. The moment you start tinkering, you usually make it worse. This kind of cool survives because people know when to leave it alone.

currently cool

I kind of hate this one, but it’s crucial to list. It’s whatever is hot right now. The thing everyone seems to agree on at the same time.

This kind of cool is powered by novelty. It feels exciting because it’s new and communal. Everyone’s in on it together. That’s the appeal. It creates a shared language, even if it only lasts a moment.

But it always has an expiration date. Three months later it feels tired. A year later it feels like a timestamp. That’s the deal you’re making when you chase it. And as trends ascend from obscurity to the pages of Shein at an increasingly fast clip, watching brands scramble to make their version of the same wave is getting harder to watch.

This is where designers usually get burned. By the time you’ve adopted what’s Currently Cool, it’s already shifting. The trick isn’t to avoid it entirely. It’s knowing when to ride the wave and when to let it pass without touching it. Most trends are better admired than written in stone.

confidently cool

This one is the truest essence of the word. Confidence is fundamentally cool. It makes a choice and stands behind it. No hedging, no apology. Cool that comes from conviction more than aesthetics.

Confidently Cool doesn’t care if you understand it. It’s not trying to win you over. It’s just doing the thing it believes in and letting the right people find it.

This is my favorite kind of cool to design for because it requires belief. It’s also the hardest.

There’s a thin line between confidence and arrogance. Taste is the difference. When the choice is good, confidence makes it stronger. When the choice is bad, confidence makes it tone-deaf.

curiously cool

This one is so sick. Driven by input over output. Always poking around. Always asking questions. Cool because the person behind it actually cares. It’s easy to be a fan of someone Curiously Cool. You get to live vicariously through their explorations.

Predicated on a love of research, process, and collecting, this is the type of cool that favors the journey over the destination.

Curiously Cool is nerdy in the best way. It’s earned. You can feel the difference between someone who’s genuinely curious and someone who’s trying to look interesting. One accumulates naturally. The other feels forced.

The more you explore, the more dots you find to connect. The more dots you connect, the more expansive your taste gets.

This is the one I’m trying to be most aligned with. My process is basically curiosity with a job title. Collecting references. Trying things just to see what happens. Following instincts down paths that don’t obviously connect. That’s where the energy comes from.

completely cool

A full universe. A subculture with its own rules, language, history, and hierarchies. You don’t need to be part of it to recognize it. It’s cool because it’s complete.

Lowriders. Hardcore. Skateboarding. Tiki. D&D. Furries. Disney adults. Japanese cutlery. If the outside world thinks any of these are uncool, it somehow makes them even cooler to me. The more specific they get, the cooler they get.

Completely Cool has structure, even if outsiders don’t see it. There are purists and tourists, and the difference is obvious. There’s lineage. Legends. Language. Deep references that only have meaning if you’ve put the time in. This is true fandom. It offers real belonging in a world that’s increasingly short on it.

The dedication is impossible to ignore. You can’t half-step into it. You’re either in or you’re not.

As a designer, this is something to study, not imitate. You can reference it, borrow from it, learn from it; but you can’t fake your way inside. There aren’t many subcultures left in the traditional sense. The internet flattened most of them. These are as close as it gets.

creatively cool

Pioneers. Visionaries. Cool that comes from making something genuinely new. Not a remix. Not a clever reference. Something that couldn’t have existed before the person who made it.

This one is really hard to write about because it’s so rare. We live in a collage culture, where everything is a chopped and screwed take on the past. But every once in a while something hits that feels uniquely new. You don’t even have to like it. You just know it changed something. Chuck Berry, Kanye, Brian Wilson, George Lucas, Brian Eno, David Lynch, Nirvana, Sam Hunt, Andy Warhol.

You know it immediately because it stops you. You don’t always understand it right away, but you know you’re seeing something new. The danger is trying too hard to get there. The moment you chase originality, it slips away. It only shows up when you follow an instinct honestly, not force a concept to be something it’s not.

carelessly cool

Unbothered, effortless energy. The “I didn’t think about this” look. Cool as a side effect, not a goal. Seemingly accidental.

The unique swagger of Japanese construction workers, the sloppy chord progressions of garage rock, the careless appeal of Adam Sandler’s absurd fits. This kind of cool only works when it’s real. The attitude is the appeal.

In the book Ametora by W. David Marx, there’s a chapter about a group of Japanese menswear enthusiasts traveling to the US to document and interview Ivy League college students about their style (the photos from this trip were eventually published in the now-canonized menswear bible Take Ivy). They arrived only to find that these kids didn’t think twice about what they wore. Outfits were just thrown on, a mix of worn-in hand-me-downs and athletic wear, worn nonchalantly. The Japanese kids were baffled to learn there were no rules. Which is exactly what made it so cool.

Brands try to manufacture this constantly. “Effortless style.” “Undone elegance.” But you can’t design carelessness. The attempt cancels it out.

The only way to achieve Carelessly Cool is to stop trying. Which is advice that’s completely useless if you’re reading an essay about cool.

so what?

The red thread that ties all of these together is conviction. You can’t dictate how your work will be received. What you can dictate is how invested you are in it.

One of the truest things I’ve learned is that interested people are interesting. The more you love, the more you collect, the more you travel, the more you ask, the richer your flavor profile gets.

Truth, confidence, and curiosity are crucial to being an effective creator in any sense of the word. Be infectious with your interests. Go down the rabbit hole and see where it leads. Dive head-first into a fandom. The least cool thing you can do is think you’re too cool for something. You do not have it all figured out. Stop performing and find joy in being a student.

I try to channel Curiously Cool in the process, Confidently Cool in the execution, and Classically Cool in the reference pool. Figure out your combination. That’s your voice.

And remember, there’s no “conventionally cool” category for a reason. Convention is just the median. Go off the beaten path. It’s the only one worth exploring.

cheat codes for understanding cool

the red thread is conviction
You can’t dictate how your work is received. You can dictate how invested you are in it. That’s the only cool you can control.

cool isn't one thing, it's many
Classically, Currently, Confidently, Curiously, Completely, Creatively, Carelessly. They each have different logic and different traps.

interested people are interesting
The more you love, collect, travel, and ask, the richer your flavor profile gets. Curiosity compounds.

the endless education
The least cool thing you can do is think you’re too cool for something. You do not have it all figured out. Find joy in being a student.

figure out your combination
Curiously Cool in the process. Confidently Cool in the execution. Classically Cool in the reference pool. Or something else entirely. That’s your voice.

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But it’s also proof that a person is there, interacting with the instrument. That human imperfection is what makes the recording feel alive. It is, quite literally, the musician’s fingerprint on the track.

In design, the same principle holds: the moments of irregularity, the off-center, the smudged ink are the parts that make you lean closer. We see ourselves in those imperfections. They feel more relatable.

In an era where AI models polish, perfect, and standardize our every move, the presence of human fingerprints isn’t just charming. It’s becoming the last true marker of taste, style, and craft.

redesigning our values

For most of history, you could understand the intrinsic value of an object. The skillful brushstrokes were staring back at you. The hand-crafted mechanics of a chair were proudly displayed. Then the Industrial Revolution changed everything. Mass production taught us to trust consistency over craft. Post-war advertising trained us to worship sameness.

No one depicted this better than Warhol, whose career was essentially a thesis statement on this consumer revolution. He observed, critiqued, admired, and ultimately partook in our collective obsession with iconography and mass production.

Now, on the dawn of another AI-driven revolution, we’ve become accustomed to ever-present assistance. We don’t just have spellcheck. We have tone checkers, layout suggestions, color palette generators, auto-retouching, and programs that can create artwork from scratch with basic prompting.

