Update: You can view my newsletter, Make It Yours.

💡 What’s new?

I’ve got a few things to talk about today. Which affects mainly me, you, and this newsletter.

But first, I built something I’ve come to depend on when I start out a new project. It’s called the Design Vault, and it’s a collection of highly organized, hand-picked sites that I love. This is an evolving vault with the intent to add 1,000 sites within a year. Snag it now at a 40% discount. (And enjoy the new site!)

Make it yours: A new beginning

I believe I have found the secret to productivity.

Let your wife and daughter head back to Wisconsin for four days to take a vacation give you time to think, redesign your entire site, launch a newsletter, and create a new product.

And I didn’t even attempt mushrooms once.

When you have the house to yourself as an adult doing adult things—like trying to be responsible and not buy Ben & Jerry’s three times a day—you try to make the most of it.

And so, if you read nothing else, here’s the TL;DR of my current sitch:

1. We are expecting another girl in December

2. I am doubling down on Approachable Design

3. I am consolidating my newsletters and rebranding them as “Make It Yours”

When I created Plan Your Next, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And most days, I still don’t.

But in the past five years since creating Plan Your Next, I started writing, quit writing, then started back up. My life changed when I took Write of Passage, had a daughter, left my job post-acquisition, started drawing again, had my best-grossing year of freelance work, started Approachable Design, collaborated with friends, co-founded Fresh Prompts and Hey, Good Game!, and have met incredible friends online that I will have for a lifetime.

The last five years have been the most personally transformative five of my life.

Why Make it Yours?

I wrote an essay a while back called Make It Yours, and that phrase has stuck with me ever since. It hits on a core belief of mine that your taste matters more than ever. Our ability to discern and lean into what makes us unique is simply an edge for you to have in a world with this much noise.

Make It Yours is a statement that wherever you are in life, you should be leaning into your stories, experiences, and taste. It’s what separates you from any situation you find yourself in.

Even if you’re in a corporate environment, standing out gives you leverage. When you’re applying for a new job, cutting against the grain and bypassing the traditional paths gives you an edge.

And, the boat storage company I’m helping out with at the moment needs to lean into its unique perspective to stand out against its competition.

Building a business or a product has never been easier. But how you bring it into the world and differentiate it matters more than ever. Community matters, people matter, and taste matters. It’s why I don’t rely on templates or predefined color palettes.

Make It Yours extends what I write about already, but brings it more closely aligned with how I want to help people with design.

What changes for me?

Not a whole lot! I’ll do some exporting and importing into ConvertKit, and give you an easy way to opt-out if you’d prefer.

However, Make It Yours will be more design focused for non-designers. I’ll make the transition as seamless as possible.

What’s happening to this site?

Honestly, I’m not 100% sure yet. I might migrate a lot of it over, but I doubt it will get shut down for a while. At the very least, I’ll likely redirect this .com to the new page and design a landing page so it’s not all that confusing.

What if I’m a paying subscriber?

I will be pausing all subscribers, and going 100% free from here on out. It’s been a great experiment and I’m thankful for the support, but as I was sitting out on the grass with a couple of weeks ago while our kids ran as far from us as they could, I realized that having a paid newsletter was not my calling.

What’s new?

I’m so glad you asked! I will be talking and writing more about how to make better design decisions in your business and life. I’ll also be doing breakdowns by people or companies doing this well, giving you a blueprint to do this yourself.

But what I’m most excited about is doing more sessions around how to improve your design, and how it affects everything from your personal/creator brand to your startups and businesses. Keep an eye out for those.

How can I help?

Can I just say that these questions you’re asking are incredible? Spot on.

I’m not going away, I’m just slightly leaning into what makes me unique. I want you to do the same.

But if you need help with your brand or business, please find some time on my calendar, or check out some of my products.

See you next week!

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💡 What’s new?

🕹️ If you’ve been around awhile, you might know me for talking about design and drawing. But, I’m also neck deep in the casual gaming space.

We’re close to announcing some news about our new game studio, but for the time being, we currently soft-launched a redesign of one of our oldest games, Hitori Conquest. If you have never played Hitori before, stick with the easier 5x5 board. It’s a lot of fun, and I even made a scrappy video about it if you scroll down the page.

⛱️ Enjoy next week off! My brother is getting married next weekend and let’s just be honest, no writing is going to happen.

Introducing my upgraded AI-enabled tech toolkit

It’s been about 18 months since I put together what I use for tools, so I thought this might be a good time to revisit what I’m using and how AI is playing a role in it.

Writing

IA Writer or Google Docs
I usually start most of my writing directly in either one of these apps, as much as I despise Google Docs, I’ve made it work for me.

Type.AI or LEX (🦾 AI Assisted)
I have started to insorporate both of these tools as a way to kickstart my brain when sitting down to a blank piece of paper. I rarely use these when I already have a story or an idea of what to write, but I do rely on them when I’ve got nothing.

SurferSEO (🦾 AI Assisted)
To grow my content site at Freshprompts.com, I like to exercise my SEO skills using this AI tool to help understand the competition and to enable our writers to compete quickly.

Creativity + Productivity

Figma
Most days always start with Figma. I use this every.single.day. It’s my most recommended design tool for everyone, not just designers.

Loom
Like Figma, this is integral to my workflow. I use it almost daily when recording feedback videos, or helping show how I deconstruct design. I also use this for Approachable Design when doing tutorial videos. (Although I may switch to Screenflow for editing those.)

Roam
Since early 2020, I use Roam for my notetaking and info capture. Any note or idea I want to save, I’ll add it here.

Notion
I’ve been using Notion for the past 18 months as a way to track tasks in my projects and domains. I follow the approach Khe Hy teaches, which I highly recommend checking out.

Procreate
This is an iPad app for creating digital art, like the ones you see at the top of this newsletter. It’s what I recommend for anyone trying to get into drawing or creating their own illustrative style. It’s what many professional artists use, as well as many who don’t consider themselves traditional artists, but who want to express themselves creatively, like Matt.

Audio Pen (🦾 AI Assisted)
Speak your random thoughts directly into this app and it will spit out a summary for you, organize them in a new way that you could use for writing, journaling, or just ideating.

Midjourney (🦾 AI Assisted)
I’m in the middle of doing book illustrations, and I love using Midjourney for concepting ideas and thinking through compositions. I also use this for Freshprompts.com, as a way to generate article illustrations on the fly.

Video

ScreenFlow
For more advanced product video editing, I’ll use Screenflow to do more explicit callouts and editing.

Screen Studio (🦾 AI Assisted)
After seeing Louis Pereira build and launch Audio Pen, (as well as grab the #1 spot on Product Hunt) I was drawn to the video tutorials he was making. Turns out that he uses Screen Studio, which allowed me to make that Hitori video, complete with transcription, zoom, and custom backgrounds within minutes.

Finance

Personal Capital* (TradFi)
I use this to keep track of most of my traditional finances, although I only check this about once a month or less, just to make sure nothing crazy happened. They recently introduced a way to track specific cryptocurrencies but depending on how active you are, it might not be worth the effort.

Chase Sapphire Card
Once my wife and I went 100% debt-free, we switched to using a rewards card for daily purchases. For the past five years we have been using this specific card, and pay the balance off monthly. For us, it’s the easiest way to pay for our travel using points without having to think about it. The annual fees make me cringe every year, but we have found the benefits worth it. We book our travel through Chase Rewards, which maximizes the travel points (1.5x).

Vanguard (TradFi)
Much of my retirement funds are locked up into long-term low index funds that automatically get rebalanced. (~90/10 stocks/bonds split) Out of sight, out of mind.

Betterment* (TradFi)
I use Betterment for my non-tax deferred savings, with goals set up. It makes it a bit easier to access, and I mostly like to experiment with low-fee AI-based rebalancing, taking advantage of their tax harvesting as well.
*$5,000 managed for free referral link

Ledger Wallet* (DeFi)
I currently have both the Ledger Nano X and the Ledger Nano S. I don’t think you need two for cold storage, but if you’re dabbling in the space, I think it’s worth getting the feel for how these work.

MetaMask Wallet (DeFi)
This is a digital wallet that lives in your browser. Imagine your bank account easily accessible from any website that takes cryptocurrency. Never share your secret keyword phrase with anyone.

Marketing

ConvertKit
For Approachable Design and a few other channels outside of Plan Your Next, I rely on ConvertKit and love its marketing automation tools.

Thrivecart
For my courses, I do most of my transactions through Thrivecart. I don’t love it, but it’s what I use at the moment.

Webflow
I use Webflow for both Kadlac.com and Approachabldedesign.co. I love it, and almost nothing might sway me from keeping things the way they are. Unless….

Framer
This is slowly growing on me, and I’ve already started thinking about converting my design site to Framer.

Hardware

12.9” iPad Pro (2018 256GB model) + Apple Pencil + Magic Keyboard
I still use this five-year-old model for all of my illustrations, usually every few days. The Magic Keyboard is a gem to type on, and prefer that if I’m in a pinch.

Apple M1 Max Macbook Pro 14” (2021)
You couldn’t pry this from my fingers.

iPhone 14 Pro
In 2007, I stood in line in 114 degree heat while in Arizona for the first iPhone. I still love using this one as much as I did that one.

If you have any questions or think I should be using something different, let me know!

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💡 What’s new?

Writing is tough. And sometimes, we run into our internet friends we’ve never met in a Whole Foods parking lot and commiserate on how difficult it is to write these damn things. I’m pretty sure was writing in his car minutes before bumping into me, leading me to also scribble some notes into my iPhone so I could feel like a real writer. My notes were likely not nearly as funny as his, so you should definitely go read his newsletter if you want to read very funny things.

But, right before I walked into Whole Foods and spent five minutes too long trying to find cottage cheese because everything in the dairy section is organized to drive us mad, I let Alex know I would not be publishing something new today. He nodded and then spoke silently with just his eyes, “That’s completely normal and I support you.”

Then he told me how he’s trying to get ahead by writing 43 amazing new pieces, and it made me think that the secret to writing might be to write in my car in a Whole Foods parking lot.

We parted ways, but with Alex’s silent blessing, I will be resharing one of my favorite pieces from a year and 1,550 readers ago.

I spent $350 on the hi-tech Lomi compost bucket to prove I’m a good person

I can be a wasteful person. But I want to be better. Rather than improve on this shortcoming, I bought a $350 kitchen composting machine to tell myself that at least I’m doing something.

Food waste is real, people. Especially with kids.

My daughter’s appetite is the dark matter of our family; it’s there, but I can’t begin to understand it in a meaningful way. I can’t predict it or manipulate it. Who knows how much or what it will crave on any given day?

I’m at its mercy.

‍See what I did there? I’ve already set the stage to defer my own garbage guilt onto a one-year-old who can’t even talk. 

If we were serving her ice cream every day, nothing would go to waste, because I’d be willingly present to finish the scraps. But between broccoli, chicken, black beans, pasta, turkey, beets, and carrots, some days she wants more, some days less. Same as all of us. Right?

And that’s just the waste from someone who doesn’t even have a say in the matter.

My failed composting history

For the past eight years, my wife and I have lived in some pretty small apartments without a traditional way to compost. You know the ones: the large garbage bins that spin in the backyard, letting Mother Nature bring life back into your waste.

Living apartment to apartment in Los Angeles doesn’t give us that much space, so if you’re looking to virtue signal, your options are limited to the form of a pretty small tin can. 

When we did compost, we used a small $20 stainless steel canister from Amazon. It fits about two and a half meals and requires custom compostable bags that never really fit. A simple Google search showed that using rubber bands around the top is how the DIYers do it, but they failed to mention how undoing a rubber band from an overflowing food waste container feels like dismantling a bomb. 

The small bin would fill up every other day, forcing you to dutifully march back and forth between the compost bin and the kitchen. Dumping the sloshing pile of food scraps into a bigger bin inevitably leaves food waste on your hands or clothes.

This went on for a few years. Then along came our daughter. While I could blame everything on her, I won’t. But curiously, I haven't composted a damn thing since her arrival. 

I’ll pause while you gasp.

It’s now been about a year since I have lived secretly in shame, letting the small tin can from Amazon sit in the corner, unused out of pure laziness. 

The moment when I try to redeem myself

While searching online, I came across the $350 Lomi compost bucket (I was a first-adopter sucker who bought it during a presale—it’s $500 now!). I’m not sure why I decided this was a normal amount to spend to be viewed as a climate-conscious person, but I’m sure some part of it was trying to make up for the fact it had been almost a year of not composting. Of course that was all my daughter’s fault.

But what really drew me into it was that you could compost your scraps down into healthy, nutrient-filled plant soil. 

