Design Isn’t Learned. It’s Lived.
Design isn’t a job. It isn’t a set of tools or a curriculum you can check off. It’s something deeper: a way of seeing, moving, and deciding. You don’t earn it through titles or certificates. You live it, or you don’t.
For years, design education has pushed the idea that mastery can be taught. Bootcamps and courses have their place, but they only give you exposure. They don’t give you instinct. They can’t hand you taste. They won’t make you a designer. That shift only happens when design becomes part of your life.
How to start living design
So how do you move from learning design to truly living it? Design is not a single skill. It is the name of a practice made up of many small creative steps, each one needing exploration, study, and repetition. You may find yourself drawn to certain steps more than others. Follow the energy.
For some, it starts with drawing: detailed sketches, simple geometric patterns, even letterforms scrawled in the margins. For others, it is photography: capturing textures in the wild, studying color in the everyday, or noticing the structure of a building and the rhythm of a cityscape. Each small act builds a piece of your creative vocabulary.
Over time, these parts begin to connect. A concrete texture you photographed becomes the base of a layout. A line drawing is layered on top. A color study guides the palette. You learn from the masters, whether Swiss, post-modern, or whichever tradition speaks to you, but what makes the work authentic is how you inject your own view, your own content, your own life.
This is not something you pick up in six months. Living design is a constant evolution, built through years of experience, always designing and redesigning, building depth and meaning in the work you put into the world.
Everything feeds the practice
Design has never lived in a silo for me. It connects to every creative outlet I touch. Music fuels my work, not just through sound but through the values and energy I take from the bands I follow. When I make my own music, the visuals — the covers, the graphics, the entire language around it — all come through my design practice. Even in composition, I lean on the same principles of rhythm, layout, and systems that shape my design work.
Writing is how I process the storm. It helps me capture sparks, make sense of scattered ideas, and ground myself in what I already know. It gives me clarity, but it is also a way to give back by sharing what I’ve learned so others can navigate their own practice.
Photography, drawing, and painting. Each one is a different door into the same house. Photography trains me to see color, shape, and texture in the everyday. Drawing lets me test systems and discover ideas, just as I did while developing the foundation of SWARM. Painting gives me freedom to be more raw, layering mediums until something new emerges. Each practice feeds the others, and all of them fold back into design.
Not everyone sees this depth from the outside. Sometimes when people ask what I do, they imagine tools and job titles, not the way music, writing, art, and design all weave together into a life. But if you have ever felt like people don’t see the full scope of your practice, you already know what I mean. Living design is about connecting those threads, whatever they are for you, until the work feels fully yours.
AI doesn’t replace practice, it accelerates it
The rise of AI has made design outputs more accessible than ever. A machine can generate a layout, a type treatment, or even a brand system in seconds. But AI cannot live design. It cannot build taste through thousands of small choices or judgment through years of trial and error. It cannot inject your perspective into the work.
What separates you is not the ability to push buttons faster. It is the way design runs through your life. Taste, instinct, and craft are built through repetition and reflection. They are the fingerprints that AI cannot replicate.
At the same time, AI can become a powerful ally once you have that lived practice. You can use it to sharpen your thinking, to stress-test ideas, or to generate raw material faster than ever before. It can help you see more directions, experiment more widely, and accelerate the messy early stages of exploration. But none of that matters without your judgment to guide it.
That is the real opportunity: use AI as a tool to expand your process, while letting your lived experience and perspective drive the work forward. This is also the heart of what I’m exploring with SWARM — not replacing instinct, but creating structures that help you move faster without losing the human edge.
The lifelong path
The designers who last are not just working in design. They are working on design, constantly. Every photo, every sketch, every solved mess becomes part of a lifelong practice. That is what makes you a designer. Not your job title. Not your résumé. Not the tools you use. But the fact that you never stop living it.
I share parts of my own practice in my field notes — fragments, sketches, daily photos. They are not finished pieces, but they show the rhythm of what it looks like to live design in public.
And starting next week, I will be diving deeper into the SWARM steps — one post for each — to show how this lived practice translates into clarity and momentum for building products.
Originally published at https://cardeo.substack.com/