The baseline keeps getting shinier, faster. Which means our definition of premium has to move. We spent decades chasing perfection. But now that perfection is handed to us instantly, the work that feels most premium is the work that feels human.

you can see it everywhere

Chicago-based Caleb Vanden Boom just made a poster for Cameron Winter’s shows at Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago. He referenced the architecture of the venue by engraving the design into a fucking stone tablet, then created 75 hand-made wax rubbings of that stone. Each was unique, using a technique that dates back to 100AD.

Think about that process. He could’ve designed it in Illustrator, sent it to a printer, and had 500 perfect copies in two days. Instead, he carved rock. Then rubbed wax on paper. One at a time. Expensive. Inefficient. Labor-intensive as hell. And that’s exactly why it feels artful. A computer would never propose extra steps that aren’t “needed.” People do that.

This fall, Cracker Barrel attempted to 'modernize' its perfectly weird logo. Within days, the backlash was so intense they rolled it back. This mistake has been made a dozen times in the last few years: in the rush to look contemporary, brands erase the oddities that make them feel human. The fingerprints are the very thing people yearn for.

As the standard design process becomes increasingly automated, the signal of human authorship becomes scarce. And scarcity creates value.

why imperfection reads as premium

Perfection reads as a pattern. Patterns are safe, but they don’t feel alive. What we respond to is the natural, the organic, the unpredictable. In music, a studio-polished track with every micro-noise removed sounds like no one, because no one is perfect. The same thing happens in design. When a piece is polished to the point of sterility, it feels like no one made it.

Around 2018–2019, the “blanding” of brand identities began to break. Texture started to creep back in. Photography left the studio and returned to real life. Handwriting reappeared. After years of “visually optimizing” for perfect app icons and crisp social feeds, brands realized they’d overcorrected and scrubbed away their personality. The result wasn’t only sterile. It was deeply unrelatable.

People wanted work that showed fingerprints.

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breaking in a digital image

Now, we go to great lengths to infuse humanity into digital media. Designers print artwork on a toner xerox and scan it back in just to lean into the character it brings. We add ink bleed, noise, and texture so the file doesn’t attempt perfection.

In photography, we chase the warmth of film, the light leaks of disposables, the creamy saturation of Portra 400. Gen-Z has fetishized early-2000s digital point-and-shoot cameras. Blown-out overexposure, sharp immediacy, high-flash energy. The irony: we’re shooting on film to post on phones. The medium changed, but the hunger for texture didn’t.

Film demand has roughly doubled in recent years. Kodak is raising prices while expanding capacity. Pentax launched a new 35mm camera in 2024. A brand-new auto-focus film camera called Analogue is launching its first product early next year. Analog photography isn’t nostalgia alone. It’s a living market.

learning from references, not just flipping them

I collect old matchbooks, manuals, stickers, patches. When you zoom in on vintage printing, you see what makes it interesting: ink bleeds because the press was running fast, misregistration creates accidental highlights, uncoated paper warms the palette. These aren't random flaws. They're artifacts of constraint. You can recreate that feeling without faking vintage: print one element, mark it by hand, scan it back in. Every real-world constraint you keep is a kind of string squeak.

the value of being “ownable”

Brand designers love to talk about what is or isn’t “ownable.” If your wordmark is set in a popular typeface, you’re easy to rip off. If your symbol is simple geometry, it’s hard to stand out. The easiest path to distinction is the oldest one: a unique signature.

By “signature” I don’t necessarily mean literal handwriting. I mean a signature way of doing things. The way you stitch your hang tags. The way you only use high-flash photography. A super lean color palette. Any repeatable, unique decision the audience can pick up on.

More and more, I bake in imperfection as the signature move. I’ll add small “mistakes” on purpose: handwriting, texture, a headline set a hair off level. A logo that’s too clean can appear as if it was created in a vacuum. Give it a little birthmark, and suddenly you want to get to know it.

The point is not mess for mess’s sake. It’s about friction. Friction is cool. Cool is confidence. Confidence carries feeling. After living in a world of mass production and aesthetically “perfect” products, people want something that’s a little fucked up and weird that they can tell a cool story about at a dinner party. Let’s be real.

keep ‘em running in a zigzag

Texture is one way to add character. Process is a deeper one. If your path from brief to layout is perfectly logical, it’s easy to follow and easy to copy. Keep one intentional zigzag in your process.

When choices feel automatic, do something you wouldn’t do. Stop thinking about it, just run with it. In music, this is recording a perfect take and then choosing the one where the mic caught a breath between lines.

The balance matters. Too weird reads self-absorbed. Too tidy reads replaceable. The sweet spot is where the real sauce is. You should constantly nod to the legacy of your craft while coloring outside the lines and scribbling your initials into it.

why patina wins

You see the same appetite in clothing. Vintage clothing carries a story, so it holds value beyond the fabric. New garments chase that feeling with garment dye, enzyme wash, sun-faded palettes. We want objects that seem to remember something.

When I’m working on something, my end-of-project question is simple: Have we worn the new off this yet? Not ruined it, not aged it into costume. Just taken the showroom glare down to a human sheen.

The same dynamic drives how we design for social channels. We’re hyper-trained to know when we’re being sold to. A glossy ad looks like a #ad, so we scroll past. That’s why creators lean into casual, imperfect, almost amateur aesthetics: it signals humanity. No puppet master, just a person. Lo-fi, native-feeling posts often outperform polished assets, especially on platforms like TikTok.

the only thing worth listening for

When a guitarist slides between chords, you hear the squeak of their fingers on the strings. That sound isn’t the music. It’s the proof someone made it.

Perfection is cheap now. AI hands us “flawless” outputs instantly. What’s scarce, what’s premium, is the mark that proves a person was there. The smudge, the string squeak, the uneven edge. These aren’t flaws. They’re signals of authorship.

When everything can be polished into sameness, it’s the fingerprints that make something feel alive, ownable, and worth remembering.

Keep your fingerprints messy. Let people hear you move.

cheat codes for leaving fingerprints

perfection is cheap, humanity is premium
AI hands you flawless on command. What’s scarce now is proof you got the sauce yourself.

inefficiency is a luxury
The extra step, the detour, the zigzag in the process. It’s wasteful by machine standards and life-affirming by human ones.

audiences trust flaws more than polish
People revolt when fingerprints are erased. They lean in when they can see the character.

nothing’s cool til’ you wear the new off
Perfectly polished reads as sterile. Add some intentional funk or squeak to show you were there.

real fingerprints build connection; fake flaws burn it
Texture only works if it’s authentic. Manufactured mess feels like cosplay. Do it tastefully or it’ll look lame.

You’d go on Thursday to buy an outfit, then wear that outfit back to the same mall the next night; not to shop, really, but to loiter, roam, fuck with security guards, talk to your crush, and eat pretzel. Shopping wasn’t just about buying shit; it was about feeling out who you wanted to become.

The mall felt like a theme park, the hallways were its central hub, and the stores were all different lands.

That entertaining landscape is gone. And something bigger went with it.

Retail is way less theatrical now. Subculture is way harder to define. And the people we used to look up to — movie stars, rock stars, rappers, pro skaters — have been replaced by “relatable” kids on TikTok. Somewhere along the way, we stopped aspiring upward and started optimizing for achievable sameness.

This post is about what we lost; in the mall, in the mirror, and in the culture, when everything got more accessible and therefore far less imaginative.

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the architecture of identity

You could feel the difference even as a kid.

The entrance to Hot Topic looked like the gates to hell — black metal archway, horror movie merch, and Linkin Park blaring at full blast. Inside was a wall-to-wall sampler of subcultures: band tees, stud belts, that cool neon silicone spiky jewelry, leathery goth shit, guages, and whatever else your parents hated. I remember once complimenting a guy’s stud belt behind the register. He didn’t even look up. Just muttered, “Yeah… it’s just a lifestyle.” That actually happened. I’ll never forget it.