Being a mediocre plant dad, I suddenly thought I could make up for lost time. I could compost my scraps, and feed my leafy green friends at the same time.

The apartment-sized Lomi compost bucket

What the Lomi does is break down food scraps—and bio-degradable packaging (!)—into nutrient-rich soil. And it does all of this on your kitchen counter, while plugged into an outlet. It’s fast-forwarding a natural process, kind of like when nature reveals organic matter decomposing at time-lapse speed.

There are three settings to choose from. The first is one you can use for plant soil, where it takes a bit longer—24 hours—by using less heat and keeping the nutrients intact. They refer to it as Black Gold. 

The second setting is the default, which takes about 4-6 hours. The end result is still soil, it’s just not suitable for your plants. 

The third setting is one that you can use for biodegradable plastics. Even the Lomi packaging itself can be cut up and composted right inside the damn thing! (Because I’m horrible, I didn’t read about this setting until it was too late and everything was recycled.)

In all three modes, you end up with incredibly dry dirt you can safely walk out to your city-issued compost bin without the mess. Or in my case, to breathe new life into our potted plants. 

Overall, it reduces the volume of food waste by up to 90%, so I can compost almost a week’s worth of scraps without walking it out. And it doesn’t smell because of the tight-fitting lid. Well, it smells, but like an armpit after not wearing deodorant for half a day.

With most of these tech gadgets, you always wonder about their shelf life, and if the thing breaks—which it inevitably will—it ends up being just a giant bin for food scraps like we originally had. 

I honestly can’t predict what will happen, but they do tend to push the three-year extended warranty for this, so I’m getting a bit nervous. If it ends up in a landfill, then I’m worse off than where I started. As of writing this, I have not researched whether I can buy a new Lomi and let it compost itself. I’ll file this as a feature request in the next software update.

While I may regret this decision later, it’s been fun to use in the same way that deleting an email is fun. You press a single button and the machine responds with a beep, signaling you’re doing a good thing. Then immediately, it starts to whir and gently fill the kitchen with a not-so-subtle white noise, grinding organic matter into Black Gold.

Aesthetically, it’s as if Apple designed the product, with its stark white exterior and shiny white power cable. The size is about twice the size of our old tin can, but it nestles nicely into the corner without being an eyesore.

But take my review with a grain of salt…

To give this not-so-serious review some authenticity, I asked my wife how she liked it.  

‍“I’m not sure it’s worth it.”

‍I guess this is where I’ll promise to do a future update that never gets written, like my daughter’s appetite, which will be difficult to predict.

There you have it. Lomi—a gorgeous yet overpriced compost bucket that signals to everyone—and to myself—that you’re a better person. Pre-order now for $500, a price increasingly outpacing national inflation levels. Ouch.

May 2023 Update: I still feel like a good person using the Lomi and Alie still despises it. And I’m pretty sure this sucker costs well over $500 now.

And Happy Mother’s Day to all the incredible moms! A special shout-out to my wife Alie, who is probably reading this from bed with a well-deserved brownie and coffee in hand. You’re amazing, and I might even get you two brownies. Enjoy your day. ❤️

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Keep your circuits open without burning down the house

I always considered myself a bad employee.

Early in my career, I made the decision to never stay employed at a company for more than two years.

I did this partly because I knew changing jobs easily beat the incumbent’s 4%. I bounced around quickly between the first three roles, quickly increasing my pay by 55% by the time I signed on with my third role.

This wasn't because I thought the companies I worked for were bad places to work, but because I was self-taught, eager to learn more, and wanted to expand my network.

More importantly, I didn't find that climbing the corporate ladder was something I found value in.

In a one and one with a former boss, I was asked what I wanted in five years. With the amount of enthusiasm of a turtle, I spit out, "Creative Director." Coincidentally that was his role, and I just wanted to leave the room with an answer that he liked.

Like a poorly wired home, I didn't want to fully commit to their network.

The limitations of a closed circuit

A closed circuit is like having everything working together in concert. The current flows around consistently, using just the right amount of energy from each resistor and capacitor, moving swiftly around in a loop.

Closed circuits are essential for things like your iPhone to function properly. Or the lights in your home.

In business, it's the same thing.

A successful business depends on its closed circuits. This is what makes hiring people so difficult. By nature, we're unpredictable and could disrupt a closed circuit. The current doesn't flow smoothly unless we're all working together.

It's why some of the most successful companies do a great job at keeping their circuits closed. They do this by offering free lunches, gym memberships, predictable career org charts, office equipment stipends, and anything else to keep the electrical energy produced by humans flowing in harmony. Understanding the needs of the network, upgrading components—I mean people—at just the right times, and keeping them satisfied.

I have a number of friends who have had one foot out the door but then that upgrade of $10-20k and a new title came at just the right time. It's the perfect bridge so a company doesn't burn down with a short circuit.

But, it comes at the cost of our own electrical networks. The energy we give someone else to protect their network makes it difficult to maintain—or upgrade—our own.

Ten years can fly by in a closed circuit.

How to open up your network and prevent a short circuit

How well do you know what your employed friends are doing in their roles? Besides my wife, I could not tell you how well or poorly or what impact my friends have.

There's very little evidence of their role outside of the walls of the business.

It's why LinkedIn for almost two decades was a feed of barely legible closed-circuit lingo, where employees and business leaders were trying to communicate what was happening inside their organization, to people outside of their network.

But in doing so, it comes off as cringe or manipulative to people who aren't speaking the same language, even if it was done in earnest.

Open a loop to your personal circuit

While there's an opportunity to upgrade your professional network, it's much slower and predictable, because you're fighting the network effects already put in place. And not getting what you want means potential years of sacrifice being wasted.

What you should be doing opening up a small bridge between your professional and personal circuit. Not too large so it causes a fire, but just enough you can relay information between the two.

Here are a few ways you can do this:

1. Save your wins

Too many people wait until looking for their next job to document their wins and losses. Instead, sit down every quarter and put together any screenshots, internal wins, team contributions, and anything else that proves you participated in something that can upgrade your own network.

David Hoang, leading Research + Design at Replit calls this a Hype Doc. A living document that recognizes the organic wins that happen internally.

2. Recognize your worth

A small trick in getting organic customer testimonials is by saving the emails, calls, and threads of customer feedback. Then when you want to use it, just go ask for permission with the saved quote. This is much easier than trying to cold call someone for testimonials from 3-6 months ago.

If you're halfway decent at your job, tune in when people highlight you for the work you're doing. Much of the time it's organic and undocumented. So try your best to capture these moments and save them for later when you need to validate your experience for a new role or if you ever go and build your next thing.

3. Keep a list of the things that get you excited about your job

What do you love about your job? What are the areas of work that keep you in the role that you have, outside of a paycheck?

Listen carefully to your interests and make sure you lean into these areas more. These are the components that open up different opportunity circuits.

Keep a document filled with these ideas, because they might lead to a new side hustle, a business, or a bridge into a new focused role.

4. Create and share

The final piece is to start connecting the dots between what you're doing in your role, and what might benefit others.

You might be compelled to act selfishly here, and think that people care about your latest promotion, how much money you're making, or some internal win that benefits you solely.

But, we don't.

While that's great cringe content for 2016 LinkedIn, this is about something deeper. This is about how your recent project impacted a certain type of customer you now empathize with because you worked so closely with them over the last six months.

Maybe a story turns into a blog post that's not about your company, but about how you approached this personally, and how it changed you.

Or you might see an opportunity gap that won't be fixed internally due to a lack of resources, but you want to try and hypothetically solve for it through a video or some writing.

Start a newsletter. Build a product. It all starts with a simple disruption to your closed circuit.

The opportunity of an open circuit

I broke my two-year rule once in my career. It lasted seven years until 2021.

Being at a startup, I was operating in fear for a lot of the time. You're constantly thinking about whether the company is going to make it, and we were very close to failing a couple of times.

Out of fear, I recognized the limits of that closed circuit. So I spent the last 24 months of that role maintaining and upgrading my own personal network.

Once I did that, I had more options. Options give me flexibility. Flexibility gave me confidence. And confidence gave me a nudge in a new direction.

And now, you're reading it.

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💡 What’s new?

🎬 I don’t share this much, but I watch a lot of movies. Too many to be honest. I’m a bit embarrassed at how many I watch during the week, especially while I design. And one of my favorite genres happens to be low-budget sci-fi. If you’re into that, check out The Artifice Girl on Amazon Prime. Spoiler alert, it’s about AI.

Four years of memory loss

Last week we celebrated my daughter Rowan turning two years old.

She is now in a new daycare group with two to three-year-olds. On Friday when my wife picked her up from daycare, she was at the bottom of a slide stacked like an Oreo cookie between her two best friends, Jackson and Bolly.

It’s fun to see her pick up new words like, “space,” when she doesn’t want to be touched or held. Or fascinated with “potty” when we’re using the bathroom.

But here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: Rowan won’t remember a damn thing.

For the next two years, every trip, memory, and interaction will be thrown into the trash bin, like a tossed digital file on my laptop. Never to be accessed again.

Almost every day since Rowan was born, I’ve thought about this. Each time, all these memories are just for us, but not for our daughter.

The trips to Palm Springs, New York, Malibu, and San Francisco won’t exist except for the annual videos that leave us in tears after watching the videos my wife edits for our family.

When I think about my own childhood, my first memory was when I was about four, and I was nauseous from spinning around in an adult-sized teacup at Disney World.

I don’t miss what I don’t know, but participating in a child’s life for four years while we’re the only ones to remember is a strange feeling.

Strangely, this has been another motivation to why I write. To retain the ideas and thoughts that aren’t fully captured in an image or a video clip. God knows we have thousands of those.

It’s also why I periodically write and schedule emails to be sent to my daughter’s email in the future (yes I’ve already picked out her email address) based on my memories.

I’m not sure if there’s a lesson in all of this, other than I feel more obligated to be in the moment now.

Rowan’s experiences are up to me to share later in life. If I miss out or forget them, they’re lost forever.

⚡️ Your next creative hit

✈️ When design can kill: “On October 12, 1997, John Denver, popular folk singer and amateur pilot, at the controls of a newly-purchased experimental aircraft, died after crashing into Monterey Bay, in California. He died in an aircraft that had already done its best to kill two previous pilots, an aircraft with a human interface flaw so fundamental, so profound, that it finally managed to kill.”

Lesson: Don’t place fuel gauges behind the pilot’s left shoulder requiring a mirror to view the tanks, and forcing you to let go of the controls to switch the lever.

🎙️ Convert messy thoughts into clear text*: I am a huge Otter.AI fan. But sifting through a full transcript of a meeting or four-hour-long lecture is not going to happen.

Louis Pereira created a fantastic tool for creative thinkers, utilizing ChatGPT. It’s a simple idea, well executed. Just record your thoughts using the app, and it will send you a cleaned-up, summarized version of it almost instantly. It’s great for shower thoughts or those moments early on when you’re just rambling. *This is an affiliate link

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What’s new?

Every now and then, I aim to unlock insights from entrepreneurs and creators who are chasing their next thing. This week, I’m honored to highlight, Patrick Morgan.

Patrick reached out via Twitter—and because he’s moving back to LA—we found some time to chat about our own next things. I found his story of balancing a full-time role while writing a newsletter similar to mine, and I thought he would be a perfect fit for sharing his journey.

Don't expect anyone else to fully understand why you need to pursue the next idea upfront.

Who is Patrick Morgan?

I'm Principal Product Designer at a cybersecurity startup and write a newsletter called Better by Design. I'm also an amateur singer/songwriter and endurance runner. So my days are usually some combo of: make something (design, writing, music), go run, hang with friends or family.

When was the last time you made an unexpected pivot in direction, either recently or in the past?
The last time I made an unexpected turn was when I switched from being a UI engineer into design.

I had joined a small startup that didn’t have any full-time designers and as the UI developer that cared the most about how the app looked and felt, I ended up making our designs.

After a few months of doing double duty, the founders let me hand off my development responsibilities and shift full-time into design. I still liked coding, but design felt like a more natural fit for me day-to-day. After making the switch, I stuck around long enough to build my portfolio and then made the move to a company with a larger, more established design team with good leaders I could learn from.

One main takeaway is to recognize and follow your own tolerance when it comes to picking your daily work. I looked around at the other UI engineers I worked with and realized that I didn’t share their fascination with the minutia of the technical implementation; I was fascinated with how the product felt to use.

Could I have been happy staying as a UI developer? Probably. But has design been an overall better fit for me? You bet.

A piece of advice you would offer someone who feels stuck in pursuing their next idea?
Don't expect anyone else to fully understand why you need to pursue the next idea upfront.

