Posts in Essays

After decades away from print newspapers, I rediscovered the tactile joy of reading the San Francisco Chronicle over breakfast. The crisp pages, inky scent, and familiar sections brought back memories of Sunday mornings in North Beach cafes—reminding me that sometimes the medium truly is part of the message.

Drawing from my time at Apple and insights from Ken Kocienda's 'Creative Selection,' I share how Steve Jobs shaped Apple's legendary design process through relentless exploration and refinement. From creating hundreds of packaging mockups to weekly design reviews in the mysterious Diplomacy room, this is an insider's look at how Apple's obsession with quality came to life under Steve's ultimate creative direction.

I was feeling emotionally off today and I wasn’t quite sure until I realized that the events of January 6, 2021 deeply affected me as a patriotic American. At the time, I thought it was the culmination—the last act of a power-hungry, extremist wing of our country. Donald Trump and his deliberate peddlers of lies and misinformation had incubated and unleashed this insurrectionist mob against the Capitol, against the United States. But I was wrong.

In times of political and social upheaval, protest art emerges as a powerful voice of resistance. From Design Is Play's anti-Trump posters to Hong Kong's protest art and Shepard Fairey's "We the People" series, I explore how modern agitprop channels frustration into compelling visual statements against authoritarianism and injustice.

As a design student in the 1990s, I never questioned why all our celebrated design heroes were white men. Today, with Black designers making up only 3% of the industry, it's time to examine how we teach design history and create meaningful representation in our field.

In the wake of Twitter finally fact-checking Trump's tweets and growing protests over George Floyd's murder, tech companies are being forced to confront their role in enabling harmful content. As designers, we're not just passive observers in this system - we help shape the digital world that billions of people interact with every day.

As a tech industry observer, I've long been frustrated by mainstream media's misrepresentation of technology issues. The New York Times' recent coverage of Apple's App Store policies demonstrates this problem perfectly - from misunderstanding MDM technology to making flawed monopoly arguments, their reporting shows a fundamental lack of technical understanding while sending mixed messages about platform responsibility.

We’ve reached the point where schools are selling bulletproof backpack panels to protect kids from mass shootings. This is the NRA’s endgame: guns everywhere, from classrooms to churches to bars, with no meaningful gun control. Meanwhile, gun ownership is declining, but 69% of us live in fear of gun violence, thanks to a vocal minority holding our politics hostage. Bulletproof gear shouldn’t be a back-to-school essential, yet here we are.

Yesterday, my Facebook filled with "Me too" posts—stark reminders of pervasive harassment. Later, I heard the harrowing story of a Rohingya survivor, exposing humanity’s capacity for cruelty. Despite millennia of evolution, our primal instincts—aggression, territorialism, tribalism—still pull us back. But progress depends on resisting them and building a future of empathy and cooperation. We must do better. Together.

We are losing something precious: the ability to compromise. With every election of an ideologue and every retirement of a statesman like John McCain, we edge closer to the collapse of a democratic system that depends on listening and collaboration. Democracy isn’t about winning every fight; it’s about finding common ground. When we lose sight of that, we lose ourselves.