On the other end of the mall was Hollister — the opposite in every way. It didn’t even look like a store. It looked like a beach house: wooden porch, shuttered windows, slow spinning ceiling fans, surfboards leaned casually in the corner, vintage California flags, and worn-in leather couches. It smelled like sunscreen. It sounded like the OC soundtrack. It was aspirational in a different register — less aggressive, more ambient. But just as curated.

Even Abercrombie felt like a portal. The shirtless greeters. The dim lighting. The clubby music. It was a brand built on exclusion, sure, but it had a clear point of view. These stores were trying to say something. And more importantly, they were building a world around what they sold. The polo didn’t matter; the vibe did. If you fell in love with the brand world, the product just felt like a souvenir.

shopping was performative

The mall was a stage, but not in the theatrical sense — more like a looping audition. Every store had a different character to play, and you walked through trying on new accents.

I’d walk into Anchor Blue, and suddenly want bleached tips and a chain wallet.
At Abercrombie, I’d always feel suddenly underdressed — and poor.
At PacSun, I’d feel like a poser who wished I could land a heel flip.

Even the stores you never actually bought anything from had an effect on you. Each one held a kind of magnetic field — a scent, a soundtrack, a lighting temperature, a logo treatment — that shaped how you saw yourself. You couldn’t help but respond. You were constantly pinging off these signals, checking your reflection in every mirrored surface, slowly assembling a version of yourself from all the pieces they offered.

And the wildest part? None of it was ironic.

the decline of cool

Retail didn’t flatten on its own. Culture changed first.

We used to idolize people who felt larger than life; Travis Barker, Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, Lizzie McGuire, Pharrell, Iverson, Gordo, Brad Pitt, Chad Muska. They weren’t relatable (execpt for Lizzie, and Gordo :). That was the point. They were giving you something to chase. Something to become. And to pick up style cues from them made you feel larger than life, too.

Now, we look up to people who look just like us. The most influential people on the internet are 22-year-olds with ring lights, Stanley cups, and morning routines. Their power comes from proximity. From being “just like you.”

That shift — from aspiration to accessibility — changed everything.

Once your idols become indistinguishable from your peers, you stop dreaming upward. You start mirroring sideways. The mall used to offer identities. Now it just offers content-wear. Safe, familiar, algorithm-friendly, and just different enough that you need to buy it.

The brands and their stores followed.

what happened?

E-commerce made shopping easier, faster, and cheaper — which meant the mall stopped being necessary. You didn’t need to drive across town to buy a band tee anymore. You could get ten online, with free shipping, and have them show up before the weekend.

But this convenience came at a cost. Once shopping became screen-based, stores lost their edge — and their purpose. The mall wasn’t just where you bought stuff. It was where you went to feel things. To wander, to flirt, to become someone else for an afternoon.

Online shopping didn’t just kill foot traffic — it broke the spell. And without an audience to entertain, most brands stopped performing.

branding got scared too

You don’t even have to walk into the stores to see the sameness — just look at the logos.

Over the last 15 years, nearly every major youth retailer rebranded, and they all rebranded the same way. Out went the mascots, serif fonts, and expressive type treatments. In came minimalist sans-serifs, fashion-house drab, and black wordmarks. It was an aesthetic cleanse — but instead of clarifying their identity, it erased it. Look what they did to our boys!

What once said “this is who we are” now just says “we’re still here.”

But this flattening wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t just bad taste or creative apathy. It was strategic.

aaron levine

Before we get too deep into the speed thing, I need to shout out Aaron Levine — the creative force behind the momentary reinvention of mall brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, Club Monaco, Madewell, and more. Aaron is an incredible menswear designer whose passion for product shows up in every project he touches. He has a rare ability to inject personal cool into clothes that still feel universal, wearable, timeless, and flexible.

From 2016 to 2021, he led Abercrombie’s design transformation as SVP of menswear — helping steer the brand away from its exclusionary Ivy League-prep past and into a new era of modern classics. There was a glimmer of hope. I personally spent way too much money at A&F during those years. The vibe was sharp, confident, and unusually fire for a dusty mall brand. When he left, you could feel the shift almost immediately.

(For raw and uncut Aaron Levine pieces, shop his personal label.)

What replaced that era had nothing to do with style or intention; it had everything to do with speed.

speed replaced style

In the wake of Levine’s direction, Abercrombie didn’t just focus on chasing trends. It reengineered how its clothes are made.

The company continued to rebuild its internal pipeline — collapsing the walls between trend forecasting, merchandising, and development. The goal wasn’t to improve taste. It was to accelerate. If something snapped on TikTok, Abercrombie could get a version of it into stores in weeks instead of months.

They called it “listening to the customer.” But really, it meant letting TikTok lead. Style stopped being something the brand declared — it became something they echoed, in real time.

“Social platforms have made everyone a trend forecaster — and brands are terrified of being even two weeks behind.”
— The Business of Fashion

That shift didn’t just reposition Abercrombie. It reshaped the entire mall. Once they proved that speed could outperform originality, every other brand followed. The goal wasn’t to invent a silhouette or hone a style. It was to be the second one to sell it, and the first to sell it at an accessible price point, and the fastest to restock it once it went full mainstream.

That’s how every store ends up carrying the same auto-shop-style-cropped-button-up-work-shirt. It’s not a coincidence. It’s what the internet asked for — and once speed becomes the metric, risk disappears. Risk slows you down.

The cycle itself isn’t new — but the pace is. What used to take months now happens seemingly overnight. And I honestly wonder what kind of “vintage” this process will leave behind. What gets remembered when style is just whatever jumped from your feed to your mall the fastest? Rough stuff…

the death of retail imagination

Walk through most mall stores today and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the next begins.

The lighting is flat and cold.
The racks are overstuffed with duplicates.
The playlists blare full-length versions of TikTok clips (i.e. songs).
The staff doesn’t look up, help, or even exist. (Self-checkout is becoming increasingly common.)

These aren’t stores — they’re fulfillment centers.

And the reason they feel that way is structural.

When speed and flexibility are your core values, it’s impossible to build a store with any specific mood or personality. You can’t anchor the space in a style, because the style will change next month. You can’t immerse the customer in a beach house if “beach” isn’t trending anymore. You need to be able to gut the set and re-stage every six weeks.

The faster the product turns over, the more neutral the backdrop has to be.
Style becomes a moving target, so the store itself has to stand perfectly still.

Without romance, the only thing left to sell is product, speed, and price.

This is how you end up with “entire outfit for $27.99” signage.
The sale is the brand. The mall, once a moodboard you could walk through, becomes a hallway of interchangeable responses to the same style conundrum.

romance still exists — just not for most people

For my birthday this year, I bought myself a Bottega bag. And while I love the bag, what really stayed with me was the experience.

The store was quiet. Not empty — just intentional. The lighting was soft and golden. The materials — wood, leather, stone — felt warm and full of character. The interior featured a contemporary take on Mayan Revival architecture. A sales associate asked for my name, remembered it later, offered me a sparkling water, and spoke to me like a person, not just a customer.

I told her I was browsing while waiting for my Cheesecake Factory buzzer to go off. We laughed about the high/low of it all. Hahahah! She asked me about my personal style, what I was looking for, and how I wanted the piece to fit into my life. (I’d primarily use it to smuggle popcorn into AMC). The bag I wanted wasn’t in stock, but she promised to track one down and have it shipped from another location as quickly as possible. Over the next few days, she stayed in close contact via text, updating me on where it was in transit.

When it arrived, she called me back into the store. The bag came in an absurdly oversized box, wrapped in brilliant green packaging — and tucked inside was a handwritten birthday card.

Along with it? A Cheesecake Factory gift card.

This is what good retail still looks like. Not because it’s expensive — but because it’s designed to be remembered. It takes a stance. It creates a memory. It’s not about the product alone.