As a people-pleaser by nature, I know it's super hard to move ahead without some validation, but it's a trap. You just need to start making what you want to make and then as the shape starts to reveal itself people will start to understand.

What are you most excited about in the world today?
I'm really excited about the next wave of business and entrepreneurship opportunities for people with a creative technology skill set. To me, it feels like we're on the verge of a renaissance for folks who embrace building hybrid skills.

A favorite quote or piece of advice you live by?
A recent addition to my list of favorite quotes is this one by author and YouTuber John Green:

"I used to think art had to be great to be worthwhile; now, I only think it has to be to be worthwhile.”

In our data-driven culture, I feel a lot of pressure to rationalize every input and output of my creations. But often, the best and only reason to make something is simply because you want to see it exist.

What do you need help with?
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Where can someone find you online?
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Unexpected connections come from building

I'm driving by the enormous wind-powered turbines lined in rows and columns between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. This stretch of the desert would otherwise be forgotten if it weren't for this stand-out backstop feature that I look forward to every time I drive through.

They're large enough to wonder how the hell they were built. It’s a quick Google search away but instead I'll leave it to the imagination as I write this.

I'm often thinking about creating stand-out features for products or brands. Features on their own aren’t useful unless it's connected to helping us in some way. But when you do, it's possible to create magic.

When Steve Jobs was young, a man named Larry Lang moved into their neighborhood. He was an engineer at HP and an amateur Ham-radio operator. He loved electronics.

To get to know the kids and neighbors around him, he put a carbon microphone, a speaker, and a battery in his driveway for anyone to try. By speaking into the microphone, the speaker would amplify your voice.

Just by building this device and letting his neighbors try it out, he didn’t have to utter a word about what he loved to do. He also couldn’t have realized the impact it would make on Steve Jobs and other kids in the neighborhood.

It was created purely as a way to connect with the people around him.

There is an infinite amount of examples of this idea at play:

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee connected information between scientists around the world, which would become the World Wide Web.

Ada Lovelace is credited as being the first computer programmer, by creating an algorithm to be run on a machine that never actually existed. Her love of math helped develop a relationship between her and Charles Babbage, who advanced the idea that computers could help solve complex problems for us.

A group of painters in the late 19th century found a shared interest in painting everyday life and landscapes. They painted outdoors, using bright and vivid colors, against what was considered popular at the time. They became known as The Impressionists, ushering in a new style and view of the world.

None of these examples started with a plan or a way to monetize. They started from curiosity. An idea. A spark.

Sometimes the best ideas come from a place of connecting with others. Whether it’s a collaboration, or simply to signal you’re a wind turbine in the middle of a desert.

⚡️ Your next creative hit

🎶 45 seconds of Ed Sheehan on songwriting. If you’re starting something new, be prepared to spew shit in the early stages.

🏡 It’s rare for a single photo to stick the landing. “Just add land,” says it all.

🍎 Make something wonderful. A beautiful free ebook on Steve Jobs’ life of creativity, building, and work.

I’ve been in hundreds of meetings when Apple is used as an example for why X company should do Y. When this happens, there’s an image I keep in the back of my mind: The Apple I.

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Discover your visual style: How to set the foundation for timeless design decisions in five steps

Most days you’ll find me wearing a black V-neck and black pants. Not because I think it’s cool, but because it’s one part convenience and one part easy to match.

I wear black because I’m lazy.

And black just works. It’s highly unlikely you’re going to dress in all white, all purple, all green, or all yellow.

Although maybe I should be convinced otherwise?

Your visual style can be an anchor for your design decisions. It doesn’t always need to be expressed in every single medium. I dial down my visual style in the clothes I wear, but it doesn’t mean I don’t let them fly in many of the products I build.

In fact, I define my fashion choices by what I don’t like, versus what I do like. For example, I hate wearing anything heavily branded. I’d rather work out in a black cotton t-shirt than a Nike-branded moisture-wicking shirt.

I own very few printed tees because I’m lazy.

But launch a new website? This is where I think it’s important to lean into your visual style. You can’t greet every person who visits your website, so you’re trying to connect with people through words and visuals. Not easy to do!

Here’s a simple process I use to start the process of creating a visual style and say f*ck minimalism.

For this piece, I’ll use a real example from our new game studio, Hey, Good Game.

1. Get personal: Connect to a favorite place or story

When I started to think about what kind of visual style I wanted to create for Hey, Good Game, I went to the stories and origins of some of my favorite puzzles. Sudoku and Hitori both have Japanese origins, and that small prompt took me back to a specific time I spent in Kyoto, near the Fushimi Inari Shrine.

Going through all my old pictures, I saw the color orange pop up over and over. The day was sunny, but the trail was crowded with cedar trees and bamboo. The Torri gates are all bright orange with dark markings in the names of the businesses and people who donated them.

Most people skip this step, and instead, go and mimic a site they like, or a color palette someone else created. But these decisions have already been made for someone else, and for a different reason.

The secret is to make design decisions that connect to your own life, then you won’t feel the need to update it six months later.

At this point, I quickly fell in love with this orange and black combination, although I want to be a bit careful with the easy overlap with Halloween.

2. Get curious: Create a visual research board

As of right now, I have two colors I know might work. While these choices will take me pretty far, I still need to find metaphors, objects, motifs, or other hooks that will connect me deeper to my decisions.

But I need to start doing some background research.

At this point, I want to start doing some research into the product itself. I want to find more connective pieces to pull this theme together.

I know we’re building and buying logic-based mobile and web games, and so many of these games use a grid structure. Sharp corners, 1:1 squares, high contrast tiles, and sometimes large letters for games like Wordle.

I’m really thinking about all of these pieces while collecting visuals, backstories, icons, and typography.

There might be intriguing ways to remix the interesting pieces and give them a new look that connects with the theme from step one.

3. Embrace frequency bias: Look for patterns

Throughout my research, I started seeing a number of grids pop up. Then I noticed the color orange in the objects around me. Shortly after, I noticed a design book near my desk called Grid Systems, which is set in a similar orange, using black type, and is a book on grids!

While it’s not uncommon for this to happen when you start chasing rabbit holes, you should embrace this cognitive bias. It’s an enjoyable experience in design, especially when you’re trying to define a visual style.

Alongside the black and orange pairing, and overall grid structures, I loved how circles kept popping up in various ways. It contrasts the other shapes easily, and so I want to keep this around for safekeeping. In the back of my head, I started thinking about using an exclamation point due to its universal symbolism for excitement, and the instant energy it brings.

So, lock into anything that pops up 3-4 times around you, and give it serious consideration. Seeing these patterns confirms the direction I am heading in, giving me the head nod to keep exploring.

4. Check yourself: Are you straying too far?

This is just a simple checkpoint before starting to apply these initial decisions to a broader design project. Are you happy with the theme? Are these decisions personal and relevant to you?

Another trick I normally do is to sleep on it. If you wake up in the morning and still love the path you’re on, listen to your gut and don’t overthink it.

For many people, making design decisions takes far too long, because they continue to question themselves and whether or not it looks good.

Stick with your stories, connect visuals to them, and these initial themes will be the seeds for your products, websites, apparel, emails, apparel, and more.

5. Create a definitive visual taste palette

The last step is to build out an edge-to-edge board filled with visuals, type, color, shapes, and everything in between. I call this a taste palette. Do not leave any available white space!

The goal is to express your unique taste in a distinctive visual style, all stemming from your personal story.

A simple technique is to set the background color in one of the colors you chose, then screengrab everything you found that’s related into one canvas.

Notice how we haven’t actually designed anything yet! We’re just being curious, experimenting, and seeing how far we can get without designing.

Once you have your taste palette, the next step is to design your site yourself or hire a designer to take this and run with it.

Most people skip this step and ask a designer to make these decisions, but having this ahead of time could save you thousands in revisions and redesigns later on.

Feel free to view the final landing page here.

⚡️ Your next creative hit

🥻 Balenciaga meets Star Wars. You will never view Star Wars the same again.

🛥️ Speaking of high fashion, I never expected Triangle of Sadness to be one of my favorite movies of the past year. ( I am a sucker for satirical black comedies and riveting YouTube thumbnails like this.)

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💡 What’s new?

🕹️ Officially launched Hey, Good Game with a stellar domain. We’re a team of four who are inspired by how impactful games can be—especially brainy games. We’re also fans of Jane McGonigal and how games can be used for good. If you know of anyone in this space, I’d love an intro.

Tetrify your choices

My nine-year-old butt sat on a stretch of plush, brown-speckled carpeted tufts only the late 80s could manufacture. Cross-legged in front of a large built-in TV, I punched my thumbs into the Nintendo controller I gripped in my hands, watching the oddly shaped squares called tetrominoes fall down the TV into layers.

Alexey Pajitnov was 29 when he created Tetris. He was inspired by a childhood game that consisted of five squares of equal size forming different shapes. He originally designed the game with brackets because his computer lacked a graphics card.

Like most people, I fell in love with the simplicity and gameplay of Tetris. It captivated me for hours at a time.

But while Tetris is one of the most popular games in video game history, it’s a game where you’re destined to lose.

It’s popular not because you will lose, but because of its infinite gameplay.

Jane McGonigal, author of "Reality is Broken," writes that all games have four distinct rules:

1. A goal

2. Rules of play

3. A feedback system

4. A voluntary participation

You don’t need competition or a winner to define a game. The state of being in flow is more addicting than ending a game by winning.

James Carse, author of Finite and Infinite Games defines these two types of games as “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”

Successful games encourage you to play more.

If you can have as much fun playing games you can’t win, what would your life look if you made choices based on how much energy and enjoyment they bring you?

Finite gameplay

Life gives you some built-in structures to live by, but they’re not mandatory.

The bumper lanes that offer on-ramps to achieve skills—like a traditional education or a career path—have no guaranteed outcomes.

What they do give you is a defined path to walk, with clear milestones and an estimated time of completion. Their outcomes are focused on things like graduation or promotion, but that usually leads to a new set of challenges.

It’s like if you find yourself stuck at a job for five or more years, unable to escape. Employers can use short-term gamification to their advantage, offering you another small promotion or raise, giving you just enough of a carrot to stick it out another year or two.

But take a moment to look back instead of forward, and think about how you have played the game so far, and what’s likely to change going forward. Don’t get stuck with tunnel vision and forget to play the infinite game with your decisions.

It’s extremely difficult to pivot and change your direction after a decade of making these finite decisions, as you enter your mid-30s or 40s.

Tetris like gameplay

If you approach life like a Tetris game, it might seem unclear how random life choices float down from the top of the screen.

Imagine each shape representing a choice or a skill attained.

How do these choices all stack and fit together? What if this skill only overlaps four of the squares instead of five?

This feeling is uncomfortable and stressful. Income from these detached skills isn’t clear yet, and you don’t know if you’re wasting your time illustrating your blog images in your spare time when you can make much more money designing user interfaces. (Oh hey, that’s me.)

But this acquisition of skills and the particular order of stacking them is completely unique to you. You can’t know the outcome yet, and it may not seem clear until you have some pieces to work with.

And this is often the case with the people you admire or look up to. Almost every one of my mentors (even the ones that don’t know me) has not followed a path that looks like anything traditional.

People I’m inspired by like Ryan Holiday went from college dropout at 19 to work with Tucker Max, then later worked with author Robert Greene, then led marketing at American Apparel, and now has authored over 10 books, writes a daily blog, and lives on a ranch in Texas. Oh, and he also runs a bookstore.

When I left my last job in 2021, I felt like I was on a linear route, without a clear direction. It’s why I named this newsletter, Plan Your Next, because I wasn’t sure what my next thing might be.

Now, I’m surrounded by a number of Tetronimoes, unsure how they’re all going to fit together. But in the past 18 months, the following shapes have started to find their place in my life, even if they seemingly started out of nowhere.

A few recent Tetris examples from my own life:

• This newsletter was given a new life after I took Write of Passage in 2020 and combined my love for design with writing.

• A consistent pursuit of becoming a better writer led me to have design conversations with creators and solopreneurs. Those conversations gave me the spark to start teaching design and building Approachable Design into something I couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.

• I never considered myself an artist, but I embraced drawing and started to illustrate each of my newsletter and blog articles, leading to a collaboration with a friend of mine to teach other writers how to draw. That pursuit has now turned into me being asked to illustrate an upcoming book.

• Teaching Figma Thinkers by using Figma every day and collaborating with a friend to teach others how to think visually.

• Fresh Prompts was born out of an interest and skill growth in SEO and marketing automation. This idea is also an extension of my drawing course, except we're helping people stay inspired to draw every day using AI.

