Everything You Design Is a Love Letter (Whether You Noticed or Not)
Van Gogh never sold a painting. He also never designed for anyone but himself. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
Or a breakup. But it's rarely neutral, and if you think it is, stop designing.
Nobody designs anything out of indifference. You can pretend it's "strategy" or "market insight," but every time you pick one color over another, a curve over a straight line, you're confessing something. Design without desire behind it isn't design, it's decoration with a spreadsheet, and nobody falls in love with a spreadsheet.
Love isn't a mood board, it's an obsession that got out of hand
Van Gogh didn't sell a single fucking painting while he was alive. He painted the same sunflowers fifteen times, cut off his own ear over love, and kept painting with his hands shaking from hunger and from something that wasn't hunger. Nobody asked him to. There was no client, no brief, no KPI. Just a guy who couldn't stop staring at the same wheat field until he pulled something out of it that nobody else had seen there.
That's not discipline. That's fucked-up, obsessive love — the kind that makes you redo the same line fifteen times because saying it once isn't enough.
And we're not talking about the pretty, greeting-card kind of love. We're talking about the kind that's also toxic, uncomfortable, the kind that would make you look unhinged if you said it out loud in a brief meeting. The kind that makes you defend an idea nobody else gives a damn about, just because you do.
Stop designing to be liked by everyone
Here's the problem: design made to please everyone doesn't love anything — it's just scared of being hated. And that shows from a mile away. It feels hollow, lukewarm, pulseless — the visual equivalent of "whatever you say." Nobody falls in love with lukewarm. People fall in love with the specific, with what dared to be too much and didn't care if it made someone uncomfortable.
If your work could please anyone, you don't love what you made. You're just tolerating it, the way you tolerate a job you hate.
The move
Think about the last thing you made. Ask yourself, without lying like a coward: did I do this because I loved something, or because I was scared it wouldn't be liked?
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, congratulations — that's your next project.
Second post in the series. If this left you a little exposed, it did its job.