And that’s what makes the gap between experiences like this and buying a polo at the mall feel so stark. Why did the value of brand disappear everywhere but the top of the market? Why is romance now a luxury good?

here we are now, entertain us

I still believe in malls. I still believe in stores that make you feel something. I still believe in walking through a doorway and knowing exactly what kind of world you’ve entered.

When we were growing up, the mall felt like a moodboard you could walk through. You’d ping from store to store, catching glimpses of who you might become. Every entrance was a choice. Every product was a prop. The stores didn’t just sell things — they gave you a sense of possibility.

Now we shop in rectangles. The silhouettes repeat. The signage blurs together. The soundtrack is just background noise. Each store feels like a duplicate of vibes that used to matter — stripped of identity, designed for speed.

The clothes themselves aren’t worse. They were never all that well made to begin with. But the context is gone. And context is what made shopping feel exciting — like an experiment, like a performance, like becoming someone new.

I don’t think that desire has disappeared. If anything, it’s stronger now. We stare at screens all day. If we’re going to leave the house and drive to a mall, we want to be transported. That’s why people love Bass Pro Shop. That’s why RH House feels like an attraction. That’s why the Ralph Lauren Mansion still draws crowds. These aren’t just stores — they’re destinations. Why can’t youth retail do that again?

And honestly, this doesn’t need to stop at retail. Dining experiences could use the same level of conviction, the same sense of set design, the same delusional commitment to world-building. But that’s for another post.

Bringing back theatrical retail isn’t about nostalgia — it’s about doing what worked. Brands used to commit to the bit. That’s what made them memorable.

Because when a store creates a mood, you don’t just buy the product. You buy the fantasy.

The store was the show. The product was a souvenir.

cheat codes

• Subculture can’t survive in a monoculture economy

• Retail without romance is just logistics

• If the product is monotonous, the only thing left to sell is price

• Luxury retail kept the theater — everyone else turned off the lights

• Style without conviction is just speed

• “Commit to the bit” is a super valuable brand strategy

• When the store is the show, the product becomes a souvenir
  

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I work alone. a lot.
But I don’t trust myself to see everything clearly all the time.

Designing alone can’t mean designing from just one perspective, and when it does, the work tends to fall flat.

Before starting my own studio, I spent years in New York at design shops like Mother, RoAndCo, Combo, Stink Studios, and Red Antler. These places were fast-paced, opinionated, and collaborative. Good ideas were sharpened through brutal critique. Bad ones? Killed before lunch.

These days, I’m designing on my own more often than not. But I’m not totally in the void.

Gus Esselstyn — my copywriter, strategist, and creative co-pilot — is my saving grace. He helps shape the story, co-directs a ton of what we make, and keeps me alive when I’m crashing out. This post would be misleading if I made it sound like I never had anyone to bounce things off. So, shoutout to Gus! Love you xx

But this post isn’t about collaboration. It’s about the stretches where I am alone. When it’s just me, deep in it, ten hours into a design file. That’s when things can start to spin out. Or land flat. Or feel derivative.

That’s when I have to dial up perspective.

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the internal roundtable

Over time, I’ve developed a cast of voices I carry into every project. It’s like Inside Out, but for design. Each character has their own taste, their own lens. This might sound unhinged. But it helps.

My little cast of characters (in no particular order):

The Critic – tasteful and ruthless. Often mean to me.
The Optimist – keeps hope alive when the file feels dead.
The Strategist – Gus’ voice, grounding the work in purpose.
The Swiss / German – clean, smart, cunty. Asks, “Is this technically correct?”
The Little Fucker – chaos, texture, noise, fingerprints.
The Marketer – checks if it lands in the real world. Kind of a square.
The Client – practical, always asking: “Is this solving my problem?”
The Purist – protects the soul of the idea.
The Audience – fresh, clueless, ready to be entertained.
The Art Director – the cool kid asking, “Does this actually look good?”

If one voice gets too loud, the work tips out of balance. Too much Swiss, and it’s sterile. Too much Fucker, and it’s illegible. Not all of them need to show up at once, but they all need to be in the mix.

Designing alone only works if you’re singing as a chorus.

the infinite note

Every once in a while, you’ll get a note that unlocks something big.

It might come from a creative director, a client, a friend, or from your own head. But when that note hits — when it makes the work better instantly — don’t just apply it and move on.

Let it sink in. Let it become a voice you carry forward.

That’s how this whole thing works. You collect useful notes over time, not just for the project at hand, but for the work forever.

A sharp piece of feedback isn’t just a quick fix; it’s a compass. If it solved a real problem once, it probably points to something deeper: a new consideration, a new instinct, a new approach. Something to test against from that point forward.

The best creatives I know don’t just hear feedback, they absorb it. They let the good notes stick. And over time, those notes become part of their own internal system. That voice gets added to the cast of characters.

Give it a few years, and your internal roundtable gets sharper. The voices get smarter. The questions get harder. And the work gets better, faster.

narrate the work

One of the best ways to sharpen your work — especially alone — is to explain it out loud.

Not just at the end. Along the way.

I do this constantly. With Gus, my fiancé, my friends. I’ll flip through a PDF or hold up my phone and say, “This is a ____ for a ____ and it’s supposed to feel like ____.” Sometimes they love it. Sometimes they say, “Yeah… I’m not seeing that.”

Even teeing it up helps. As I talk through it, I realize five things I need to fix — before they even say a word.

And if no one’s around? Export the file. Sit somewhere else. Talk to yourself. Out loud.

Explaining the work forces clarity. It untangles the logic. You catch the discrepancies. You start to hear the story forming — or falling apart.

And if you’re the one pitching it? This part is non-negotiable.

If you wait until the live presentation to hear yourself explain the work… you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’ll trip over weak spots. Hear yourself justifying instead of storytelling. That’s avoidable.

Pitching should feel like telling the truth. If you’ve talked through it already, presenting becomes easy: Here’s what I did, and why — told with clarity and conviction.

the first cut ain’t the deepest

Most projects start with a strong first hit: A layout that feels like the one. A logo that unlocks everything. A palette that shows up fully formed.

It’s tempting to build the whole project around that early dopamine buzz. But projects evolve. And that thing you loved might not survive.

You have to be willing to cut the slide you thought was the hero. Delete the logo that doesn’t scale. Drop the palette that doesn’t fit the photography.

Don’t be precious. This isn’t your last project.

“We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”
– Walt Disney

Translation: don’t treat every project like your last. The reward for good work is more work.

Fall in love with the ride — or get off the carousel.

know when to walk away

This one’s obvious but true: switch it up.
Take a break.
Go to sleep.
Change the music.
Watch a movie.
Make a little love.
Go to Disneyland.
Eat a cinnamon roll.
Exercise.

When I’m stuck, I try not to power through. I change my whole shit up. I walk away, then come back as the Client. Or the Critic. Or the Audience seeing it for the first time with fresh eyes. Or… the little fucker!

Perspective requires distance. I can’t tell you how obvious a solution can become if you shake off the dust. Distance helps you tell the difference between good-looking and actually good.

Sometimes discernment isn’t about being tasteful. It’s knowing when to step back.

applied curiosity

My friend Brian once referred to designing alone as a jarring process of zooming wayyyyy in and then waayyyyy out, over and over. Big picture, small details, repeat. If I’m lost in the sauce, I try and zoom out and move laterally for a beat. “What are some other things I’ve come in contact with that made me feel the way I want this work to feel?”

This has worked really well for me. But the key is to be as eclectic as possible with your references. I’m not talking about looking at other brands that make you feel something, I’m talking about movies, albums, places, eras, foods, wines, people — anything that elicits emotion might be helpful. Anything that helps you triangulate a mood.

Color issues? A runway look from your favorite designer might have the answers.
Layout problems? A fresh perspective might be found in the liner notes of your favorite album.
Stuck on typography? Street signs from a sleepy beach town might conjure the feeling you’re after.

