A year ago, I would have told you good design disappears. That the best objects are the ones you stop noticing — no excess, no noise, nothing that isn't earning its place. I believed in subtraction almost as a moral position. Strip it back. Let it breathe. If you can remove it, remove it. I think I picked this up the way most design students do — through a steady diet of Dieter Rams quotes and a quiet contempt for anything that felt decorative.

I'm not sure I believe that anymore.

The Website

Today a friend told me to simplify my website. And I did — because they weren't wrong, not technically. It's cleaner now. More considered. Better in the ways that are easy to measure and explain. The kind of thing I would have been proud of a year ago, maybe even shown off.

But I kept thinking about what I removed. There were icons in the background of the old version. Scattered, a little messy, overlapping in places they probably shouldn't have. Not quite justifiable by any clean design principle. If you'd asked me to defend them I probably couldn't have — not in any language that would survive a critique. But they were mine. They felt like the inside of my head made visible. The new version is better designed and somehow less me, and I haven't quite made peace with that trade.

That tension has been sitting with me all day.

The Problem with Subtraction

I think somewhere in the last year I started feeling like simplification was becoming an excuse — a way to avoid the harder, messier work of actually saying something. It's easy to keep removing things. There's always something else to strip away, another element to question, another reason to make it quieter. But at some point you've removed so much that the thing stops belonging to anyone. It becomes correct without being alive.

Minimalism is safe. It's easy to defend. Nobody argues with a clean line. But clean lines don't always have anything to say. And I've been in enough conversations about design to notice that "it's too much" is often said with more confidence than it deserves — as if restraint were a virtue independent of what's actually being made, and for whom, and why.

What I'm Drawn to Now

What I'm drawn to now is design that has a point of view so strong it can't be quiet about it. Surfaces that are doing something. Forms that feel like they came from somewhere real — a material pushed to its limit, a detail that didn't need to be there but insists on being there anyway. Maximalism, when it's honest, feels like confidence. Like a maker who stopped apologizing for what they find beautiful and just went there fully. There's a kind of generosity in that, I think. It gives you something to actually respond to.

I don't think I've abandoned restraint entirely. Chaos for its own sake is lazy, and I know the difference between a considered abundance and just not editing yourself. But I've started asking a different first question. Before, I asked what can I take away? Now I ask what is this trying to express? Those questions lead to very different places, and I think I spent too long assuming the first one was always the more sophisticated of the two.

Mess That Means Something

Maybe the icons were bad design. Maybe they were exactly the point. I haven't figured out where that line is yet — between mess that means something and mess that's just mess. Between personality and noise. But I think the fact that removing them felt like losing something is worth paying attention to.

Good design used to mean clarity to me. Now I think it might mean honesty — and those two things, it turns out, are not always the same.

Today I made my website cleaner. And I keep thinking about what I gave up to get there.