Hello to the 25 glorious humans who read my thoughts weekly! How’s it going?

I usually write my intros after I’ve written the rest of the newsletter. Having just finished the ending, fair warning: this week’s dispatch is less design framework, more design-adjacent diary.

It’s been one of those slow, in-between weeks. The kind where things move slowly, your calendar is suspiciously free, motivation is on vacation, you are running on empty, and you start wondering if Mercury’s in retrograde.

When the guilt spiral started - “I’m not doing enough, I’m not being productive enough, what am I even doing” - I did what any self-respecting creative does. I did a series of vaguely productive things that tricked my brain into feeling accomplished. Not all were useful. But surprisingly, some helped top up the ol’ creative battery.

Not wanting to miss a week of writing, I thought I’d share glimpses from my slow week. Maybe you’re having one yourself, maybe you wanna bookmark this for the next time you have one.

If you’d like to take a break from design, come along. It gets a little weird.

Monday: I drew a cotton bud. Because of course I did.

“How hard can illustrations be”, was the naive question I asked myself as I was preparing to send out last week’s newsletter. Its lack of visuals was bothering me, and the idea of adding a generic photo of a box of Johnson’s cotton buds, while relevant, made me shriek in pixels. What I really wanted was an illustration of it - how original, I know!

So six years after buying an iPad Pro to sketch, and forgetting I even pay for Procreate, I decided I’d draw it myself.

Turns out its not that hard. I’m basically an illustrator now. 🙃

I even slapped a copyright symbol on it. Delulu is the solulu, my friends.

Tuesday: Framer, but make it finance-core

I finally got around to finishing a pro bono website I was building for my uncle. The project had marinated for three weeks longer than promised.

The biggest challenge? Designing a red-and-yellow financial consultancy website that didn’t scream: clown money.

The UI felt amateurish, and I realised I was leaning too hard on images — everything looked stocky and soulless. I reached out to a few designer friends, got roasted gently, made a few bold moves, and zhuzhed it up.

I think it looks… pretty decent? But you be the judge:

Wednesday: I traced cats and called it art

High on cotton bud success, I decided I was now an illustrator. I picked a few Pinterest drawings and traced over them for “practice.”

They say imitation is the best form of flattery. I say imitation is the fastest way to learn. So I copied. A lot.

It’s all very Depressed Drawings meets self-taught chaos. But it made me happy, which is the only metric we are tracking this week.

Source: Cat, Already Late, Oranges

Thursday: I judged portfolios (lovingly)

An ex-colleague needed help with their portfolio, so I offered to give feedback. Then, naturally, I spiralled into a case study wormhole. While I repeated a bunch of advice I’ve shared before, I was looking for examples that were more than just Figma dumps, the ones that actually showed thinking, not just shipping.

And ended up going down a rabbit hole of case studies. Here are a few that made me want to re-do my own:

• Jessica Goldman: Impact-first case studies. So clear, even your grandma would get it.

• Abdus Salam: Uses videos + GIFs like a pro. Feels alive, not like a PDF graveyard.

• Chengsu Chen: Crisp reasoning. The visuals carry real narrative weight.

• Tregg: Reads like a step-by-step design log. You feel like you’re in their head.

Go look ‘em up. Especially if your own portfolio is silently judging you from a browser tab.

Fri-yay: Fiction > Figma

Screens were starting to fry my retinas, and I wondered if it might be time to interject my excessive screen time this week with some light reading. I’ve been in a reading slump. The last book I finished was Anxious People and that was two months ago.

So I reached for the closest paperback, Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, for two reasons. First, its a book of short stories, so it was a low barrier to entry. And two, it had just won the Booker Prize! Low effort, high payoff. Perfect.

I’m now also reading The Housekeeper and the Professor on my Kindle. I am 5 books behind on my Goodreads reading challenge but atleast I am back!

Saturday: I attempted Botero. It went how you think.

Feeling too confident, I went from tracing cats to replicating Fernando Botero. A logical jump.

This is the part in the movie where the voiceover goes: “She could not.”

Here’s what trying to go from Pinterest doodles to high art looks like:

This is how far I got before surrendering to the gods of perspective and proportion. Please keep me in your thoughts.

Sunday: Rotting, professionally and gloriously.

After all that fake productivity, I decided to hang up my boots for the week. I gave in and binge watched the new season of Tires. And then because it was over too soon, went back to rewatch season 1.

If you have not watched Tires, what are you even doing? It’s peak deadpan absurdity. The Office for 2025. Yes, I said it. Netflix was smoking something beautiful when they renewed this for season 2.

In closing: Rot is underrated

So yeah, that was my week. No big breakthroughs. No strategic insights. Just a gentle reminder that creative energy needs rest too — even if that rest looks like tracing Pinterest drawings, redesigning a family website, or bingeing nonsense.

Like one my closest friends said in a previous edition, “cultivate a creative life outside design,” you better believe this is what that cultivation looks like. Mildly unhinged. Surprisingly soothing.

If you made it this far, hat tip my kind queen.

Until next time, homies ✌️!