This is the real job: collecting what moves you, and waiting for the right moment to use it.
Your lived experience, your memories, your swipe folder — they don’t matter unless you know how to connect the dots in a way that feels clever, not random. When a left-field reference finds a home in the project at hand, that’s not luck. That’s authorship.

Design isn’t just about making things. It’s about recognizing them.
Catching the spark when it shows up.
Trusting your taste enough to say, “It finally fits here.”

Your life is a research trip. Pay attention accordingly. I say this every week.

build your system

All of this — the voices, the notes, the restarts, the sideways references — is how you build a system. Not just to make better work, but to make it consistently.

Solo work gets easier when you're not really alone.
When you're carrying a whole cast of voices, a backlog of lessons, and a curiosity that stays turned on.

You won’t get it perfect every time. But the longer you do this, the better your instincts get. And eventually, the questions in your head become sharper than the ones in the brief.

That’s the real reward: a sharper lens that works for you. A system of your own.

cheat codes

• Design from multiple seats at the table

• Let good feedback become part of your system

• Talk it out — clarity comes from articulation

• Kill your first crush — let the work evolve

• Steal from outside the category

• Anchor everything to the original feeling
  
  

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The DTC boom flooded every aisle with clever names and contemporary branding. For a while, it was fun. Then it got exhausting. We’re in a new chapter now.

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At the same time, personalities were rising. Influencer and creator culture, for better or worse, has become mainstream. People don’t follow brands, they follow people.

So the strategy evolved. If people are tired of brands, let them have people. And let those people feed them brands.

That’s the shift I want to focus on, here: branding isn’t just trying to feel human anymore. It’s being built around actual humans—with real lives, real opinions, and real audiences.

Because people don’t want a brand to tell them what they need. They want a person to. It’s why Molly Baz’s Ayoh Mayo feels more real—more alive—than anything Hellmann’s could write on the back of a jar.

the brand is the person is the brand

The way these brands are built is fundamentally different. You’re not starting from scratch. A creator’s voice is the tone. Their closet or house sets the color palette. Their taste becomes the strategy. Their audience is the target market.

We’re not dressing up brands to feel human, we’re dressing humans up to feel like brands.

personal brands evolve like people do

Legacy brands stay in their lane. Personal brands take detours.

Tom Holland gets sober, makes a non-alc beer. Kristin Bell becomes a mom, so she starts a brand for moms. Drake’s addicted to gambling, so… Stake!

These aren’t pivots. They’re arcs.

Take Paige Lorenze. Her brand Dairy Boy is a shoppable diary. She moved from the city to Southport, Connecticut, and her wardrobe followed. You’re not just buying a hoodie. You’re buying her current ~aesthetic~. It's metropolitan pastoral; it's her.

That’s the play: build a world, then sell what fits inside it. Products should feel like a natural extension.

Because when your life is a research trip, your business becomes a reflection of where you’ve been, and where you’re headed. You go viral for your travel vlog, you make luggage. You buy a house, you make home goods. Your kid picks up tennis, you make kids’ tennis apparel. It’s not random. It’s responsive. It’s believable. It’s story. People loooove story.

branding across platforms, not products

The old goal was just consistency across SKUs and marketing. However, with a personal brand that spans a portfolio of different products, there is a new requirement. You have to define the connective tissue that combines everything with your name on it. Flexible enough to grow, specific enough to be unmistakable.

Your podcast should feel like your Instagram. Your merch should echo your tweets.

New brand architecture looks more like this:

• A scroll-stopping (and sell-able) presence

• A flexible but strong aesthetic

• A personality that permeates everything you do

hollywood paused. creators didn’t.

While the old content machine stalled, creators kept shipping.

Film production in Los Angeles fell by over 40% during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, with the industry losing an estimated $5 billion. Streaming growth has stalled, and audiences are burnt out on reboots.

But online? Millions of hours are posted every day. People making things. Not companies.

People who know their audience, people with a voice, people who get that brand is the bridge between who they are and how they make money.

Creators aren’t replacing actors. They’re replacing channels. They create content and sell the ad space.

legacy brands are just distribution now

Big brands aren’t driving culture anymore. They’re latching onto it.

Their best plays come from people who already have the crowd:

• Emily Mariko × Our Place

• Emma Chamberlain × Levi’s

• Hailey Bieber × Krispy Kreme

• Arvin Olano × Rugs USA

• Tinx × Tabasco

• Alix Earle × Forever 21

The brands aren’t manufacturing cool anymore. They’re leasing it.

Which is why personal brand matters so much. If it’s clear, consistent, and distinct, you become the asset they want to rent. Selling out is no longer a bad thing; it’s applauded. It’s how we support our favorite creators.

we’ve seen it up close

This isn’t a theory. It’s my job.

We worked with Alex Cooper to rebrand Call Her Daddy, design the Unwell Network, and create the beverage brand Unwell for Nestlé. Then we translated it to IRL, by creating the full identity for Call Her Daddy: The Unwell Tour—merch, marketing, even stage design. All anchored in who Alex is and what she stands for.

We worked with Kendall to define the art direction, launch strategy, and merch line for 818 Tequila. We also helped Mel Robbins launch her first national tour with a brand that reflects her message and how far it’s come.

These projects cut across industries. But they share one thing:

When the brand is built around a person, everything clicks. The decisions get sharper. The spin-offs make sense. And the audience actually cares.

We’ve watched personal brands grow into something way bigger than the person behind them.

the long game

Creator-led brands clearly work. The question is, can they last?

There are signs that they can:

• Skims is leaning on celebrity-heavy marketing, so it won’t need to rely so heavily on Kim.

• Clooney’s Casamigos sold for a billion and still dominates as the original celebrity brand template.

• Mr. Beast is stacking product empires (despite looking so fucking evil) because kids watch him more than Nickelodeon.

• Chamberlain Coffee is holding its own due to really good creative and consistent involvement from Miss Chamberlain herself.

But here’s the funny part: the thing that makes these brands successful—their personality, their closeness, their human fingerprints—is the very thing they’ll eventually have to outgrow.

Longevity requires structure. Scale. Distance. These brands work because they feel personal, but they last because they slowly stop being personal. They disseminate.

They hire CEOs. They bring in ops teams. They separate the person from the product. They start to look a lot like the traditional brands they were built to replace.

Because the founder won’t stay interested forever. Or they burn out. Or grow up. Or fall off. And if the brand can’t survive that transition, it wasn’t really a brand… it was merch.

So yes, these brands win because they’re built around a person. But they endure by becoming something bigger than them.

That’s the irony. The creator era is reinventing branding, only to evolve right back into the model it replaced. lol.

why this matters

This isn’t just about celebrity brands. It’s about where branding is going.

More personal. More emotional. More human. Even if your client is a big, faceless company, the expectations are shifting.

And it applies to you, too. You might not be an influencer, but you are your own channel.

The work you share, the way you write, the taste you show, it all feeds your future pipeline. Your portfolio becomes your platform. Your interests shape your incoming projects.

That’s what a portfolio career is. Not one job. Not one lane. Just one identity expressed in a bunch of different ways. If the work feels true to you, people can follow you anywhere.

Your identity is your unfair advantage. The more clearly you express it, the more doors it opens.

cheat codes for modern brand building

1. build a portfolio, not a pigeonhole
Your work is a signal. When it’s aligned with your taste, it pulls in more projects that fit, and stretch.

2. anticipate the shift
The rules are changing. More personal. More flexible. Whether you work with creators or corporations, you need to know where expectations are headed.

3. make your toolkit transferable
The tools, logos, systems, storytelling, still matter. But now they have to stretch across platforms, products, and mediums. The goal isn’t just recognition. It’s coherence.

