I don't want to be in the box anymore
Five-sixths of this is still design. Here's what the other sixth is for.
Going daily. Five days in the box, one day out, and the honest reason for both.
My co-founder Corey writes about marketing and positioning. He's genuinely great at it, and that is not why I open his emails.
The one I remember is the one about going through his divorce as a Christian.
Not a framework, not a teardown. Him, telling you what it was actually like. It was heartfelt and it was brave and I have thought about it more than anything else he's ever written, and he has written a lot of very good things about marketing.
That's true of almost everyone I follow. The expertise is why I subscribed. Something else entirely is why I stayed.
I've spent three years running this newsletter doing the exact opposite.
The box is a compliment first
Getting put in a box feels good when it happens. It means people know what you're for. Mine says design, I earned it over a decade, and it has paid for my life.
Then you notice it's also a fence.
There's a version of "I come to you for design" that quietly means "I don't come to you for anything else," and people are not neutral about you climbing out. They like you where they found you. So you stay, and you call it focus.
Ideas turn up every day. Plenty of them are design. Some are so far out of left field I couldn't tell you where they came from, and those are usually the ones I can't put down: what AI is actually doing to us, what I'll tell my daughter about God and how much of it I believe, whether we should have kept marching in 1945... it's a mixed bag.
None of it fits the box, so I've spent three years assuming nobody wants it.
I want it out of my head anyway.
I'm not knocking the box. I like design. I think it matters more than most people are willing to say out loud, and after ten years I'm still not bored of it.
But the tactical part is free now. Ask a machine about your typography, your hierarchy, what's broken on your pricing page, and you'll have a competent answer before you finish the sentence. What it cannot give you is a specific person with a specific decade behind them, and you cannot see that person through a box.
The shape of it
Starting Monday, this goes out every weekday.
Monday through Friday is design, same as it's always been, with a lot more of it. Brand, craft, tools, teardowns, client work. I'll argue that Dribbble ruined a generation of logo designers, that "clean" should be banned from design feedback, and that most brand guidelines are written too early and enforced too hard. Normal service, louder.
Saturday I let loose and breach topics that most people would only think about stoned with their buddies in the backyard. Makes me wonder how it's gonna go over with a 32-years sober and counting bald dude.
Same four parts every Saturday. The question, where I land, the strongest case against me built to win rather than to lose, and what would change my mind. That last one is the point: anyone can have a take, and naming what would move you off it is the difference between an opinion and a posture.
Five days in the box. One day out.
Some Saturdays will be uncomfortable. Some you'll think I'm flat out wrong about, and I'd genuinely like to hear why.
And if this isn't what you signed up for, the unsubscribe link is at the bottom of every email and I won't take it personally. You're either on this list or you're not. I'd rather write for a small room that wants the whole thing than manage a big one that wants a slice.
The part that's hard to say without sounding grand:
I have a daughter now. The design work will eventually be a portfolio nobody opens, and that's fine, that was never going to be the thing that lasted forever. What I'd rather leave behind is a record of who I actually was and what I actually believed, written down while I was still working it out and still capable of being wrong in public.
You should know how I think. You should also know me and those are not the same thing.
So this is me saying goodbye to the box my own talent built.
👋
— Zach
PS. This isn't a big newsletter, and some of you have been here since 2017 when I first started (thank you!). That's the entire reason I'd rather be honest with a small room than careful with a big one.
