gram-design

  • Tailored, Part Three

    Tailored, Part Three

    I Didn’t Frost the Glass How a privacy problem became a portrait, and why the safe answer would have been the wrong one. Two pieces ago I argued that a designer’s real job doesn’t change when the tools do — that the instrument is just the instrument, and the judgment sits somewhere the software can’t…

  • The brief told me my audience was 95% male. That turned out to be the least interesting thing about it.

    The brief told me my audience was 95% male. That turned out to be the least interesting thing about it.

    Tailored, Part Two The Brief That Assumed a Man One dataset, two readings, and where AI actually belongs in the process. In the last piece I made a distinction between two kinds of designers: the ones who operate the software, and the ones who understand what a tool is for. I traced it across three…

  • Tailored: A Designer’s Instrument, From QuarkXPress to AI

    Tailored: A Designer’s Instrument, From QuarkXPress to AI

    Twenty years, three instruments, one job. The Backbone I started my apprenticeship as a graphic designer in front of an iMac running QuarkXPress. That wasn’t a personal choice — it was the industry standard. For more than a decade, Quark was the backbone of desktop publishing: books, magazines, brochures, and catalogs, nearly everything that went…