4. lead with patterns, not platforms
Your tone, your references, your style, these are your through lines. Define them. Repeat them. Let them travel.

5. collaborate with clarity
Choose projects and partners that feel like extensions of your world. If it doesn’t sound like you, look like you, or align with your values, it’s probably not for you.

If you've made it this far, you should support my brand by shopping the Cul De Sac site. Everything is 50% off until Sunday at midnight. xoxo

shop the sale

What I couldn’t find was a single souvenir worth buying.

Every gift shop I walked into had racks of bachelorette-script heather navy tees and digitally printed hoodies with geometric vector art of bears. There were loads of contemporary renditions of vintage national parks posters and ugly flat-brimmed hats that looked like they’d blend into the closet of any blind Denver resident.

Not a single piece with character.
Not a single bold, timeless graphic.
Not even a good bumper sticker.

It was genuinely disappointing. I realized I’d have to go to eBay to find something worth keeping. Something old. Something made when souvenirs still had soul. This happens all the time now, and that’s why I’m writing this.

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There was a time when the best thing you could bring home from a trip was a tee or a sweatshirt.

Thick cotton. Ribbed cuffs. Block-letter type across the chest. A real-deal Champion crewneck from UCLA or Notre Dame. The kind that made you feel like you were part of something, even if you only passed through the bookstore for five minutes.

That sweatshirt wasn’t just merch.
It was a souvenir.
A wearable memory. A signal. I was there. I belong.

sou·ve·nir
noun
A thing that is kept as a reminder of a person, place, or event.

Before “souvenir fashion” became ironic (see the Balenciaga “Souvenir Shop” concept from 2024), it was sincere. Arguably, the most iconic fashion export from the U.S. isn’t some runway trend — it’s Champion sweatshirts. These were made to last, and they doubled as identity. They weren’t trying to be cool.

That’s exactly why they were.

In Ametora, W. David Marx writes about how Japanese kids would fly to California in the 1980s to line up outside the UCLA bookstore. Not for textbooks, but for merch. They understood what most Americans didn’t: souvenirs had weight. Built to last. Screen-printed with thick plastisol. Universally bold, yet culturally specific.

Some of that magic still lingers in vintage circles.
Gen Z was quick to see the value in Planet Hollywood hats, bootleg band tees , old NASCAR shirts. Pieces that weren’t designed to be iconic ended up that way through ubiquity, irony and timing. Specific. Tied to place. Produced in limited runs. Worn hard. Forgotten. Then rediscovered.

The new stuff? The stuff in shops today? It just doesn’t hit the same.

And if you care about design or memory, that’s a huge L.

erasing the fingerprints

So what happened? Why do souvenirs today feel so generic and flat?

1. Globalized production killed regional character
Any gift shop or boardwalk stand can now order low-minimum merch from Alibaba. Tees, mugs, hats. Templated, drop-shippable, and perfectly forgettable. MOQ: 3. Delivered in 12 days. Entirely soulless. So buff.

A sweatshirt I picked up in Vail a few years ago lost its appeal when I saw the exact same one in Mammoth, only the name had changed. It was a “your ski mountain here” template after all.

Gone are the hand-drawn mascots, the odd color choices, the screenprint errors that accidentally made a tee worth keeping. The strangeness is gone. The local, mom-and-pop energy is gone.

2. The online design economy erased the local voice
With tools like Pinterest, Canva, Fiverr, and increasingly, AI, souvenir design has collapsed into one flat style. Safe. Retro-ish. Overly optimized. Everything looks like a Target graphic tee. Same fake-worn texture stamps. Same “crafty” child-like typography. Same terrible blue heather fabric (why they gotta use so much fucking heather!?).

What once felt specific now feels like stock.
It’s aesthetic SEO, designed with data in mind rather than the place it’s commemorating.

3. Retail has learned how to fake memory
Walk into Abercrombie, and you’ll see an entire wall of fake souvenir shirts: “Montauk Boat Club” sweatshirts in #oldmoney fonts, hotel, cafe, or bar tees with pre-distressed textures, and country club logos for country clubs that never existed.

Ironically, the most broke-boy look imaginable is the fake “vintage” Cape Cod tee from Abercrombie — currently on sale for $28.

It’s a weird inversion of what brands like Firstport are doing.
While Firstport’s output is a love letter to East Coast souvenirs and hyper-localized destinations, rich in texture and storytelling (however manufactured it may be), Abercrombie’s version strips out the sincerity and sells vague destination nostalgia as a costume.

One day, my kids won’t be able to tell which “vintage” souvenir tee is real and which one was printed in 2025 to look like it was from 1986.
The line between artifact and artifice is blurring, and that makes the lack of real souvenirs even rougher to see.

the souvenir problem is now a business model

Entire businesses have emerged to fill this void.

Homage is built around vintage-inspired tees. They reprint archival gems for sports teams, movies, IP, even theme parks. On a recent trip to Cedar Point in Ohio, I saw a corner of the souvenir shop filled with incredible tees. “Holy shit, Cedar Point gets it!”

Not exactly. Turns out Homage had gone into the archive and reprinted all the designs they never should’ve stopped selling.

There are higher-end examples too. Vintage Heavy makes super-premium “fake vintage” reissues of old Peanuts graphics on thick fleece, run through stone washes, and sprayed with enzyme washes that are so believable you’d swear they came off the floor of a flea market.

Don’t want to dig on your hands and knees at the flea at 5am? For $290, that “grail” can be yours.

These brands are smart. They’re giving us what we’re missing.

But it raises a bigger question.

what are we supposed to do, just give up?

Are we just going to throw our hands up and say cool died in 1990? Or was it 2000? Or 2012?

I want to believe we can still make future vintage.
Stuff that doesn’t rely on nostalgia, but becomes nostalgic with time. But it’s hard to see it while it’s happening. Maybe it’s right in front of us. Maybe we need 20 years of hindsight to recognize it.

I don’t know. But I think about this a lot.

designing like no one’s watching

This shift doesn’t just change how I shop. It changes how I design.

What is it that makes vintage feel cool? I’m always chasing that off-ness. That layered, imperfect, practical beauty. One line of type that doesn’t match the rest. A printer substitution. A graphic scaled just a little too big. A layout that breaks the rules.

Perfect wasn’t the goal. Punch was.

The appeal of vintage souvenirs proves that “cool” doesn’t rely on “correct.”

When I’m designing, I’ll make something clean and then break it on purpose. Add something like it was slapped on last minute. Change the font halfway through. Let it get a little ugly. Not to be messy, but to be real. I play jazz with it. Break the tempo. Sit in the pocket.

I’m not trying to replicate vintage.
I’m channeling the mindset of the people who made it.
The non-designer designers. The print shop crew. Designers on a deadline who took liberties, pushed scale, and made decisions on the fly. They sent things to print, crossed their fingers that the type remained legible, and sold it even if it didn’t.

They played power chords with distortion.

Those mistakes made it. They’re what make something feel alive.

As we enter the age of AI-generated artwork, these human fingerprints have never felt more valuable.

future vintage starts now

We live in a world obsessed with nostalgia, but terrible at producing it.

We want things that feel timeless, but we design for trends.
We want clothes that age well, but we manufacture for speed.
We want souvenirs that mean something, but we’ve lost sight of the meaning.

If you make graphics, apparel, or anything that captures a memory, ask yourself:

Will someone want to keep this in 20 years?
Will it tell a story? Will it remind them of where they were?
Will it feel like anything?

Because in 2054, no one’s hunting for a Yosemite tee generated by AI and fulfilled by Alibaba.

But they might still lose it over a slightly-wrong, slightly-right tee from 1991 that wasn’t trying to be cool.

It just was.

cheat codes: how to make future vintage

Here’s what I try to remember when I’m designing with longevity in mind.