• Hey, Good Game is an extension of my own product background, combined with building communities, growing an email list, and building extremely fun and brainy games that hopefully Jane McGonigal would be proud of.

“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.”—James Carse

This all might seem like a badly played game of Tetris, but if you look back, each shape continues to find its place as you continue to stack each shape

⚡️ Your next creative hit

👨‍💻 The I ❤️NYC redesign completely flopped, and they removed all of the personality Milton Glaser gave it.

👓 Vox on why so many people need glasses. Also, Vox videos are such a great resource for data visualization inspiration.

🕹️ The story of how Tetris came to be licensed is almost unbelievable. The history of how Tetris came to be is Tetris just launched on Apple TV+.

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The best purchase you can make under $100

The answer to this conversation bait will always be a personal website with a $12 domain and a $15/mo web host.

I remember the moment I launched my own website. It was in the early 2000s, and I used it to host my design portfolio to land my first in-house design role. Having my own website with portfolio back then was like being able to bring my own offer sheet to the interview for them to sign.

Prior to getting the job, I spent a week straight on it. I stuffed it with as much portfolio work as I could, even if most of it were volunteer design projects I assigned myself.

It was built in Flash, a now-defunct technology that I honestly have no idea how to load the hundreds of files on my computer anymore.

Like an old photo album, my own personal site has taken on a dozen personalities. From its very first emo incarnation to my early entrepreneurial efforts, to clean and modern Nate, to a simple hand-coded about me page, to a cherry dipped take, to its version today.

It’s fun to look back through the years to get a sense of how it’s changed. But one thing hasn’t: Having a place for your own weird ideas should exist, even if they evolve over time.

Take it seriously, but don’t be too serious

In many of my creative calls, I’ve fielded more questions about personal websites and how to blend the professional and the personal.

“Should I have separate domains for my consulting and my personal blog?”

I get it. It’s the same reason we dress up for interviews. To separate the, “I’ve got my shit together” person from the “I can’t get out of bed in the morning because I’m doom scrolling TikTok videos of cute things dogs do.”

But, splitting up these personas only complicates things more, so I generally advise people to start building their online home, then add a detached garage or ADU if you get to that point.

At the end of the day, we want to work with people we enjoy and we trust. Giving people a glimpse into your personal life through your writing and your hobbies is a great way to demonstrate your personal monopoly of skills and interests.

Don’t wait to build your site the moment you need to put on that dress shirt you wear twice a year. Start building it now and evolve it over time.

An investment in yourself

Listen, you’re going to spend $8-18/mo and you’re going to like it.

It’s one of the best investments you’ll make. What Ramit Sethi says about personal finance also applies here: “Spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.”

Stop trying to save an extra $5/mo and just do what allows you to launch something you can edit over time. Having an online presence is worth more to your career than it is to reject a tool like Webflow because of price.

It seems every creator and indie thread will promote Carrd as the best option, but I believe it’s a stopgap that doesn’t allow you to grow. One page is better than zero pages, but you’re going to need a blog and the ability to add more pages.

Newsletters and blogs

Substack is great for starting a newsletter, but ultimately you should bet on owning your own platform. The website vs newsletter line is being blurred by Substack on purpose, but ultimately I believe writing a newsletter is different than writing a blog, and owning your own web host is different than viewing Substack as your website.

If you know how to code using HTML/CSS, I’d recommend using Wordpress or a static site generator like Jekyll to create your pages using markdown. But for most, this is overkill and creates a much larger learning curve.

To get started quickly, I’d recommend Webflow or Framer. I personally host my own site on Webflow, and it’s been great for me.

A process for building your personal site in Framer without being a designer

The single biggest problem with building your own site is not knowing how to design it. This is usually one of the biggest stumbling blocks, which leads most people to choose a template that they get bored with within a matter of months.

But what if you could see exactly how your favorite site was designed, and download that into Figma? There’s a way.

If you use Figma, you can use this plugin, then enter in your favorite personal website. It will visually render the HTML code directly into Figma, giving you a sense for how they constructed their site!

Once you have it in Figma, start to look at how they laid out the text, the background colors, and the navigation. Pay attention to the details and how they chose to place their text. If you want an example of my downloaded site, you can see it here.

I will always recommend copying as a way to learn design. If you’re curious to learn more about Figma and design, you can check out my 80/20 design challenge.

Framer is changing the game

A newish tool on the block for building websites is called Framer. It’s essentially a visual design tool that lets you design directly on their canvas, then click Publish without ever seeing a line of code.

I’ve never witnessed a tool work so easily and flawlessly.

To see it work, create a free account and start with a template. Click ‘publish’ and your site will be live at a temporary domain.

Starting at $5/mo, you can build a completely custom one-page site and publish to a custom domain within minutes of creating an account. I’ve never seen this type of functionality before for $5/mo.

If you want to add additional pages and a blog, you’ll jump to $15 a month. This sets it apart from using platforms like Carrd in my mind because it can scale with you without having to switch products.

We’re truly in an era of no-code tools being able to express yourself visually, and it’s never been easier to create something truly unique for yourself, whether it’s personal, professional, or a hybrid like mine.

⚡️ Your next creative hit

📦 The delivery design of this drone is wildly creative and has the potential to upend drone delivery.

🔊 Can a $4,000 pair of speakers make you cry? Great thread by Julian Shapiro and here is the full HiFi sound guide where he tests speakers worth $360k. Btw, the guide is hosted at his *ahem* personal website.

And a special thanks to Abhishek, Scott, and Dupaski for supporting this newsletter in the past week!

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💡 What’s new?

🏴‍☠️ Figma Thinkers beta cohort sold out in under a week! Over the next four weeks, we have a diverse group of UX researchers, indie consultants, marketing directors, and biz dev folks becoming more persuasive visual thinkers.

🎲 Working with friends to build and acquire a number of online casual games (think Sudoku or Kakuro) as we focus on creating a game studio as a force for good. More to come on this soon, but you’re welcome to see how I concept and build out sites in Figma.

Last week, I was on vacation in San Diego with my family staring out at the ocean inside our AirBnB with a sinus infection and pink eye. I could hardly breathe and suffered from Tsunami headaches while missing out on the Jurassic Park Museum and the San Diego Zoo with my daughter.

My daughter walked in from these trips like she had made new bonds with everyone, and ol’ dada was the chump who missed out.

I was instead spending my days on telehealth apps trying to stuff my face with as many meds as possible. I rarely take anything and so when the opportunity rises, prescribe me everything, please.

Everything that required my 100% attention failed to get finished. Things like this newsletter, client work, and parental duties fell off a cliff. Antibiotics for both my eye and sinus infection left me looking and feeling like Sloth from the Goonies.

But this letter isn’t about how bad I felt. It’s about what got done while I was incapable of being anything but productive

The week prior, Tom and I were finishing up eight consecutive weeks of building Figma Thinkers in public and had just launched the doors to our beta cohort. If I were running this by myself, I don’t think I could have even summoned the energy to throw an announcement to our email list or online.

Collaborative risk mitigation

It’s enticing to start projects by yourself. No risk no reward, right? 100% upside—and if it fails—you won’t let anyone down except yourself.

Many of my past projects have failed because of this perspective. Either I couldn’t find a product market fit fast enough, I got bored with an idea, or money ran out.

It’s also easy to blame yourself if you lack the mental wiring to publicly talk about your projects, or whether to lock yourself in from getting any real feedback.

But to reduce the risk of many of these outcomes, it might make sense to partner with a collaborator, even if the project feels too small to split the equity.

Collaborative upside

My latest partnership has been with Tom on Figma Thinkers. Before that, I partnered with Salman on Drawing for Writers using Procreate.

If you look at these projects at the surface level, you might not think they deserve a 50/50 split between two solopreneurs. We all have other creative projects, client projects, and other businesses to look after.

With Figma Thinkers, this is exactly the type of business that could fail or never get enough fuel to get off the ground quickly enough if it were just one of us running it independently. Between the two of us, we can cover all aspects of running a business with ease, and keep each other motivated with ideas and the ability to create.

Neither of us needs to ditch everything else we’re working on, and the speed at which we can work is at least 2-3x because we’re testing ideas with each other first, iterating quickly behind the scenes, and doing what we can to test each iteration in real-time along the way.

We’re still early and figuring out the potential upside of the business, but this is the same problem that Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger had when building blind an early version of Tailwind UI, then later co-authoring the book Refactoring UI. That book and framework found a niche and has now passed four million in revenue.

Collaborating with others gives you the chance to think bigger, and to force us to imagine how a business might support two guys with families.

And when you have a partner like Tom during launch week while your face is full of mucus, you can trust that your business is going to be all right.

Your next creative hit

⏰ How to take better breaks (and actually take them) is a great article by Clo S. on steps you can take to be more digitally mindful. Highly recommend subscribing to her weekly newsletter here.

🎨 What makes design, “good?” An analysis of four sites and how they all achieve good balance through type, color, contrast, and layout.

The best way to visually breakup an interface is with a shift of background colors. This shift creates the illusion of a foreground (which will draw the users’ attention first) and background. — Sarah Gibbons and Kelley Gordon

🖪 Historical hardware from Sony Design via Tim Van Damme

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💡 What’s new?

📱 After more than 100 calls with some of you, my creative calls are now under the paid plan of this newsletter. But, if you just want to grab some time to chat about your creative projects, there’s a new link at the bottom of the email.

The phone call that changed my life and the best design books for non-designers

I picked up the phone and called a friend out of anxiety.

"I'm going to drop out of college and I want you to teach me web design."

I was 18 and my feet felt stuck in cement at the local community college, not knowing what direction I wanted to pursue. I couldn't make up my mind, and I overloaded myself with classes, failing at some.

Was it architecture? Graphic design? Something else?

Up until this point, I was playing it as safely as I could. Without any financial help from my parents, I didn’t want to lock myself into debt from school loans. So, I chose a local school just minutes from my parent's home in a suburb of Minneapolis, while working at a local photo studio.

My dad was a graphic designer for a mail-order company local to the Midwest. Watching him place mail-order products like pens and clothes next to labels and prices using a desktop publishing software called Quark was not what I wanted to end up calling a career.

What I didn’t know was knowing how many different flavors of design there were. Print design was the only medium I was familiar with, and taking classes at the local college was like peering into the truth of the past, without any bets being placed on the future. I wanted to be on the cutting edge, just like the Apple IIe my parents owned at the height of personal computing in the 80s.

After that phone call and my soon-to-be mentor took me up on my offer, I spent the next 18 months working as an apprentice, learning how to use Microsoft Frontpage, code HTML and CSS, and more importantly, design for the web.

My path in design led me to learn about design in non-traditional ways. I never studied design formally, but instead, I built my skillset by chasing my next idea.

If you have been curious about wanting to better understand design in a non-traditional way, here's a list of books I'd recommend to close the design knowledge gap.

1. "Thinking with Type" by Ellen Lupton

The most important thing you need to learn about design is how to make your text sing. 95% of the web is made up of text, and there are helpful guidelines to make sure your text is readable and legible.

Have you landed on a website where the text stretched from one side of the browser to the other? It's tiring to read, no matter how great the story is. And that feeling affects the brand equity of the person who wrote it.

"Thinking with Type" is one of the most approachable books on typography. It not only covers some of the technical aspects in a simple way, but this book will level up your thinking after one read.

It's filled with great illustrations, and writers will love this because many of the examples are directed at making sure your writing looks great.

2. "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams

"The Non-Designer's Design Book" is a great introduction to design for non-designers. The book covers the basics of design, including layout, color, and typography. The book is written in a friendly and accessible style, making it easy to understand for anyone.

My only knock is how dated the examples are, as it was originally written in the late 80s when it was cool to have overly designed business cards because desktop publishing was entirely new.

That said, it covers the fundamentals well, and it's a great reference book on the four basic design principles.

3. "GO: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design" by Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd has designed more than 1,500 book covers, including the cover of Michael Crieghton's Jurassic Park, which was later licensed to Universal Studios for the movie.

Personally, I believe you can learn a lot about design from the way books are created to grab our attention. This book by Chip simplifies the basic ideas of design into content, form, typography, and concepts.

The book also includes 10 mini design projects in the back, which make the concepts incredibly easy to apply.

4. "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman

"The Design of Everyday Things" is a classic book on design that explores how everyday objects are designed and used.

Good design should be intuitive and easy to use, and the book provides examples of both good and bad design in everyday life. The book is less about how to apply design, but instead how to cultivate your curiosity of design in the world you live in.

5. "Designing News: Changing the World of Editorial Design and Information Graphics" by Francesco Franchi

Much of the time, I would buy books like this to be inspired by different layouts and ways to design information. Even if you're designing a personal site, looking through newspapers all across the world is such a fascinating way to be inspired.

