Design is a business function. Most designers argue like it isn't.
Why design gets questioned first, and what to do about it.
When a company gets nervous about money, design is the first function people start to question. Not engineering. Not sales. Design.
For a long time I thought that was unfair. Now I think it is mostly our own fault.
Most designers are trained to argue craft. Consistency, accessibility, the right corner radius, user delight. That's not wrong, but almost none of it lands in the room where budgets get decided. The people in that room are asking a different question: what does this team return? If you cannot answer in their language, you are a cost centre with nice pixels. Cost centres get cut.
I came into design through industrial design school, then economics. Industrial design taught me that form follows function. Economics taught me to read it from the other side of the table. Zoom out far enough and form follows function becomes something bigger: design is a business function. It is expected to reduce cost, increase revenue, or take risk out of decisions. Otherwise it is decoration. Good design does the first three. Almost nobody writes about how.
I have spent more than fifteen years helping build software. Carrier apps that shipped on phones people actually owned. Multi-brand platforms that handled real money and real traffic. Design systems retrofitted into mature, developer-shaped products that resist change. Long enough to watch the same pattern repeat across very different companies.
That is what this newsletter is about. Design the way I actually practise it.
Design systems as a shared language between design and engineering: what it saves in build cost, and what it costs in creative freedom. Not a style guide. How design teams get built, scaled, and cut, and what to do about each. Multi-brand and internationalised products, because that is where systems thinking quietly erodes. And the operational work that decides whether good design survives contact with a real company.
I am not a fan of trend pieces or "ten principles" lists. There are enough of those already.
Some of it will be practical. Sometimes I will obsess over a piece of technology I find fascinating. Some of it will be argument, positions I will defend and you are free to push back on. I write to think. Sometimes that means being wrong in public and correcting myself. That is the point.
On rhythm: something every couple of weeks, not a schedule I will break. Hopefully each one is worth your time instead of just filling your inbox.
The first one is coming soon. It is about why design systems are the most misunderstood cost-saving tool in software, and why most of them fail for reasons that have nothing to do with design.
If that sounds useful, subscribe. If not, no hard feelings.