1. Design for place, not platform
   Make it feel of somewhere, not made to live everywhere.

2. Break your own work
   Add the bizarre layer. Fuck with the font. Flatten the perspective. Let it feel human. Play jazz.

3. Honor the mistakes
   Flaws add character. Mistakes are what make someone pick something up at a flea market 30 years from now. Show ‘em a human made it.

4. Use nostalgia as seasoning, not the main course
   A reference is fine. A rehash is forgettable. Don’t just play covers.

5. 1+1=3

   A great graphic is only half the equation. The production is what brings it to life. Ink, thread, fabric — these choices turn a file into something you can feel.

At some point, I got tired of making work that lived in a PDF.

When you work in brand design, you make a ton of stuff. Dozens of directions, dozens of slides. And eventually, it all gets whittled down to one final concept. One brand book. One approved vision. That brand book is usually really tight. Clean layouts. Solid thinking. Smart rules. Crispy, high-res mockups. But then you hand it off to the client, collect your final invoice, and cross your fingers.

Sometimes the brand gets even better. The client brings in great collaborators, and the thing you made turns into something you’re stoked to see out in the world. Sometimes it changes entirely. Sometimes it literally disappears altogether. (I hate that shit.)

But that’s the nature of the beast. You play your part, hand it off, and hope for the best. After eight years of that rhythm, I realized I wanted to make things I could control. Things that would definitely see the light of day. Things you could hold, wear, ship, shoot, and feel. Intention all the way to execution.

So I started making stuff.

shop the stuff

business cards you can wear

That was the beginning of Cul De Sac’s apparel line. I didn’t start it because I wanted to be “in fashion”. I could care less about that. I started it because I needed a better business card. A louder one. A more interesting one. Something that would travel farther than a case study or cold email ever could.

Every tee, hat, sticker, or tote I’ve made has done more to build Cul De Sac than any portfolio deck. Physical things stick around. They show up in people’s lives. They get worn, photographed, passed around, remembered. You can’t say that about a Figma link.

Think about all the little assignments you give yourself when setting up a web shop, all the little skills that it shows the viewer.

1. I can design a hat

2. I know what shape of hat is cool

3. I know what material to make that hat in

4. I know how to make the little woven label that goes in the hat look cool

5. I know where to get the hat made

6. I know how to manage the production of the hat

7. I can art direct the product photography

8. I have photographers in my rolodex who can shoot the product photography

9. I can art direct the lifestyle shoot

10. I can style the lifestyle shoot

11. I can organize a lifestyle shoot

12. I can find a cool location for the lifestyle shoot

13. I have photographers who can shoot the lifestyle shoot

14. I can find the right models to model in the lifestyle shoot

15. I can style the hat in the lifestyle shoot to show how it’s meant to be worn

16. I can make image selects

17. I can color correct

18. I can design a web shop

19. I know how web shops work, and what they require to function

20. I know how to promote my products on social, email, and in person

I mean god damn, you can prove this all with one post. That’s some shit, that’s marketing, without ever calling it marketing. And it creates a really healthy amount of brand confusion. “Is it a studio? Is it a clothing line?” That tension works in my favor. It starts conversations. It draws the right people in.

I didn’t launch a product line to make money. I did it to show my work. To prototype the kind of assignments I wanted more of. To say “I can do this” without having to say anything at all. The merch isn’t a side hustle. It’s a portfolio. It’s a strategy. It’s how I made my taste visible, tangible, and real.

proof > potential

There’s a big difference between work that looks good on a slide and work that actually exists in the world. Fake work says, “I could make something like this.” Real work is printed. Shipped. Live. It has weight. It has receipts. It speaks for itself, and it puts a client at ease. This ain’t my first rodeo.

Real things stick around. In an increasingly digital world, they embody a kind of permanence that pixels just can’t. Graphics are fleeting. Graphic tees are timeless. A graphic holds more value, more emotion, more potential, when it’s printed on canvas rather than floating on a solid color in a PDF.

I didn’t want to be the designer with good ideas that never got made. I wanted to be the one who made them. Who finished. Who proved it. I want clients to look at what I’m making and think, “I want to get in on that”. It works too, clients ask to join the party now more than I have to ask to join theirs.

You can’t build a reputation on what-ifs. The only work that matters is the work that’s out there.

My guy Walt Disney understood this. When he wanted to build Disneyland, he didn’t pitch a dream, he built a prototype. With his own money, he brought in illustrators, art directors, and model makers (inventing imagineering in the process) to sketch it, model it, make it real enough to believe in. Then he pitched that version to ABC and got funding in return.

He didn’t sell the idea of Disneyland. He sold the evidence of Disneyland. And it worked because people could see it.

you want better work? make better proof.

You can’t feel sorry for yourself for not getting dream assignments if you’ve never shown anyone what your dream work actually looks like. Don’t be the soul singer in the session band, waiting for someone to notice. Belt that shit.

That’s what I did with Cul De Sac. I made the kind of stuff I wanted to be hired for, put it on cotton, and let it speak for itself. No pitch deck required. The more I printed, the more the right people found me.

Some of my favorite client projects came directly from the things I made for myself. People hire me because they’ve seen my style, not because I’ve explained it. They’ve held it, worn it, or spotted it in someone else’s story. That’s what made the difference. Not my resume.

Walt Disney said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” Shit’s true.

cheat codes

• sing your song
  No one’s going to ask you to do your thing if you’ve never shown them what it looks like.

• proof over potential
  Let people hire you for what you’re doing, not what you could do

• objects over decks
  One hat can show more capability than ten portfolio slides. Use objects as your resume.

• confuse them (on purpose)
  “Is it a brand? Is it a studio?” That tension attracts people. Blend your interests, lean in.

• be a world builder
  Stop begging to be let in. Make something so good they ask to be part of your world.
  

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Hi everyone, thanks for following along as I get this thing off the ground and figure out what it wants to be. Last time, I wrote about where I’m from. Now I want to talk through where that got me, how I work, and why I work the way I do.

To clarify, Cul De Sac is the name of this newsletter, my design studio, and my clothing brand. I want to use this space to share what has shaped and is still shaping my point of view. Not just visually, but philosophically. How I decide, design, edit. What I think good work is made of. And why I still think this job is fun.

I want to talk about something that changed the nature of my career: the terrifying opportunity of being given a brief with no rules.

Let me back up, but first, if you’re not already, subscribed…

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conviction

Design is funny, in that so much of it can be taught in a very technical sense (there are “correct” ways to use these programs, to set type, to establish a layout grid, to pair colors, etc.) and yet the real impact comes from ~style~. “Technically correct” moves no one, what you need is a point of view, and conviction.

One of my favorite teachers in school was the artist James Victore. I ended up taking a mentorship position under him in the summer before senior year and learned a lot that’s stuck with me. Some of my favorite things he’d shout at us:

• If you think design is about fonts, you lose

• Things that make you weird as a kid will make you great today

• If your work appeals to everyone, it moves no one

• By believing your work is a ‘gift,’ it radically changes what you create

He’s loud, opinionated, and allergic to anything generic. He didn’t teach how to design. He taught how to think. How to put yourself in the work. He emphasized the designer, not just the design. I think of the 30 kids in the class, only 11 remained at the end of the year.

“Most people are afraid to make bad work. You should be afraid to make boring work.” - James Victore

In the years directly after school, I made a lot of boring work (no shots at my previous employers, but making logos for life insurance brands can only be so tight). My primary objective was to keep a job and learn to get better at making “correct work”. None of James’ ideas felt applicable to me yet. “Bucking the system” isn’t really a practical design approach in an agency setting.

what happens when there are no rules

When I was starting, I prided myself on being adaptable. I could make clean work. Follow direction. Fit in. I knew how to speak fluently in someone else’s tone of voice. I knew how to design for the team, brand, or studio I was slotting into. I learned how to show range, technique, and polish.