I have kept this on my shelf for almost 10 years, and whenever I'm feeling uninspired, this is my go-to resource to better understand different ways to combine type, form, and content.

Optionally advanced: "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst

This book is the definitive manual on typography. It can be a bit dense, and much of what you'll learn is in Ellen Lupton's book above. But, if you want the Bible of typography, this is it.

This covers everything from the history of typography to the basics of typography design. The book is filled with examples of good typography, making it easy to understand the principles of typography design.

This is really only for those who want to dive deeper into typography and master the craft.

⚡️ Get your next creative hit

👨‍💻 Represent your day in 144 squares

🎨 Pair fonts easily using FontPair

🥃 Surprisingly hilarious read from Marc Andreessen on abstaining from alcohol for the past six months.

“About six months ago, I stopped drinking alcohol. I feel much better, and I’m mad as hell about it.

We recently passed 2,000 subscribers. Thanks for being here!

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💡 What’s new?

💵 I recently turned on payments for this newsletter, but don’t worry, nothing changes other than your support. I’ll still be sending along the newsletter in its fully crafted form, but with the optionally and highly touted (by me) benefit of doing open drawing sessions, AMAs, and other office hour sessions.

What’s probably most interesting to me is the PYN OG membership where you’ll get every product I create (by myself) plus extended 1:1 calls. So far I have two products that would be included, and anything else I create in the next 12 months.

✍️ I was recently asked to do illustrations for a book that’s being written. It’s not a done deal—nor all that profitable—but damn would it be fun to do! It’s just another example of how your next idea can change how the world sees you.

Stop treating your art as a gift to the world

I've heard the phrase that you should look at your art as a gift to the world. But I think that's giving any individual piece of art too much credit and not enough to what is a lagging indicator of the greatness that lies ahead.

Treating anything like a gift sets the bar too high. Even the most famous painting (Yes that’s the Mona Lisa) is mocked and ridiculed by many. Our creativity is not always viewed as a gift anyways, so when it’s inevitably rejected by some, it cuts deep.

Our creative process isn’t built to withstand repeated rejection. And if you’re like me, my so-called gifts feel more like a combination of six different lego sets mixed together in an unwrapped Amazon box shipped on a rainy day.

I've snapped tens of thousands of pictures, typed out hundreds of essays, designed hundreds of websites, and nothing has felt ready to gift to the world.

I've spent hours tweaking a photo in Adobe Lightroom to get a slightly desaturated but film-like grain, adding a foundational crunchy texture like a slice of dutch crunch bread beneath a layer of warm pastrami.

In Figma, I'll push pixels around the infinite canvas, wondering if the font Domaine Display showcases my personality enough or if I should go with something more modern.

While Hemingway said the first draft of anything is shit, what if we spend hours on a creative project that still ends up like shit? Endless tinkering increases the likelihood that you'll be more cautious about what you end up shipping, because of how much devotion you've given to your art.

This is the ultimate paradox: the more you care, the more difficult it is to admit, "I'm ready to publish.”

So what if we cared less about our art? Does it make us less than an artist? Does your art not deserve to see the light of day?

I struggle with this idea often, as if spending more time on our projects somehow makes us better artists or creators. That process should be as disheartening as the idea that working in a cubicle makes you a better employee.

Leonardo Da Vinci made more scribbles in his sketchbook than Steve Jobs sent emails, and even he said, "Art is never finished, only abandoned."

There's a certain beauty to the imperfection of something that is finished and released into the world. It shows that you are brave enough to accept your work as it is and let it live on its own.

The beauty of deadlines

What’s more important than any single piece of art is the trail of evidence you leave as you continue to create. And creating needs deadlines so we don’t devote too much of ourselves in a way that leaves us too fragile to publish.

This is why I believe in having a finish line. Create constraints for yourself, even if it's a weekly newsletter forcing you to ship on Sundays while wondering if my gift writing will resonate with anyone.

Releasing art into the world regularly has a more important role than any one individual thing you create. It establishes a family tree of work that can be found and traced back to its origin. You.

Don’t treat your creativity or art as a sacred gift, but as evidence of what you’re interested in so you can pull people into your world.

⚡️ Your next creative hits

🌈 99% of color palette generators work and look like trash, and you’re left not knowing how to use color anyways. Poline won’t teach you anything except about how it works, but it sure does do a better job of combining colors.

👨‍💻 Try browsing the web in a different way. It took me months to get the courage (and time) to try out the Arc browser, but it’s one of the few products that balance form and function well. Check out this incredibly well-edited video between the Head of Design and the CEO. (It’s based on Chrome so all your extensions will still work) 👉 Here are five invites

👋 See you next Sunday

My calendar is always open to chat about your next adventure, crazy idea, or if you’re feeling creatively stuck.

My goal is to help more people give a damn about what they’re creating next, through my writing, teaching, and design. If you want to support my journey, the best ways are to learn to draw, make better design decisions, communicate stories with better slide decks, or discover your visual style in my live workshops.

Or, if you want to sponsor this newsletter, sign up here.

Have a great week,

p.s. Words are just words, but if these words made you feel something, would you let me know by tapping on the heart below?

Subscribe now

The War of Art(boards)

Imagine you just received a creative brief email that reads, “We need to create a graphic of seven pillars to demonstrate our seven strategies for the upcoming year. And we need it for our presentation this week.”

Spend five seconds on Google and you'll be served up a bounty of images that look like the Greek Parthenon with the requisite number of columns.

Five seconds later and you throw your hands up because you’re not a designer, and how do you even fit title text and subheads around this image in PowerPoint that's not utterly cliche?

There are a few directions you can take at this moment.

1. Keep searching online for the perfect visual metaphor.

2. Cobble together some pre-designed shapes using slide deck software like Powerpoint.

3. Calmly lure a designer who won't roll their eyes to help you out, if your company saw fit to employ one.

4. Attempt to create a visual from scratch, on your own.

For those who are curious about the last path, you'll quickly discover that there are a couple of popular design tools out there. But only one of them will let your creativity and uniqueness truly shine in a cross-functional environment.

Visual persuasion vs graphic design

“PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation.”—Edward Tufte

Figma and Canva are both popular tools for design, but the main difference is where they drop you in the design spectrum.

The infinite canvas that Figma places you on can feel like starting to write a novel while staring at an empty Google Doc.

While this might feel intimidating if you're unfamiliar with the tools, you're being asked to explore and collaborate.

Canva is a graphic design tool that drops you much further down the path, in a sea of pre-designed templates eagerly waiting for you to add color between the lines. It's great for creating consistent and branded elements, but it's a modern-day version of Powerpoint, that extends its template capabilities into websites, YouTube thumbnail art, and social media.

It's the perfect place if you need to quickly design an ad, but if you want to use visual persuasion to communicate ideas, it will attempt to blindfold you and push you into a sea of pre-made templates, wasting your time while promoting its paid pricing plan that removes backgrounds.

Oh, Figma has an active community with plug-ins that will do that for you, for free.

Multi-disciplinary collaboration

One of Figma's most useful (and scary good) features is the ability to work in real-time across teams.

I've built branded client-facing sales decks and prototypes in collaboration with sales and marketing teams, helped engineers execute pixel-perfect designs for web and mobile apps, and even built animated prototypes to communicate art direction for motion graphics artists.

But, one doesn't need to be a designer at the middle of these collaborations.

Figma also offers robust tools for gathering feedback from stakeholders and other team members. You can easily create polls or surveys right within your canvas to get input from everyone involved in the project. This helps ensure that everyone’s voice is heard throughout the entire process and that all decisions are made with everyone’s best interest in mind.

I can't imagine a scenario where you couldn't be a Figma facilitator, involving those who you work with to get feedback, test ideas, or just make sure the font used is correct.

Community Inspired

Using pre-designed templates forces you to retrofit your content into a certain mold. The creativity is sucked out of the air, leaving you with cliches and overused metaphors.

Figma does offer similar pre-designed templates if you dig deep enough, but their strength lies in the thousands of community-powered plug-ins to wrangle your data, build unique prototypes, or create interactive components.

But if you're just needing that perfect GIF to add to your deck, you can find those too.

Visual layer stacking and grouping

In design, an element lives on its own layer. It's how we bring depth and visual intrigue to elements placed on the screen. A string of text could live on a layer above or below a shape. This simple stack creates a foreground and background element.

All tools have layer stacking built into them, but most hide this behind labels like "send to back" or "send to front."

Figma offers a more complete way to handle the organization of layers, by giving you a visual tool palette that lets you easily move layers up or down in order, or nest layers into groups.

The pen is mightier than the sword

In 1987, Adobe introduced the pen tool in its own software called Illustrator. It instantly allowed designers to create any shape they wanted with ease.

But 36 years later, it's still one of the most intimidating yet powerful tools to learn in design. It's what is used to create logos, lines, shapes, and even typefaces.

Simply, Figma offers this functionality in its software for you to learn if you dare. Canva doesn't allow you to create custom shapes in this way, and this is why creativity is allowed to roam free in Figma.

A canvas for communication

In the end, both tools serve different purposes, but understanding how to use Figma in your day-to-day (especially if you're not a designer) is like learning how to code. You'll become more valuable in cross-discipline collaboration, be able to create persuasive visuals, and have conversations via an infinite canvas.

Canva is good for a lot of general design use cases, but if you’re a weirdo and want to stand out—Figma is the tool for you.

⚡️ Your next creative hit

📡 Take a hi-res photo with a satellite starting at $20

✍️ Did you know Rick Rubin’s book was ghostwritten? I didn’t, and Ellen Fishbein aims to disrupt the publishing incentives by focusing on under-the-radar authors.

🦾 My buddy Stew launched a new AI writing tool called Type. I’ve used a few AI writing tools and while the feature set is limited, I like the angle they have taken here to get you off the ground quickly.

⏪ Revisit: Around this time last year, I published a post about making your trips memorable by sketching them.

🙏 Ever since writing about my slow-growth (but impactful) newsletter, 600 of y’all showed up to prove me wrong. I appreciate you being here and if you think anyone else might enjoy it, I’d love for you to let them know. *kisses*

Subscribe now

💡 What’s new?

🎨 Want to build an online product or service that stands out? Enrollment for the eighth cohort of Approachable Design is open! It’s a live two-day workshop to help non-designers like you build a personalized design kit so you never have to start from scratch again. 👉 Sign up here

Fresh sheets for your spreadsheets

It’s a Friday night with a glass of boxed cabernet in hand—and like most people—I’m searching “How to make your Google sheets look better.”

The first two results are YouTube videos and this is what passes as being acceptable examples of well-designed Google Sheets:

In case I’m being too subtle, these are not well-designed!

Nothing against what these people view as acceptable, but if you decide that vertically aligned text, low-contrast backgrounds, and brightly colored cells with unreadable text are what people enjoy looking at; many thoughts and prayers.

But, don’t lose hope.

The one common mistake non-designers make when trying to design, is to overdesign. One bad decision leads to a worse one to make up for it. Ultimately you’re left with a color palette the Joker might find provoking.

So here are a few ways you can help bring a bit of subtle personality and organization to your Google Sheets without relying on abysmal color decisions and type choices.

1. Future proofing your fresh sheets

It’s much easier to start from a new spreadsheet than to alter an existing one. While this isn’t as helpful for you to if you want to modify the one you’re currently using, reversing design decisions is always a bit more tricky because I’m lacking the context in which it was built.

With that, the main thing almost every non-designer gets wrong is not adding enough spacing. (Or padding, in this case).

Most likely if something is tough to read, or an online form looks too squished, it’s because there’s not enough spacing around the letters, between the sentences, around the form fields, and almost every other element.

Even bad restaurant menus lack good spacing. (Badly formatted menus when I’m hangry is not a great combo for a designer.)

How do you add spacing in Google Sheets?

I will usually add two spaces of padding to the left of each cell. This helps to give the text some breathing room around the text, especially if you end up using background colors later on. (Which we will)

To do this, open up the Custom Number Format menu:

→ Select all cells > Format > Number > Custom Number Format

Once you have this menu open, you’ll want to type, [space][space]@, then click Apply.

It feels a bit hacky, but what you’re doing is adding two spaces to the left of each cell that is selected. The “@” symbol represents the cell itself.

If you want to add padding to both the left and right sides, you would type, [space][space]@[space][space]. I don’t do this myself though because we’re usually dealing with fixed-width columns.

2. Setting up our color scheme

Almost no one takes the time to set up their Google Docs or Sheets files, so it’s easy to make a good first impression.

By setting up a few subtle color choices for each document, how we show up in the world is immediately projected.

I remember the moment when shared his Google Doc with me to collaborate on, and I just thought, "he gets it."

