Things I am following with no particular endpoint.

Not via portfolios or conference talks. Slowly, in small moments — an offhand comment in a design review, a sentence in a book read at the right time, watching someone make a decision and then later catching yourself making the same one. I keep wondering whether mentorship is mostly the deliberate version of that, and whether we lose more than we gain by trying to systematise it.

Why some buildings from the 1880s feel inhabited and some from 2018 already feel tired. The honest answer is probably the same reason some products age well — what they refused to do at the start matters more than what they do well now. Walking past a Haussmann façade and reading it as a design system, not a style.

Increasingly convinced that drawing a thing by hand reveals what you do not yet understand about it, in a way no Figma or whiteboarding tool quite does. I keep reaching for a small notebook before I open a canvas. Currently noticing that the diagrams I draw for clients in the first week of an engagement are the only ones we still reference at the end.

How much of "we are not shipping the right things" is actually "we are shipping in twenty-minute slots between meetings". Wondering whether the most useful intervention is sometimes a calendar audit, not a design audit. Probably writing this one up properly when the case study is anonymisable.

Less interested in the demos. More interested in what AI does to the practice of articulating intent — the prompt has become a brief, and writing a good brief was always the hard part. Following this one over the next two years rather than the next two weeks. Probably writing in the Lab section as patterns stabilise.

Why "A Pattern Language" still reads like the cleanest design-systems argument decades after it was written, and what we could borrow from his idea of timelessness for digital products that mostly aim for novelty. I have started running an exercise with one client where we list the patterns their product unintentionally embodies, before we list the ones we want to add. Surprising results.