Design Practice
Part 1 of 6
Why it matters
When I look at a design, whether starting something new or reflecting on an existing one, I want its form to reveal its essence. No unnecessary decoration, no diversion. Just the thing being itself, in a way that feels clear and resonant.
Before deciding aesthetics or features, it is wise to decide what the thing is: its purpose, promise, and what value it brings. Let that essence drive the form.
It was the architect Louis Sullivan who declared, “form follows function.” His mantra urged designers to let utility shape execution. A form is well designed because it fulfills its function well. Sullivan’s thinking laid the foundation for modernism and ergonomics, and it remains a cornerstone of design education.
But when I reflect on my personal practice, I find myself shifting the emphasis. With a background in communication design, my instincts work backwards from a semiotic insight: what a thing signals matters. Function is necessary, but it’s not enough. Form doesn’t only benefit from following usage—it benefits from following meaning. It’s what the subject is about at its core.
That search for essence may sound subjective, but it doesn’t have to be completely arbitrary. I think of it as looking for a latent truth, something that can be uncovered through reflection, dialogue, or research. McCann’s old motto, “Truth Well Told,” has always resonated with me. Design feels most accomplished when it tells a truth clearly, rather than distracting, decorating, or deceiving.
When form follows meaning, design feels resonant and long-lasting. It avoids contrivance and trend-chasing. People adopt it more readily, because it feels right. And in that way, design doesn’t just serve needs—it helps create a more coherent world.
In my work
Across various projects, I’ve seen how starting the process at meaning has led to strong forms, whether in the form of a visual element or the form of a business itself.
Nothingness as a mark: Blank Label logo
One of my first tests of “form follows meaning” came while I was the creative director designing a new logo for Blank Label, a custom menswear startup. The company’s name itself presented a challenge: how do I represent the absence of fashion-house pretense in a visual mark?
Working with designer Cem Eskinazi, we tossed around various ideas until he identified the empty set symbol from mathematics—a pure expression of nothingness. It felt exactly right: the essence of the brand, a label defined by having none.
We refined the mark by setting it in Didot, a classic fashion typeface that nodded to fashion’s status games while rejecting them. Some saw a threaded needle in its lines. For me, it was a powerful example of form following meaning: the logo’s strength came not from ornament, but from embodying the company’s core intention.
Fit over options: Blank Label product strategy
In its early days, Blank Label positioned itself around endless shirt customizations—collars, pockets, fabrics. As we prepared to expand into more garment categories, I led a customer research initiative and asked: what does “custom” really mean?
Other brands treated custom as elitism or status signaling. Our founder’s inspiration came from an exclusive tailoring experience on Savile Row, but he wished that experience was more accessible to everyday people. Through the research, I realized the true meaning wasn’t status or tricked-out shirts at all. It was fit: clothing that aligned authentically with the body.
Once we named that essence, the strategy of the business shifted. We simplified options, focused on fit, ease, and quality, and streamlined the operations and user experience to deliver on those values. By letting form follow meaning, we differentiated the brand and made the customer experience more resonant.
Clarity over complexity: Torch leadership feedback
The same search for essence that guided my early brand and strategy work has also impacted my digital product design practice.
At Torch, I was tasked with redesigning the company’s 360 assessment feature, a way for users in its leadership coaching platform to learn what their colleagues thought of their leadership skills. The legacy measurement framework used a five-point Likert rating scale that converted into decimals and generated reports that felt more like lab results than coaching insights. Users and coaches told us it was confusing and time-consuming to interpret.
I stepped back from everything and asked: what’s the real meaning of this experience? My intuition was that it wasn’t about generating detailed statistical scales, but about enabling focus, helping the user see where their colleagues believed improvement would matter most.
After evaluating a range of measurement approaches, I led a redesign using a simpler two-point rating scale with “Area for improvement” or “Strong” to ultimately offer a sense of direction. This design more closely aligned with the meaning of the thing—clarity, not complexity. Coaches who had previously spent multiple sessions parsing results told me now, “By simplifying this, you’re helping us coaches get to the root of what this feedback is supposed to be telling clients so they can have a better coaching journey.”
Honoring lineage: portfolio design
When I began designing my own portfolio website, I defaulted to familiar web layouts. They worked, but they felt generic and lacked any subtle magic.
My friend Cem challenged me to think more critically about the thing itself: to let the subject and content speak its form honestly, through gesture or interaction. That inspired me to ask: what is a portfolio, really? I thought back to the days before the internet, when creatives carried folders of work. That history sparked the question: what if my digital portfolio embodied that history in some way, like the tactile act of flipping through folders?
The result became an interface where form followed meaning—tactile, scalable, and quietly aware of the lineage of the portfolio.
In others’ work
This principle isn’t unique to my own work. Some of the clearest designs, from logos to products to systems, draw their strength from the same move: letting meaning shape form.
Waves in a mark: Rotterdam Maritiem Museum logo
The Rotterdam Maritiem Museum designed its identity with a logo that reduces the sea to its most elemental gesture: a wave line. Simple, recognizable, and versatile, it captures the city’s maritime heritage without ornament. The form works because it fuses meaning and form—the essence of a maritime museum is the sea, the sea is waves, and the waves are an M.
Work as building blocks: Notion logo and product design
Notion is built on a simple metaphor: the block. Every page, table, and database is made of the same modular units that can be combined and rearranged freely. Its logo reinforces the idea—a block itself, a literal form that points to its meaning. This coherence is why Notion feels adaptable yet intuitive: the tool’s form follows its meaning, a workspace built from building blocks.
Universality through branding: Muji design language
Muji built an entire business on the vision of “universality.” Its name literally means “without brand, quality goods.” That meaning drove the form of its design language across objects, packaging, and retail design. Stripped-down typography, uncoated paper, and neutral color palettes weren’t aesthetic decisions alone; they followed the company’s core qualities of simplicity and honesty.
Implications for practice
Before you define a product, draft a feature, sketch a layout—pause. Ask: what is this thing, really? What should it mean to the person encountering it? That question alone can reshape the trajectory of a project.
The answer will never be perfectly objective. Meaning is discovered in context, in dialogue, in reflection. But the act of listening to the material first keeps design from drifting into decoration or trend-chasing and will produce a more essential solution.
In practice, this might look like:
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Writing one sentence that names the subject’s core truth before you begin designing.
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Using that truth as a filter for design decisions—choosing the option that best embodies it.
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Returning to it when complexity creeps in, to clarify what belongs and what doesn’t.
This doesn’t require new tools or jargon. The task is to listen past surface impressions until you reach what feels essential about the subject: not just any truth, but the one that holds. When we do, our designs don’t just function. They tell a truth about what they are.
Field guide
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What’s the core truth of the thing you’re designing right now?
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Where might the current form be distracting from that essence?
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If you stripped everything away, what gesture or element would remain?