a quarter of design

October 01, 2025

My goal with this post is to capture both short- and long-horizon reflections from taking DESIGN 160.

10.1.25

• Warming up creatively – both mentally and technically – feels essential. I also felt this way on the first day of my choreography class. Unsure if this means that my creativity is being stifled the other 22 hours of the day?
• Today I worked on our first project, virtual textures¹. I was struck by how impatient I felt towards the process. I was working on 3.5x3.5 swatches of these intricate, repetitive patterns. Once I had filled in a corner, or sometimes just the initial pencil sketches, it felt much harder to be excited about just finishing the swatch. It was also frustrating that my drawing and mounting wasn’t as neat as I’d have liked.
• I’ve been thinking about whether the toil of creating something from scratch is actually necessary to developing taste and creative autonomy. In other words: if you set aside ten thousand hours to become a great artist (or master any other discipline), are you better off using tools to augment the creation process and getting tons of practice selecting, or should you still be creating entirely from scratch? Does being intimately involved in the details give you discernment that you couldn’t learn just from training on the judgment task?
• My guess is something like: 1. The process of “handmaking” something is fundamental and unsubstitutable 2. The fruits of this effort are not always aligned with your end goals; it’s important to paint your own paintings to develop intention behind each brushstroke, but optimizing arithmetic intuitions probably won’t make you a better algebraist 3. How you should spend your time depends on how good your tools are relative to how much time you have to dedicate; training curation without a strong creative foundation is only more sample-efficient early on, but perhaps your tools will progress as fast as you

10.11.25

Had an honestly wonderful four hours making my 100 acrylic swatches for the color theory project. Reminded myself that brown is just dark red/yellow/orange, and that I love a light red. Ripped through a couple of episodes of Moment of Zen². There’s something about a Saturday afternoon spent on manual labor.

10.13.25

Today my flight was delayed at the very last minute and so I spent an hour in the SeaTac N gates working on my black-and-white composition. I appreciate how simple and process-oriented the prompts for this class are – it has the spirit of elementary school arts and crafts, but with the intentionality and quality standards of any other college class.

For a while I was working on this one thread of inquiry involving an orb (?) and some tendrils surrounding it. I think I over-worked it, so I ended up scrapping the whole tendril motif and working on a spilled-milk-and-spheres-and-trumpets mix instead.

Several times I found myself putting together a rough sketch, thinking it looked passable, and then wanting to be done; only when I actually tried to articulate the idea further, for a true rough draft, in fact it was all a mirage.

10.14.25

One humbling realization from vectorizing my drawings today: sometimes things look different, and even better, in the intended medium. I probably went through another 50 pencil sketches, only to discard ~all the ideas I had pursued and create directly in Illustrator.

11.23.25

So, it’s certainly been a while since I’ve updated this log, but here are my bullet-pointed reflections on what I think I’ve taken away from the class:

• When I compare the critiques I would give to a piece to those of my instructor (the wonderful John Edmark), I notice I tend to be much more critical of the actual idea; there are many things I just find kind of weird, or distasteful. John is impressively open to ideas – in fact, he seems to think most ideas, when articulated with intention, have the potential to be good – and much more of a stickler for execution. Of course, he’s quick to point out when a student’s idea hasn’t quite worked out, but this is an empirical observation based on the actual end product, and not an ex ante assessment.
  • In general, quality of craft has been a big theme of this class. It is amazing how much extra labor and love goes into turning a piece from passably constructed to nearly perfect; very much a power law.
• A theme of the class is working around constraint, both as a core requirement of design as a profession, and as a tool to increase one’s creativity. John regularly gave us somewhat arbitrary limitations on the format or themees of our work. One intuition here is by constraining the possibility space, it becomes much more tractable to do deep search and to find something truly interesting. There is a sort of paralysis by choice in too-large search spaces that can lead to boring work; you need to be able to actually follow threads of ideas to their limit
  • Creativity needs a problem to chafe against
• In general, the Design degree programs at Stanford are very much about self-teaching and building one’s own practice (of course, with the support of a technically talented peer group). This is almost completely in contrast with e.g. the Mathematics major, which I did for my undergrad.

I’ll do at least one more update before the end of the quarter, probably when we compile all our projects.