Posts — Design Inspiration

• The Bread-Bag Clip Principle: Why Design's Smallest Gestures Are Its Most Honest — Why 2026's obsession with hyper-functional micro-design represents a return to Dieter Rams' true principle—and a rejection of lazy emptiness.
• Kommando Otl Aicher: How the 1972 Munich Olympics Taught the World to Navigate — An analysis of Otl Aicher's 1972 Munich Olympics identity system—how rigorous pictogram design, systematic typography, and functional color theory created the most influential wayfinding language of the 20th century.
• Emptiness Is Not Minimalism: What Kenya Hara Taught Me About Design's Quietest Gesture — Kenya Hara's philosophy of 'emptiness' offers a critical counterpoint to Western minimalism. The distinction matters more than most designers care to admit.
• The Spaceship on Wilhelmplatz: How a Brutalist Embassy Outlasted Its Regime — A meditation on the Czech Embassy in Berlin—locally known as Raumschiff Enterprise—a brutalist vessel designed by suppressed architects that transforms from grey concrete to molten gold as the day progresses.
• The Vignellis Return to Milan: Why Systematic Design Still Matters — Triennale Milano's upcoming retrospective on Lella and Massimo Vignelli offers more than nostalgia—it presents a working manifesto for design permanence in an age of disposable trends.
• The Honesty of Small Things: What Vintage Matchbooks Teach Us About Typographic Intention — Vintage matchbooks—those small, disposable objects designed to be lit on fire and thrown away—contain some of the most honest, structurally sound typography ever produced. In this deep dive, I examine how severe constraints created typographic masterpieces, and what modern designers can learn from the "ugly-useful" beauty of ephemera.