Writing for Design

Many of you know my podcast, Minor Details, where James and I chat about design things like the Cybertruck, Dyson vacuum, or whatever half-baked ideas we have floating around in our heads. It’s fun to hang out and talk with fellow designers, but podcasting is not a concise or accurate way of sharing refined thoughts. I like to think of podcasting like a rock band – a bunch of musicians jamming out, making mistakes, and working on new riffs. On the other hand, writing feels more like the work of a classical composer – every note is predetermined and calculated, the entire piece forming a concise and coherent statement.

Both mediums have value and despite my aversion to it, I’ve come to realize the importance of writing. One of my goals this year was to write more. Specifically, I wanted to share my thoughts on design beyond my current projects. So to kick off my somewhat regular newsletter, here are a few reasons why I think writing is important.


Writing helps me form my thoughts.

This one may be obvious to those of you with the natural tendency to write, but for me, it was a revelation. One of the studio values is Distill. It’s the idea that designs need time to rest so the subconscious can work its magic. The same goes for our thoughts. I’ve found that writing them down on a page allows me to see them clearly and evaluate them properly. It enables me to refine them, adding detail and nuance, or change my mind when something doesn’t work. Most importantly, writing gives my ideas time and space to breathe. This space helps me form new insights and become more confident in what I’m putting out into the world.


Writing is written in stone.

Contrary to the common phrase “nothing is written in stone,” some of the oldest human records we have are indeed written in stone. While this newsletter isn’t mailed to you on a slab of clay (although this can be arranged) this is the first step to publishing my thoughts in a more permanent form, hopefully progressing to the modern-day equivalent of stone, aka the book.

Some of my most insightful moments have come from reading books written by designers. Jasper Morrison’s “A Book of Things” was pivotal for me. My friend gifted me the book during NYC Design Week when I was new to the city. The way Jasper speaks about his work is very matter-of-fact: no pretentious language or esoteric ideas. He simply walks you through his process for designing objects that feel normal, like they should have always existed. This revelation of making objects that feel inevitable was eye-opening for me at the time. I was young and still leaning heavily into that clever, problem-solving, swiss-army-knife-ification attitude that a lot of us came out of school with. There’s something about reading his words that clicked with me and helped me balance out my perspective. I don’t think it’s something I could have picked up from watching an interview or seeing an Instagram post. It’s the slow contemplative nature of the book that had the most impact.

A quick tangent. When I met Dieter Rams in 2018, I brought my copy of “As Little Design As Possible”. When I pulled it out for him to sign, he was appalled. Dieter said that it had way too many pages and extra images and that the publisher wanted to make the book thick so it had that coffee table appeal to it. I told him he could rip out anything he didn’t want me looking at. He laughed, declined, and was kind enough to sign it anyway. The book Dieter approves of is his much thinner “Less But Better” which he wrote himself.

There’s another common phrase “everything you post online is forever” that, while a good rule to live by, I have found not always true. Plenty of knowledge has disappeared from the web, whether intentionally or by accident. I’ve archived a lot of my old Instagram posts which has led to broken links on a few design blogs. Even the savviest of internet archeologists, who know the ways the Wayback Machine, are stumped by lost information that was never recorded (reminds me of a Reply All episode). Who knows what social media platforms our brains will be plugged into in 50 years or what the ever-evolving technological landscape of the internet will even look like. Not even the way forward machine can predict that.

Books remain constant. They don’t change. They can’t be edited or deleted. Of course, this doesn’t make them foolproof. They can still be lost to time, the elements, or God forbid – banned. But I still think they have the best chance at passing on a legacy over time, likely outlasting our digital footprint and possibly even the physical products we design.


Writing is a way to tell stories about designs.

“DeSiGneRs are StoRyTellErs” says every design firm’s about page. To be honest, I didn’t understand this idea until several years into my career. I heard the phrase a lot in school, and always thought “Why can’t I just make cool things? I don’t need to write a book about my salt shaker design.”

This topic deserves a full essay, but the simple fact is that stories add meaning and emotion to things (design also does this). Humans have told stories since the dawn of time. Books may last centuries, but stories can last millennia. The part that I missed in my education was that the stories we tell about our designs don’t have to be grandiose or have a silly fairytale plot. It can simply be a story that relates the object to the user. My story about looking at clouds created a meaningful connection for the Daze sofa. A sophomoric quip about the sofa “just looking cool” wouldn’t do it the same justice.

Writing is a great way to tell stories because it’s calculated and concise. You can craft an object’s story just as well as you can craft its form. The story is the backbone of a design that translates the work into all the images, videos, and other mediums where it will be seen. I’ve come to find out that I’ve always had stories about my designs, they were just simple ones, usually shared on social media. All I had to do was dig a bit deeper and write them down.


I hope that sharing these ideas will encourage you to jot down some of your own thoughts on design. Writing is a painful and slow process for me (I’ve spent like three days on this newsletter), but I’m pushing myself to share these essays even if they aren’t perfect. Writing may be hard, especially for us shape rotators, but like many things in life, it's the hard things that are worth doing.

- Nicholas Baker