Imagine what spreadsheets might look like from some major brands. These are not complicated or overly designed choices.

Now, what might your own fresh sheets look like?

Here’s how I think about picking color schemes for spreadsheets:

You’ll want to choose a primary color—used for headers—then pick two alternating row colors that pull from the same color (or hue), with slight differentiation in tint and shade.

Even though we’re using dark headers above, I prefer to keep mine on the lighter side so I don’t need to also change text colors based on the background.

How to set your custom sheets styles

→ Format > Alternating Colors

By clicking on each swatch, you’ll open up a menu where you can change the HEX values of the header and alternating rows. This will give your spreadsheet an entirely new canvas to work from.

I included my default settings here, but you can add any color you want.

• Header: #DFDCD5

• Color 1: #FFFEFB

• Color 2: #FBF8F2

3. The best spreadsheet fonts to use that are not Arial

First, let’s all agree Arial can go sit on itself. It was commissioned by Microsoft to rip off Helvetica because they didn’t want to pay the licensing fees.

Thankfully we have thousands of others to choose from.

I recommend picking a sans-serif font which is more easily readable at smaller sizes, especially when you’re working with spreadsheets. Think Source Sans Pro, Roboto, Open Sans, and many more.

If you happen to be using a lot of numbers in your sheets, I’d recommend choosing a monospaced font. These are useful because each character takes up the same amount of space, so numbers line up exactly.

I’m somewhat biased and love the personality of Space Mono. If you don’t see this in the dropdown, click on “More Fonts” in Google Sheets and you can add a new font from Google Fonts.

• You’ll need to select every cell before changing your font. Select all the cells of your empty spreadsheet by hitting Command + A, or selecting the top left corner square.

So here I am, wondering what a really great spreadsheet looks like. I land on a video like this

Honestly, I don’t even want to write this. Right now I’m sandwiched between two Google Sheets views, to see if I can make this look a bit better.

It’s a challenge I don’t particularly like, but it’s a challenge I should attempt.

Spreadsheet readability type tips

• Here’s my Google Sheet doc if you’d like a starting point. Please make a copy.

• Freeze the top header if dealing with large columns of data. Left-click the row number to freeze, then go to View > Freeze > 1 Row

• Use all caps for the header row titles, and make them 1pt smaller than the rest of the data in your spreadsheet.

• Never center-align spreadsheet data. Left align titles and row data for everything except numbers.

• Right-align columns with numbers, using an evenly spaced monospaced font so the decimals line up.

5. Creating a template to save your styles

Unlike Google Sheets, there’s no easy way to make a default font in Spreadsheets without using a Template, and your font choices are limited using Google Sheets Templates.

Instead, I have created a template file that I use as a starting point for all future spreadsheets.

Stand out with your own visual style

I hope that was painless, but if you found yourself giving up in the end, you can duplicate my own document here.

Most of us make small design decisions every day, like selecting which font to use in your spreadsheet. The tiny amount of time you spend thinking about them adds up, when you should be making them once.

If you’re struggling with making simple design decisions for you or your business, I teach a two-day live workshop called Approachable Design, and enrollment closes this week. You can sign up here.

Subscribe now

💡 What’s new?

🎨 I’ve been writing about how to approach design. Not coincidentally, I teach a two-day workshop designed to help non-designers like you make better decisions for their own projects and businesses.

My next cohort is on the weekend of Feb 25-26, and these past few issues are a snippet of what you'll learn. Get on the waitlist!

📸 Crossed one million views of my photography on Unsplash. Wild. Feel free to use my photos anywhere. (But I’d prefer if you learn to draw your own.)

How to pick a font that doesn't suck (for non-designers)

Have you ever been told choosing a font is a waste of time? Or there are more important things to do than spend time worrying about which font you use?

If you know nothing about typefaces, you might be right.

Because for the non-designer, this process could take hours that could be better used on your business.

So you have three options:

1. Spend zero hours picking the same default font everyone else uses, which also happens to be the fonts Microsoft, Apple, or Google tell you to use.

2. Search for hours looking at fonts not knowing what works—or God forbid—having to learn about typography in the first place.

3. Hire a designer. (But we all know you’re not going to hire a designer if you can't communicate what you want—more on that below)

And this is the eternal decision loop you find yourself in! Design gets put on the back burner and you end up making the same design decisions as everyone else around the web.

What if there were a few simple rules you could follow, so you could still find a good font for your projects, without having to spend hours learning design?

Knowing all of this, it should be my duty to make the web a more readable place. I’m doing this for me, not you.

But you’ll benefit too.

Tip #1: Pick one type family with 6+ styles

The worst thing you can do is pick a font that has 1 style, like this one.

A ‘style’ is like bold, semi-bold, regular, or italics.

Regards is a good-looking font, but imagine trying to use it for everything.

Headers, subheads, body text, captions, buttons, etc. Nope. Not going to work! All you can do with it is scale it up or down.

And so you just wasted $19 when you figure out you realize it won't work for everything.

If you're going to only pick one typeface for everything, pick one that has 5+ styles.

Like Lato for instance.

Lato has 10 styles, so you can use it for anything and everything. Billboards, websites, social media, paid advertising, face tattoos, mugs... the list is endless.

Once you have a flexible font like this, start playing with sizing and creating contrast using the different weights and sizes.

Want to see the styles of fonts you already have access to? Click on the name of a font in a dropdown like Google Docs, and see if there are any variations like this.

Tip: In Google Fonts, you can filter fonts by style. And anything you find on Google Fonts is free to use both personally and commercially.

Tip #2: Combine fonts with one superfamily

There are over 200,000 fonts to choose from online, but you should only pick one or two to use in your designs.

Sound difficult? It’s not if you don’t plan to spend money on them. Your best bet is to head to Google Fonts and pick a superfamily.

A what?

A superfamily is one where the exact same designer has created a serif and a sans-serif version, so you know they'll work together. Mix and match them in any way you can imagine, and they’ll work well together.

Using serif and sans-serif fonts instantly creates visual intrigue due to their contrast.

Thankfully Google has a few of these, which you can use for FREE. Download a pair of these and you’ll never need to choose another font again.

• Source Serif Pro + Source Sans Pro

• Alegreya + Alegreya Sans

• PT Serif + PT Sans

• Roboto + Roboto Slab

• Merriweather + Merriweather Sans

• DM Serif + DM Sans

Note: Never pair two different sans-serif or serif fonts together. (Like Helvetica and Arial) They’re too similar to each other, and it just looks amateurish.

Pro tip: Combine fonts by picking a different font for your header and body text

Let's say you don't want to pick a superfamily. You want to head out on your own into the hundreds of thousands of fonts and find something completely unique. You should!

My recommendation is to first pick your body text font, then go find a header font.

But, don't pick two different serif fonts or two different sans-serif fonts.

If your body text font is a serif font, go find a sans-serif header font.

Body Text fonts

Body text fonts are your workhorse. They do 95% of the work on your newsletter, article, and web pages.

You'll want to pick one that has 5+ styles so it gives you a lot of flexibility. So, follow Tip #1 for choosing a body text font.

Header fonts

Where you can get more expressive is by choosing a unique header font. Since you already have a flexible body text font, you can find a header font with 3+ styles. It's a little more limiting, but you don't need to use it all the time.

But unlike the font Regards, we need a little flexibility. At least 3+ styles are enough to work with.

If you have never visited a font foundry (an online design shop that sells fonts), I made a quick video here detailing how to find and pick a font to use from a small boutique shop, by Dan Cederholm.

Stand out with your own visual style

If you have ever been overwhelmed with making your own design decisions or working with designers, I’ve got a two-day workshop to help you unlock your visual style.

It’s for non-designers, so even if you don’t know what colors to choose, we’ll help you during our live course. (And bonus, you’ll learn how to use Figma to create your own assets)

Our eighth(!) cohort is coming up on Feb 25-26. Enrollment opens soon, and you can get on the waitlist here.

⚡️ Your next creative hit

🍄 Mushrooms need a PR campaign, and it’s here.
Incredible writing and creative storytelling in this half-baked ad. (h/t Noah Stokes)

🍳 I’ve fallen in love with these carbon steel cooking skillets
Honestly, I’ve never known cooking skillets could look so damn good.

👋 See you next Sunday

My calendar is always open to chat about your next adventure, crazy idea, or if you’re feeling creatively stuck.

My goal is to help more people give a damn about what they’re creating next, through my writing, teaching, and design. If you want to support my journey, the best ways are to learn to draw, make better design decisions, communicate stories with better slide decks or discover your visual style in my live workshops.

Or, if you want to sponsor this newsletter, sign up here.

Have a great week,

p.s. Words are just words, but if these words made you feel something, would you let me know by tapping on the heart below?

Subscribe now

💡 What’s new?

🤘 Building Figmathinkers.com: Thanks to everyone who showed up to our live event this past week as and I build out our course in public. Join us here this week, or check out the live Figma file as we design.

A simple book is the perfect example of great design.

Books have existed for thousands of years—and while there are jerks like me who like the convenience of a Kindle—nothing beats the design details of a book.

What makes it so resilient is the intentional typesetting, the space of the side margins for your precious fingers, the evenly spaced leading between lines, the left-aligned text, the color and texture of the printed paper, and a glass of cabernet just within arms reach.

That last part might be just me.

Do you know what’s not enjoyable? Reading a Google Doc on a bright laptop screen using its default settings while it pokes its googly fingers into your eyes.

Printed books have been doing something right for over a thousand years. So today, we’re going to make the internet a little bit cozier by making our Google Docs less traumatic.

These next few minutes could change your life. (And mine if you ever share a doc with me.)

Here’s a quick breakdown:

1. Remove page breaks

2. Change the background color to anything except pure white

3. Choose different fonts (optional if you hate nice things)

4. Update your font colors

5. Set defaults so you never need to do this twice (unless you’re a masochist)

1. Remove page breaks

Page breaks are for those who either need to use a fax machine or if you’re trying to make an office memo look a little longer than it is.

It’s like a fifth grader bumping up the font size to turn a two-page homework assignment into a four-banger, but for an insecure middle manager who wants to look smart.

Now imagine what might happen when you let things breathe a bit. Heaven’s gates are pushed open, angels rejoice in unison, and all the ice cream pint lids at Jeni’s suddenly pop off. (It’s a California thing)

But seriously, spacing is everything when it comes to being a good steward of design. Open things up a bit, take a sip of your Cabernet, and prance blissfully while using infinite scroll.

To turn on pageless viewing, navigate here:

→ File > Page Setup > Select the tab labeled Pageless

2. Change the background color to anything except bright white

Now, if we just stopped after step one, the entire internet might let out a big sigh. But we’re not done.

There’s one thing you need to know about pure black and white: they’re the most intense colors you can use together. They’re also used out of pure laziness because they’re default settings no one wants to change. They’re also used explicitly by luxury brands like Prada or Gucci when they need your immediate attention to spend thousands of dollars on a handbag.

But we’re just trying to give your colleagues and readers a more pleasant reading experience—not sell thousand-dollar heels—so let’s soften it up a bit.

I’m going to give you a nice off-white sandy beachy color to use, which takes the edge off a bit. It’s going to feel like a soft piece of paper lit by an old gold-plated 40w desk lamp. You can always change this up later.

Head to the same place as the last step.

→ File > Page Setup > Background color

Now that you’re here, click on the color swatch labeled "Background color.”

Next, under “Custom,” click on the “+” sign and then paste this hex value into the field. Don’t worry about adding in the # symbol.

→ Add this color value in the field: FFFCF2

You can change this to anything you want, but let’s just start with this sandy beach vibe background for now.

It may take a second for the shock to wear off, but give it a moment. Your eyes will adjust and you’ll never want to go back the next time you’ve shared a default Google-themed document.

3. Choose different fonts (optional if you hate nice things)

Now we’re getting our hands dirty.

You might be thinking to yourself, changing the font is a waste of time. But I’d love for you to experiment and pick one that you love to see.

It’s easier to tell you what not to do, instead of the many things you can do. So follow a few tips below for picking fonts quickly.

But first, just set up your Google Doc with a title, headers (1-4), subtitle, and normal text. You’ll want to see these side by side when making your text decisions. Here’s a starting template for you to use. (File > Make a Copy before editing please!)

Don’t make these mistakes:

• Never use more than two typefaces unless you want to make things difficult for yourself. And really, most of you can stick with one font that has multiple styles.

• Don’t use two different sans-serif fonts, like Helvetica and Arial. Just pick one and use different sizes or weights to differentiate between them.

• Similarly, don’t use two different serif fonts like Georgia and Source Serif Pro. Just pick one and use different weights and font sizes for your normal or header text.

