What Fifteen Years in Design Actually Teaches You

Introduction

I did not set out to write a retrospective.

Fifteen years felt like a number worth acknowledging — worth pausing at, briefly, before continuing. But I resisted the urge to write the kind of piece that lists lessons in numbered order, each one distilled into a tidy sentence that fits on a poster. That kind of writing is easy to produce and easy to consume and almost immediately forgotten. And if fifteen years has taught me anything, it is that the things worth knowing are rarely that clean.

What follows is not a list. It is closer to a reckoning — an honest attempt to articulate the things that have actually changed in how I think about design, about clients, about the studio, and about the work itself over the course of a decade and a half. Some of it is practical. Some of it is philosophical. All of it is true, at least as far as I can tell from where I am standing right now.

You Learn to Trust Discomfort

In the early years, discomfort in the design process felt like a signal that something was wrong. When a brief was unclear, when a concept was not landing, when the gap between the work on screen and the work in your head felt impossibly wide — the instinct was to resolve it as quickly as possible. To push through to something that felt finished, even if finished was not the same as right.

What fifteen years teaches you is that discomfort is almost never a signal that something is wrong. It is a signal that something is being worked out. The best work I have been involved in has almost always passed through a period of genuine uncertainty — a phase where the direction was not clear, where the obvious solutions had been exhausted and the right one had not yet emerged, where the temptation to settle was at its strongest.

Confidence Is Not the Absence of Doubt

There is a version of confidence that I associated with good designers when I was starting out — a certainty, an assurance, a sense of knowing exactly what the work should be and moving toward it without hesitation. I spent a long time trying to perform that version of confidence. And I spent a long time feeling like a fraud for not actually having it.

What I understand now is that the confidence I was performing bore almost no resemblance to the confidence I was trying to project. Real confidence in design is not the absence of doubt. It is the ability to hold doubt and conviction simultaneously — to question every decision while still making it, to remain open to the possibility of being wrong while still committing fully to being right.

The designers I most respect are not the ones who never doubt their work. They are the ones who doubt it constantly and proceed anyway — who have developed enough trust in their own judgment to act on it even when it is uncertain, and enough intellectual honesty to revise it when the evidence requires.

The Brief Is Never the Whole Story

I have written about this before, but it bears repeating here because it is one of the things that has changed most significantly in how I approach the beginning of a project.

In the early years, I took briefs at face value. A client asked for a logo and I designed a logo. A client asked for a website and I built a website. The brief was the instruction and my job was to execute it as well as I could.

What fifteen years has taught me is that the brief is a starting point, not a destination. It is the client's best attempt to articulate a problem they are usually too close to see clearly. And the most valuable thing a designer can do — before a single sketch is made — is to find the real problem underneath the stated one.

This is not always welcome. Clients invest time and thought in their briefs and do not always appreciate the suggestion that the brief itself might be the wrong question. But the projects that have produced the most significant outcomes — for the client, for the studio, for the work — have almost always been the ones where we pushed past the surface of the brief into something more fundamental.

Relationships Are the Work

When I founded Blokke in 2010, I thought the work was the design. The thinking, the making, the craft — that was what mattered. Everything else was infrastructure. Necessary, but secondary.

I was wrong about this in a way that took me longer than it should have to understand.

The design is the outcome of the work. The work itself — the thing that actually happens in the space between receiving a brief and delivering a finished identity — is almost entirely relational. It is the quality of listening in an early briefing call. It is the trust built through a difficult feedback conversation handled with honesty and care. It is the relationship that develops over the course of a project between a designer who is trying to understand something and a client who is trying to articulate it — a relationship that, when it works well, produces outcomes that neither party could have reached alone.

Speed Is Not a Virtue

The design industry has a complicated relationship with speed. On one hand, there is genuine respect for efficiency — for the designer who can move quickly, iterate rapidly, produce good work under pressure. On the other hand, there is a growing cult of output, of volume, of the studio that prides itself on how much it can produce and how fast.

Fifteen years has made me deeply skeptical of speed as a value in design.

Not because fast work is always bad — it is not. There are contexts where speed is genuinely appropriate, where the brief demands it and the outcome does not suffer for it. But speed as an end in itself — as a quality to be pursued and celebrated independent of the quality of the work it produces — leads somewhere I have no interest in going.

The best work we have done at Blokke has almost never been the fastest. It has been the work that was given the time it needed — to think through properly, to develop honestly, to test against the brief with enough rigour to be confident it was right before it was delivered. That kind of time is not inefficiency. It is investment. And it almost always returns more than it costs.

You Never Stop Learning to See

One of the things that drew me to design in the first place was the way it changed how I looked at everything. Once you start paying attention to type, you cannot stop seeing it — on signs, on packaging, in newspapers, on the sides of buildings. Once you start looking at composition, you see it in every photograph, every film frame, every room you walk into.

This is one of the great gifts of a design education. It does not just teach you to make things. It teaches you to look at things differently. And that altered vision does not switch off when you leave the studio.

What fifteen years has taught me is that this education never ends. I am still learning to see. Not in the dramatic way of early discovery — the first time you notice kerning, the first time you understand what negative space is actually doing — but in the quieter, more gradual way of deepening perception. Of seeing things you have seen a thousand times and suddenly noticing something you had not noticed before. Of looking at a piece of work you admired five years ago and understanding it differently now — more completely, more critically, with a finer sense of what it is doing and why.

Knowing When the Work Is Finished

I want to end on this because it is the thing I think about most often — and the thing that has changed most fundamentally in how I work over fifteen years.

Early in a career, the question of when work is finished is answered by external signals. The deadline arrives. The client approves. The presentation is made. The project closes. Finished is defined by the process rather than the work itself.

What develops over time — slowly, unevenly, through a long accumulation of projects and the reflection that follows them — is an internal sense of when the work is done. Not when the deadline requires it to be done. Not when the client has stopped asking for changes. But when the work itself has reached the point where further intervention would diminish rather than improve it.