Introducing Daily Designer

Today I’m introducing a new project called Daily Designer. Every day, I’ll post a thought-provoking quote from a designer I admire.

Let’s talk a little bit about how this project came together.

The idea

This idea appeared in my mind when I thought about how I often watch talks given by people I admire, and I hear ideas that connect directly with my work. Sometimes I’ll clip them and put them somewhere, hoping that I’ll remember when the time is right.

Inevitably, I forget, and then if I watch that video again, I’ll be surprised yet again and remember that I found this useful before, but the cycle essentially repeats.

I already knew that a good way to remember something is to externalize my thoughts by putting work into those thoughts — by writing and publishing. That is what has happened with my blog and my newsletter.

Forever projects

I started to think that it would be cool to do something with a very clear set of constraints so that I can continue this project without it becoming too much work.

One of the things I realized in the process of working on another project, zen of things, is that I can only have so many forever projects in my life. My blog is my primary forever project. I don’t intend to abandon it. When I first conceived of the idea for zen of things, I treated it the same way. Over time both of these projects started to compete for my attention.

I decided that I wanted to reduce the amount of work that I would have to put in every day and bring in a system to handle a lot of the creativity.

Inspiration

I started on the creative side, collecting inspiration for how I wanted the site to feel. When I’m looking at inspiration and mood boards, I’m often thinking about what world this creative thing I’m producing should belong to. And for me, quotes from designers feels a lot like something that belongs in the world of modernist or mid-century design — things that to me feel timeless.

All the way, I was thinking about how I’d need to treat the text of the quote, the name, and some associated metadata. I also wanted to have some sort of image, and I quickly decided that a portrait of the designer would be the best, although I did toy with the idea of potentially showing what they designed (obviously not every designer made physical objects).

With those ideas in mind, I collected a mood board, stared at every image and their details. Then, I put away the mood board and started designing. I started mocking up ideas of how this project could manifest in social media, how it could manifest on the web. From there, I started to understand the shape of the project.

Color system

While exploring, I stumbled upon an idea that has shown up a lot over time. Spotify famously did this ten years ago, but I’ve seen this technique used all the way back in the mid century. Essentially, you take a black and white image and replace the white and the black with some other colors.

I picked some hues that I liked on the color wheel and then built a little tool to play around with different levels of lightness and chroma. I was looking for AA contrast for every combination of background and foreground to make sure that text is legible.

In all, I have nine foreground and background colors that combine into 72 different combinations (excluding combinations that use the same hue for foreground and background). And then from there, I created a sequence where no foreground or background is repeated one after another.

Next came a Figma document, which gives me a template to put these quotes into.

I spun up a website using Astro that lists the quotes, newest on top. I decided to keep the top navigation fixed to the top and made it change color as you scroll. This is a technique I first saw on the Parakeet website years ago.

Logo

I also needed to create a logo, so I played around with the letter D.

Unsurprisingly, most of the simplest combinations have already been tried, but I found one that didn’t bring up any duplicates. I set the wordmark in ITC Avant Garde Gothic. I love the geometric forms (though the lowercase r is a bit illegible).

Finding quotes

Finding the quotes is a whole other job. And this is where AI tools — which I use a little bit for those system and color-picking tasks — were far more important. I used Claude to ingest a bunch of transcripts from YouTube videos I’ve enjoyed of each of these creators and asked it to compile a long list of interesting quotes, picking the quotes I liked along the way.

Going forward, I’ll try NotebookLM, since it natively can ingest YouTube videos.

From there, I sequence out the quotes so that every day we have a new designer. I’ve tried to bring in more diversity as well since people from different times and different places have very different perspectives. The last thing I want is a bunch of designers who all think the same thing and say the same thing.

A daily experiment

Feel free to check out dailydesigner.net or follow it on Instagram, Bluesky, or Threads.

Last of all — it’s an experiment. I’m going to try this out for a month or two before reflecting and deciding whether to continue.

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Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.