If you want to get fancy, do this:

• Choose a serif font and a sans-serif font. Choose one to use for your headers and one to use for your normal text. (Like Montserrat for your headers and Lora for your normal text) The natural contrast between them will increase the visual intrigue, making for a more interesting vibe.

• You can flip these around to your liking, but just use one for your normal text, and one for all of your titles and headers.

• Use different weights like regular, semi-bold, bold to increase the visual interest in your text without using different fonts.

Apply your new font selections

First, I’ll add a few pieces of text to a document to cover my immediate bases. (Use this document as a starting point.)

1. Select the modified text. In this example, I’ve highlighted the text for the title of the document.

2. Then select the Style dropdown and select “Update Title to match”

3. Now do the same for the title, headers (1-5), subtitle, and normal text options.

4. Update your font colors

This might be going overkill, but similar to adjusting the pure white background, we’re going to adjust the color of our pure black text.

Head to your text color icon and click the + icon under “custom.”

→ Type in this HEX value: 0D0C0A

This softens the text just slightly so it’s not stark black, and will give us a more pleasant reading experience.

5. Set defaults so you never need to do this twice (unless you’re a masochist)

Ok, that was a bit of work. But thankfully, you’ll never need to make these changes again. How?

Google built in a feature that lets us save our page and text settings for next time. Here are two things you need to do:

→ Save your page settings:
File > Page Setup > Set as Default

→ Save your text styles:
Format > Paragraph Styles > Options > Save as my default styles

Stand out with your own visual style

I hope that was painless, but if you found yourself giving up in the end, you can duplicate my own document here. Just be sure to save the styles as your default from Step five.

Making a few design decisions in your everyday life goes a long way to improving how you show up in the world.

If you’re curious about how to make better design decisions for you or your business, my 2-day Approachable Design workshop is coming up in a month, and you can get on the waitlist here.

⚡️ Your next creative inspiration

📣 Shout out to my friend on getting his recent article highlighted in Tim Ferriss's 5 Bullet Friday newsletter. It’s difficult to estimate the impact Tim Ferriss has had on my life after reading The 4-Hour Workweek. It changed how I think about the world, and led me to change how I navigated my own career.

“If Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek kickstarted the “first wave” of the post-industrial reimagination of work in 2007, 2022 was the year that a newer, and weirder, second wave began. “—Paul Millerd

✈️ Scott’s Cheap Flights is now Going™️
I’ve been getting emails from Scott’s Cheap Flights for years, and it’s always been the first place I check for airfare deals, although I’ve only used it a few times for tickets. It’s absolutely strange to see this new brand, but excited to see what used to be one guy running this business by email has turned into. (Designed by DesignStudio)

I also love the layout of the State of Travel page.

👨‍💻 Kurt Vonnegut book designer Carin Goldberg passed
You have probably seen these Vonnegut editions over the years, but Carin Goldberg left a legendary mark on the world with her design.

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💡 What’s new?

🧠 Publicly kicking the fresh rubber of Fresh Prompts, an AI-driven daily drawing prompt generator. Text prompts for now, visuals to come soon. Sign up for the waitlist if you’re curious.

🤘 and I are building a Figma course for knowledge workers in public. If you’re a project manager, strategy consultant, creator, or business owner, you’re likely thinking visually. Come watch us build out our curriculum, design landing pages, and prototype our ideas using Figma. Sign up here

⚡️ When I left my full-time role, I met Khe Hy and took his course Supercharge Your Productivity to find a way to prioritize my next steps. It’s one of the most impactful courses I took, and his 10K framework saved me a lot of struggle. Registration closes tomorrow. Find out more here

Hitting reset on a puzzling identity crisis

What holds many people back from chasing their next idea is the perception of how people will view you when trying something new. It held me back for much longer than it should have.

If you’re in a full-time role, there’s a chance your title aligns with your identity. If you’re like me, you have kept it up for years, maybe decades. This comfortable identity is like a 50-piece puzzle. The image of who you are is like a simple image on a puzzle box. The image is baked into your brain, and requires no effort to assemble the pieces.

“Oh hey, I’m Nate, a brand and product designer for over 18 years.”

That line rolls right off the tongue and was my go-to response when people asked what I do. The only complicated part was trying to figure out the math of the total number of years.

(It’s probably wrong.)

If you have never tried to escape this one-line opener, you might be underestimating how difficult it is to let go of that line. You have spent years cultivating and establishing your authority in a particular space. No one wants to hear you’re in your 30s, 40s, or 50s and trying something new!

Oh shit, can I even call myself a writer? I’m a fraud!

Thankfully, there’s a way through this mess. Here are a few things I have done to help broaden what was possible.

Introduce yourself with curiosity

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve responded, “I’m a designer” to the question, “what do you do?” It’s easy to put on that comfy, old, t-shirt with those explicit words embroidered into the left corner of your tee. A tee that feels safe, and reliable.

Years of people repeating back to me what I do create a fixed image of how I expect to be portrayed.

But take your profession out of the picture, and think about another perspective to describe yourself.

One way to lead with more curiosity is to let people know what you want to be doing.

For a year, I started telling people, “I’m doing a bit more writing online, and started a newsletter recently.” Just revealing a little insight into what I was aiming for redirected the conversation in a different direction altogether.

Don’t worry, you’ll still have time to circle back around to your 50-piece puzzle and explain how much experience you have at design.

Join an online community

If you believe in the idea you’re the average of the five people closest to you—and you’re unhappy with who you’re hanging around—you need some new friends.

Before leaving my last role, I joined a number of paid and free communities to meet a different set of people to surround myself with. This gave me the advantage of introducing myself to people who forever changed how I viewed myself.

Here are a few communities that I immersed myself in, and the role they played:

Farnam Street

Before I even knew what a learning community was, I signed up with Farnam Street for their virtual book club. Before long, I was digging into their forums and having conversations with people about similar book interests, from all over the world.

I never really took full advantage of Farnam Street, but it gave me a glimpse into how accessible a bunch of intellectually curious and creative people hung out.

Write of Passage

Pegged as an online course for writing, Write of Passage is much more than that. I signed up quickly in the summer of 2020, and my life never looked the same. It was my introduction to Zoom breakout rooms, 1:1 chats, feedback on my writing, and a community of aspiring writers who were trying to figure it all out.

This course/community helped me breathe some life back into my own puzzle.

Ness Labs

Founded by Anne-Laure LeCunff, this online community was one of the earliest paid communities I joined. I was a fan of Anne-Laure’s writing, and it led me to her part of the internet where there were a number of people who cared about creativity, productivity, and building businesses.

Quickly, I connected with someone much smarter and wiser () then I could ever hope to be, and we started to co-host weekly sessions on all things newsletters.

Co-hosting these sessions with Steven gave me a space to help others with design, in a fundamentally new way I hadn’t ever considered. Design was still a part of my fabric, but not in the same way it had been years prior.

Find the Others

Started recently by —author of The Pathless Path—Find the Others is a new community bringing together people looking for their new path. I met Paul in early 2021, and he’s been an advocate of mine since the first day.

Bouncing between communities is like bouncing between jobs. Your value is always increasing based on your past experience, but sometimes it’s not clear until you immerse yourself in a new job with new colleagues.

I believe it’s important to move around to realize how much you’ve grown, and how much impact you can have on others. Your surface area is always increasing, and that 10,000-piece puzzle is starting to fill itself in.

Update your personal website with personality

For years, I owned kadlac.com and used it for showcasing my design portfolio. While this is fine, it’s much more interesting to find ways to highlight everything else you’re curious about.

What inspires you? What are you chasing? What books are you reading? Give us a glimpse into your curiosity, and let us define you by a new script that you’re not used to.

Personally, it’s more fun to highlight the edges of your interests. We don’t always need to cater to who we want to get paid by.

Professionally, it sets you apart from other candidates by having a small piece of real estate online. I once helped a friend land a job across the country with a video showcasing his hilarious personality, just because it helped him stand out from everyone else.

Embrace the weirdness.

Start a podcast with a friend you just met

While co-hosting the newsletter meetup with Ness Labs early on, I happened to meet . He’s a talented marketer, writer, and one of my best friends (although we’ve never met).

We hit it off immediately and decided to spin up a podcast together because we both happened to have a couple of good mics. As simple as that.

Starting a podcast with Reza re-shaped how I viewed myself, and I owe a lot of my own clarity of my puzzled identity to our time recording the pod.

It gave us an opportunity to interview people we admire, and to further push the boundaries of who we thought we were.

Start a newsletter

This is a hill I’ll die on, but it’s one of the easiest ways to demonstrate your thinking publicly.

It’s also a way to test out your ideas, reach a new audience, and let your identity grow in ways you never imagined.

You can read why I think even a small newsletter can have a tremendous impact.

The 50-piece puzzle is holding you back

The combination of these small maneuvers helped me cross the bridge from who I was to who I wanted to be. At the risk of fitting the cliche Marie Kondo into my plan, it’s also a much more interesting life to chase the things that bring you joy.

If you want to have the confidence of chasing something new, try replacing the puzzle you can do blindfolded, and opt for one that is pieced together with blind curiosity.

⚡️ Three creative hits for you to check out next

📕 Nick Huber (The Sweaty Startup) is writing about entrepreneurship in public
I’m sure this has been done before, but I love the idea of writing a book in public. What better way to hold yourself accountable and get feedback from others?

🍗 The Meater: This looks incredibly designed. And who doesn't love cooking in style? (via )

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 A collection of articles on parenting: Every dad should have a resource page like this. has created a concise list here, and I really enjoyed this particular piece on why fathers should take a mini-adventure with their children early on.

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💡 What’s new? A lot!

❤️ I’ve never had more responses to a newsletter than last week. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. And if you’re stuck, let’s find time to chat. (link in footer)

✨ I updated my home page and finally added a Now page (h/t Derek Sivers). I’m pretty excited to deviate even more away from my self-limiting identity as a designer. (A new secret project is revealed there.)

👀 A logo for the newsletter? I couldn’t continue looking at my logo set in ALL CAPS LORA anymore. Make it yours! (If you make one for yourself, please use a transparent background, so it doesn’t look like a piece of lousy clip art in our emails. We have standards.)

🔔 Close to launching a new AI product focused on drawing prompts. If you have ever used prompts to spur creativity, I’d love to chat! (Please reply and let me know.)

How to get unstuck and stop worrying about what everyone thinks about you

The first online course I took was in the fall of 2016. I lived in a studio apartment just a block south of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The pre-recorded course was taught by Ramit Sethi, called Zero to Launch.

I completed the promise of the first half by doing zero with it.

At one point during the course, the enthusiastic pre-recorded Ramit asked me to write down my hobbies, interests, and skills on a slice of paper. He told me to do this with an actual pencil, to make the experience hit home.

The point was to find an intersection of interests I could turn into a business or a course. It was the 2016 version of the Personal Monopoly.

The thought of teaching something I knew scared the hell out of me—and even though I hadn’t finished the video course—I already felt like a fraud for thinking I was someone who could teach others. Maybe it was because I still held University professors on a pedestal even though I quit college and pursued a different path.

I scribbled down a bunch of interests while admitting to myself I was never going to finish this course, and I was foolish for thinking I ever had the confidence to be the type of person who could change.

Taking the scenic route

Years later (and about six months ago) my writing friend came to town, and we quickly made plans to hike Griffith Park here in Los Angeles. Hiking in LA is my go-to activity when friends come to town.

Salman and I had never met in person, although we had fumbled our way virtually through a couple of sessions on showing other writers how we use Procreate in our writing process.

While we walked around the Griffith Observatory, we challenged ourselves to collaborate on a project together, and teaching a drawing workshop came up.

Within a few weeks, we hosted a live YouTube workshop and started to build an email list that would eventually lead to a course we successfully launched two weeks ago. It was all very pragmatic, with neither of us letting ego or pride hold us back.

In fact, many of our conversations were about how to put out something slightly embarrassing just to have the chance to work together on a project.

What changed between these two versions of myself?

How did I grow from the version of someone who couldn’t finish Ramit’s course and the version of me who leaped at the chance to build something (in public!) with Salman?

I had to escape my bubble.

It’s not a job that defines you, but how people identify you

I’m a self-taught designer, so there’s a lot of built-in psychological baggage screaming, “I’m good! I’m not a fraud! Tell me I’m not a fraud!”

What held me back for many years, was ultimately fulfilling my goal—becoming a damn good designer—to the reinforcing nature of how people identify you.

This cycle is difficult to escape since your identity is like a handprint in a decades-old cemented sidewalk.

How often does this happen in the industry you work in? How much does the external perception cement your inability to make a change?