Everyone I worked with talked about how client feedback was killing their creativity. The implication, of course, was that with fewer guardrails, we’d be doing the best work of our lives. I was just as bad; it felt good to justify, admittedly, torched work by saying how good the “director’s cut” would have been. “Yeah, it turned out fine, but you should have seen the shit they killed in round 1!”

While this is somewhat valid and, at times, justified, it got me stressing about what would happen if I were ever given carte blanche to go buck wild and do my own thing. What would that even look like?

Then one day, I got my first new business inquiry from a client who came to me intentionally, not because I was recommended as a scrappy, eager, affordable designer, but because they specifically wanted to work with me. Their brand was called Sackville & Co. They had seen the ID work I did for Yowie (my very first freelance ID client) and reached out for a rebrand, where the brief amounted to little more than “Do your thing.” This was liberating, exciting, and terrifying at the same time.

Not because I didn’t want that freedom, I did. But because I had no idea what “my thing” actually was. Aside from some open-ended college assignments, I hadn’t made much without someone else’s brief or brand guidelines framing the output. I suddenly realized how easy it is to become a capable designer without ever becoming a unique one.

That brief (or lack thereof) forced me to ask some big-brain questions.
What k i n d of work do I want to make?
What am I trying to s a y?
What even c o u n t s as my taste?

It was humbling for sure. Thankfully, this client was a weed brand, and I was a massive stoner at the time, so I just tried to make it look like something I’d like. I figured it should feel irreverent, colorful, curt, and timeless. The outcome was a visual expression that aimed to be simultaneously expressive yet deadpan.

design for fun

After the Sackville identity, I knew I wanted more of that freedom. In between client projects, I decided to start making work for no reason. I idolized studios like Hort Berlin, Fisk, and artists like Braulio Amado. One thing they all had in common was that they constantly put out work. On top of this, lots (if not most) of the work they shared wasn’t client-approved, polished work, but personal projects, sketches, director’s cuts, outtakes, or scraps. They made it clear, from a distance, who they were and how they saw the world.

This is when I started Cul De Sac, and began shuffling self-initiated projects into my Instagram feed and portfolio. Printing these sketches onto apparel and accessories gave it tangible permanence and legitimacy.

Almost instantly, clients started referencing my own work in their briefs to me. By making more of the kind of work I loved, I started attracting the kind of clients I wanted. While this may sound obvious, you’d be surprised how many kids still ask me how I “get to make so much of the kind of work I love”, and the answer is simple.

“Freedom is something you take” - James Victore

life is a (research) trip

The weird thing about developing a specific creative style is that once it starts to form, everything around you starts feeding it. Every little artifact you come across in your daily life can inspire something else. Designing can start feeling more like collecting and dot connecting than starting from scratch. It turns your whole life into a research trip, which, honestly, is one of the best perks of this job.

interesting people are interested

The ones doing the most compelling work aren’t just technically sharp, they’re curious. They go down rabbit holes. They read books, take photos, watch movies, travel, start collections, ask questions, and try things that might not work. You can see it in their output. The enthusiasm shows up on the page, and it draws you in.

Curious designers build a deeper library to pull from. Their work doesn’t just look good — it feels lived in. There’s texture to it. When you stay curious, you don’t just make better work, you start making work that reflects who you are and what you’ve done. The more personal and believable the source code, the more magnetic the result.

That’s why I think curiosity is a skill. Train it. Chase it. Let it lead you somewhere strange.

sharpen your point of view

(cheat codes, from someone still figuring it out)

1. Make work with no goal but to explore
Start projects just for yourself; no client, no audience, no deliverables. Treat them like sketches, not statements. Post the ones you like. Print the ones you love. This is how you build a visible trail of your taste.

2. Take inventory of what you notice
Pay attention to what pulls you in: color palettes, typography, textures, labels, packaging, signage, whatever. Shoot it. Screenshot it. Save it. Collect it. Trace the patterns. Your taste is already there — your job is to get better at recognizing it.

3. Let your whole life feed the work
It's all input: travel, music, movies, meals, weird obsessions (I have a season pass to Magic Mountain, Disneyland, and Universal Studios). The more curious and connected you are outside the screen, the more original and personal your output becomes. Treat your life like a research trip.

Try to have fun. That’s probably what got you making art in the first place. And honestly, people can tell when something was cooked with love, they tend to like it better.

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Santa Clarita Valley has a truly fascinating history, which I’ll get into in future posts. But for the purposes of this introduction, I want to introduce Valencia (the town within SCV I grew up in) as a brand new (our specific neighborhood was built in the late 90s) series of secure cul-de-sacs, all connected by heavily landscaped trails. It’s home to Six Flags Magic Mountain, and Cal Arts, the seamless co-existence of which I’ll write a whole post on. We grew up listening to Blink, skateboarding (poorly), and smoking weed in said trails.

This is all to say: I didn’t grow up reading Vogue; I had CCS. I didn’t discover new bands at Rough Trade; I had the Tony Hawks Pro Skater soundtrack. I didn’t shop at Union, I had Val Surf. I didn’t even know what graphic design was; I just knew skate stickers and tees were the most alluring things I’d ever seen.

And I’m not complaining; I think a lot of “designers designing for other designers” are super wack, and I doubt you need more of that in your feed. I think finding gems within “suburban mall culture” is tight (or at least can be), and I invite you to examine it more precisely as I explain what I find so attractive about it.

On a trip to visit family in Chicago in high school, my cousin's boyfriend Pierre (a supremely cool British guy who chain-smoked and put my brother and me onto all kinds of cool comics, movies, and bands) told me about his job: he was a graphic designer. He explained what that meant, and I quickly started fucking around with a cracked version of Photoshop elements I had on my blue bubble iMac G3.

Despite terrible grades and a growing addition to weed, I was able to get my shit together enough in high school to get into The School of Visual Arts in NYC. I’ll get into college more later, I’m sure, but the main point is that when I moved to the city for college, everyone immediately started putting “NYC” on their work, or at the end of their studio names. Erasing the reality that 99% of these kids were from the suburbs of Philly or N.J., New York was a much sexier personality to adopt. I came home most summers in college, and loved the super high contrast between a busy school year in the city, and a slow-as-molasses summer in Valencia.

I ended up staying in NY for a decade, but when it came time to name my studio (Cul De Sac started in 2017 in Brooklyn), I wanted to be honest and proud of where I was actually from. Thus, Cul De Sac was born. I still think it’s a great name and does a perfect job of conjuring a place, which is ultimately the source code of my work.

I genuinely believe there is a lot of very cool shit in plain sight. Since subculture no longer exists, I want to use this newsletter as a way to show you my lens on the mainstream, and maybe in the process help you realize that The Gap currently has cooler shit than Our Legacy.

This newsletter doesn’t have a single focus. It’s just a place to park everything I’m obsessed with, confused by, shopping for, or in search of. Some weeks, it’ll be what I’m designing or working on, and other weeks, it’ll be about music, travel, clothing, theme parks, souvenirs, sobriety, or technology (I’m fascinated by the role AI is going to play in the design industry and will continue to share my insights).

Sometimes it’ll make sense. Sometimes it’ll spiral. It’s a moodboard, a diary, a pile of images and ideas — all filtered through the Cul De Sac lens.

“Studies have shown people who live on cul-de-sacs are happier — they feel safer, know their neighbors better, and spend more time outside. It’s not just a dead end — it’s a social design feature masquerading as a street.”

I love that.
I love the idea that breaking the grid can produce so much joy.
That by looking at one another, we can feel more at home.

Anyways, if you made it this far, much love. This is Cul De Sac.
A newsletter about design, culture, ephemera, clothing, and everything else that feels important to me, maybe one day my kids will get a better understanding of me better by reading this shit.

xoxo Colin

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