For years I thought in systems. Code, speed, structure, correctness. If something was fast and honest about its costs, it was good. That was the whole aesthetic: things that work, built from parts I understand.
Lately I keep opening Figma instead. My Figma homepage now looks like my downloads folder felt in 2021: Untitled_12, Untitled_23, poster-final-v2-ACTUALLY-final. Somewhere in there is a logo for a product that does not exist, and honestly the logo is carrying the whole company on its back.
Designing with no reason
Posters nobody asked for. Logos for products that will never incorporate. Type set and reset three times because the spacing felt wrong in a way I could not yet name, which is a sentence I never thought I would say out loud. Layouts, textures, weird little visual experiments that will never ship anywhere.
There is no client. There is no brief. I just keep doing it.
That is new for me. I used to see design as something beside engineering, an adjacent room I respected but did not live in. Engineers made things work; designers made things pretty; never the twain shall meet, or so my younger self believed. Now I catch myself adjusting letter spacing at midnight with the same intensity I once reserved for shaving microseconds off a hot path. Last week I spent forty minutes on a drop shadow. A drop shadow. My compiler work has never once made me question my life choices the way that shadow did.
The same instinct, different material
Here is what I am starting to realize: I am chasing the same thing in both.
I dislike generic clean SaaS aesthetics for the same reason I dislike unnecessary abstractions in code. Both are decisions someone else made for me, smoothed over until nothing specific remains. A landing page that looks like every other landing page offends me the way a framework that clones request objects offends me. Something is being hidden, and I am paying for it.
Coding gives me control over behavior. Design gives me control over feeling. I want both, because a thing that behaves well but feels like nothing is only half made. It is like cooking a nutritionally perfect meal that tastes like warm cardboard: technically a triumph, spiritually a crime.
There is also a funnier possibility I have been avoiding. I designed that fake logo first, and now some part of my brain thinks I owe it a company. The tail is wagging the dog. The poster is managing me. At this rate I will incorporate a startup purely to justify a color palette, and honestly? That might be the most honest founding story in tech.
Taste is showing up uninvited
The stranger part is that my taste is becoming identifiable, and I did not plan it. Rough instead of polished. Editorial instead of corporate. Asymmetrical. Muted colors. Typography that takes up more room than it strictly needs. Things that feel made rather than generated.
I look at something I designed last month and I can tell it is mine before I remember making it. That never happened with my code, or at least not this clearly. My code has always aimed at invisibility: the best code is the code you never notice. Design is the opposite. It is a signature. It is the difference between a hotel room and someone’s actual bedroom, and all my websites used to be hotel rooms. Nice. Clean. Nobody lives there.
Not a switch
So am I becoming a designer? I do not think so. Or rather, I think the question is miscast.
I am not switching from engineering to design. I just like making things, and code and design are two different materials. Some ideas want to be compiled. Some want to be composed. The impulse underneath is identical: start with nothing, end with something that feels deliberate.
Maybe I don’t actually care whether I’m a designer or an engineer. I just care that the thing feels like mine.