What’s the opportunity cost of not being able to make that change?

Intellectually, I knew other people don’t really care, but without external evidence of acknowledging that change, it’s just a potential idea lodged in your head.

Labeling myself a writer took a couple of years of publishing every week, which felt like cutting against the grain of hardwood with a butter knife. It wasn’t until recently—after enough evidence of external acceptance—did I have any courage to apply that label.

But eventually, courage came with force. I started to meet and get introduced to people who weren’t designers. I found my same fears parallelling theirs, but I realized this was all made up. We were fooling ourselves, and downplaying our strengths.

The more writing groups I joined, the more brunches with strangers I hosted, the more creative calls I held, the more risks I took publicly, the more 2016 Nate was becoming a distant memory.

I’m forever changed, but it took cutting off enough knots in my personality that I don’t feel limited to being “just a designer.”

I’m not where I want to be, but I’m more fearless to fuck up for the right reasons.

I’m not building or seeking the approval of designers anymore.

Who shouldn’t your ego be fearing?

p.s. I’m coming for the confidence of pre-recorded Ramit.

⚡️ Creative hits for you to check out next

📣 “Don’t talk about the things you own, talk about the things you do.” —Jesse Pujji (h/t )

🎨 Become an expert at typography

While I teach the fundamentals of typography, one of the best resources to learn the inside-outs of typography is the Flawless Typography Checklist by Jeremiah Shoaf. Right now you can save $100 on his massive bundle of resources.

🍸 The most honest alcoholic beverage branding
Well, you can’t say they didn’t warn you.

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💡 What’s new?

✍️ and I launched our drawing course last week! We have almost 50 people running through it already, and one person snuck out of a silent retreat just to sign up (true story!). To date, it’s been the most successful launch in my short lifetime of building courses. If you’re a writer who wants to learn to draw using Procreate, here’s 25% off for the next 10 people.

⛱️ Thanks for the break! I took the past two weeks off unannounced, and it’s just part of my belief that you can and should take time off without permission or remorse.

Reflections of a high-impact but a slow-growth newsletter

Open your eyes for a split second on Twitter.

You’ll see people sharing screenshots of newsletter growth into the tens of thousands, giving thank-you speeches to Substack’s internal recommendation engine like they just cured polio.…

But languishing at the bottom with a smirk are people like me who pound out a letter every week, happy to reap the rewards of career optionality and personal growth that can occur without a large audience.

When starting out, it’s tempting to chase audience growth like a slippery net worth number, always a few feet ahead of your stretched fingers.

So I’d like to take you behind the scenes of my newsletter and give you a reason to write without Ultimate Audience Growth Domination being your driving goal.

🔥 An ambitious starting point

In July 2018, I had a 30-minute creative call with , who was already writing his newsletter on Substack. Naval Ravikant had just written his now famous tweet thread, How to Get Rich (without getting lucky), and I was looking to get creatively unstuck.

It wasn’t anything specific that David said, but I could just tell writing was a fundamental belief he held. From that call, I knew I wanted to start a newsletter because it felt like such an easy way to push into a new area.

I wasn’t sure what to call this thing, but I was a fan of Tim Urban’s “Wait, But Why?”

In terms of stickiness, branding a product or service around a turn-of-phrase or a question intrigued me. People can quickly relate, and so I wanted something similar.

I thought about a question I asked myself all the time: why am I always thinking about what’s next? Questions like my next business idea, or what I will do next year? Plan Your Next came to mind almost immediately, even though I initially thought it might be about traveling.

Failing after 17

I started off hot. I wrote 17 issues regularly without knowing how or what to write about. I was working a full-time job, and barely eeking out an issue every Sunday.

But as with most things in my life, I started to burn out, putting too much pressure on myself to write lengthy posts (like this one). Struggling to publish weekly, and not knowing many other newsletter writers, I sent my last issue on Nov 25 of 2018.

That issue came as we were moving into a new place, and if you’re like me, changing your routine can throw a wrench into any habit you have slowly built up.

And it did. I stopped writing for 18 months and couldn’t find the motivation to keep going.

The reboot in 2020

What happened next is a tale as old as the Pandemic. Early in 2020, I was regularly reading the writing of , enamored with how he grew a newsletter while chasing his diversified interests.

While everyone was seemingly trying to niche down, Nat was writing across a broad set of interests (and succeeding!). He introduced me to , and later, .

Nat and I have never met, but following his work permitted me to start taking my writing more seriously with a playful attitude.

What changed my trajectory was taking David Perell’s Write of Passage course.

During his intensive course, I met a group of writers who took their craft seriously, but with a much less intimidating framework for writing.

Now, armed with confidence, accountability, and a system for writing, I felt prepared to kickstart my newsletter again. Starting with the same 56 people.

🎯 The immediate benefits

In sales and marketing, it’s widely known that it’s more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to sell to existing customers.

When creating a newsletter, many of the benefits you’ll immediately see are from your existing relationships, from either your friends or family.

Creating something new is like revealing a new part of your personality your friends haven’t experienced. You’re letting them in on new stories, and secrets, allowing them to open up to you in ways unavailable to them before.

In my case, within sending the first 2-3 emails, I had deeper conversations with some of my long-term friends about similar experiences I never knew we shared.

Serendipity and security

The other immediate benefit of maintaining a newsletter (even if it’s turtle-like) is the ability to point people to a place where they can hear from you if they want. The distribution mechanics of email are already set up, so it’s much easier to land in front of them, unlike a blog they need to visit regularly.

This is all basic knowledge, but it’s surprising how many still prefer to post Facebook/Instagram updates vs. having a more portable and compounding growth opportunity like a newsletter. (Which is platform agnostic.)

The flip side to finding yourself in the inboxes of people who have opted into your writing are the serendipity effects of writing consistently. It’s just too easy to build equity in a positive reputation as someone who shares their insight with consistency.

Doing this with < 1000 readers on a weekly or monthly basis is still much more powerful than it is with a social platform that is only showing your followers what they think they should see. At least with email, it’s chronological, so you have a better chance of reaching your fans.

Building products

Through the practice of writing, I’ve been able to spot some opportunities that resonate with my readers. I’ve leaned into what I’m good at, developed new skills that pair nicely with existing ones, and increased my confidence in asking for help.

Creating something on the side doesn’t only have monetary potential, but it’s also a way to demonstrate what you’re capable of to potential employers, clients, and friends. These tend to carry much more signal of the type of person you are, and who you want to be.

You’ll quickly realize how valuable this characteristic is to other people, giving you another way to wedge yourself into new communities, and opening many more doors down the road.

Collaborations

While I love design—and practice it every day—I tend to gravitate toward people outside my field. That can be difficult when you don’t have a way to reach those people regularly.

Through the newsletter, I’ve been able to build alongside and develop a network of interesting people working in fields I would never normally be able to find. It’s also allowed me to show up every week, and make sure that I’m making time to create, while hoping to give away more than I could ever ask for.

That’s the type of relationship I aim to have with most people, and this is an almost automatic way to increase the give:ask ratio.

📊 By the numbers

Subscriber growth

To get it out of the way, my current subscriber count is 1,388. Not much by many Substack standards, although I don’t hold this number with a ton of weight.

Between June of 2018 and Aug of 2020, my subscriber count never exceeded 56 people. Why? Because I never shared my posts publicly.

I was scared not only to publish but to share my ideas. While I don’t think numbers should drive your intention, not sharing your writing is the more harmful aspect of writing. You won’t get all the benefits of creating new relationships, you won’t get feedback from others on if it’s resonating, and you won’t get the longtail benefits of realized serendipity.

After I dedicated myself to writing weekly, growth to the newsletter started to come naturally, even if slowly.

By Aug 27, 2020, I had my first 100 subscribers. More importantly, I had strangers signing up to my newsletter from the edges of the internet. I was finally reaching people I’d never met, which was a wild feeling.

By mid-Jan 2021, I had 200 subscribers. Since then, I’ve averaged about 49 subscribers per month, although it was much slower in those first six months of 2021.

Substack’s referral engine

I’m thankful for the other writers who recommend Plan Your Next. The internal recommendation features of Substack bring in 15% of my overall growth. While I am skeptical of the long-term viability of this feature, it’s brought some of you in, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Here are the top 5 friends who recommend Play Your Next. Go and read their incredible newsletters!

• writes

• writes

• writes

• writes

• writes

Compounding consistency

Instead of thinking about where my numbers from a short-term growth. One key idea I keep in the back of my mind is not the speed of growth, but what growth could look like over the next 5-10 years. With the number of opportunities I’ve been given in the past two years, what might a sustainable business look like in five?

If you can sit on this idea for a moment, this is where long-term thinking and the compounding consistency of a habit can become a reality.

Creative Calls

Since my early call with David, I have wanted to find a way to connect with others early on in their journey. If your network is small, I’ve found that finding support at this stage is hard to come by.

So, I set up a calendar invite to allow people to book a free 20-minute call on my calendar, to talk about crazy ideas or where they might be creatively stuck. To me, I get a ton of value from these calls as well, just by giving space for serendipity and creativity to flourish.

The data: To date, I’ve held 81 of these calls, speaking with people randomly from all over the world. There’s nothing more energizing than connecting with someone over FaceTime from the energetic streets of Tel Aviv at nine in the morning.

❓ What would I do differently?

Share publicly immediately

While this newsletter is growing slowly, I didn’t help myself early on by never publishing. I sat at the same 56 people because I was too frightened to share anything online.

More importantly than the numbers, you’ll never start to build the confidence you need to create. This held me back, and it’s the blocker that many people I chat with struggle.

I know I would have surprised myself with some of those early articles if I had gotten more feedback from them.

Start earlier

In 2005, I was leaving my job and I had a random idea to create an email on Campaign Monitor, letting everyone I know what I was planning to do.

I received many replies, and started my freelancing career from that email. But I never sent another one again. I just didn’t realize the power that I held in that moment, had I just kept up with it.

Many of the most successful writers—defined not by numbers but by opportunities—started around 2015-2018. That’s not that long ago, and while I may have missed that window, I can’t wait to see where I’ll be at in five years from now.

Accountability

Being a designer who writes is a lonely place to be. There weren’t many early in my career, and I always struggled with not knowing how to become a better writer.

Now, it’s much easier to find and join a small community of writers to bounce ideas off of. I have that now, but it’s something I should have searched for earlier.

🤨 To Substack or not to Substack? Why audience numbers shouldn’t drive behavior

Don’t get caught up in the hype

To me, Substack works well not because of its growth efforts, but because it’s easy to start a newsletter and publish your first post within minutes.

SEO doesn’t seem to be an issue, and importing media like images, YouTube videos, GIFs, and URLs just work.

Don’t be inspired by writers with thousands of followers, but be inspired by how easy it is to start your own and do it for a few years. It can truly change your life.

I don’t believe you need to start on Substack, as long as you start somewhere. If you do want to use Substack, you can quickly get started here.

Substack’s growth is finite

Substack to date has raised $82 million. They’re incentivized to grow at all costs. Their recommendation engine most likely can’t sustain itself forever, especially if it starts to disrupt the user experience and obnoxious popups we’re starting to see.

That’s all to say, don’t focus on the numbers. Focus instead on building a habit based on incentives that aren’t directly tied to an audience number. Substack is one of the easier ways to do that.

My 2023 newsletter and accepted strategy

Where does that leave me right now? My main strategy has completely shifted to a writing and community-first approach. Anything I build in the future will have these mechanisms built in from day one.

I also acknowledge I will never be the type of person who can just focus solely on one thing. This is my unique differentiation, but it also caps my short-term growth upside. I realize this goes against most strategies, but I’m sold.

My game will last for the next 20 years, so I’m not worried about how fast I will grow in years 1-3. I’ve had a solid career, but I’m working to undo bad habits and create new channels for growth. It doesn’t happen overnight, or by reading a weekly email from James Clear.

Most of my income is still derived from freelancing and client work. The personal goal I have for 2023 is to slowly chip away at that ratio based on my portfolio of small bets, Approachable Design, and my writing.

What’s next for you?

What’s the life you want to live? You have the choice to build what’s next for you, using your own strategies and not one from a Twitter thread.

👋 See you next Sunday

My calendar is always open to chat about your next adventure, crazy idea, or if you’re feeling creatively stuck.

My goal is to help more people give a damn about what they’re creating next, through my writing, teaching, and design. If you want to support my journey, the best ways are to learn to draw, make better design decisions, communicate stories with better slide decks, or discover your visual style in my live workshops.

Or, if you want to sponsor this newsletter, sign up here.

Have a great week,

p.s. Words are just words, but if these words made you feel something, would you let me know by tapping on the heart below?