Analog Lessons for a Digital Designer: On Building the Eye That AI Can't Replace
Full of creative confidence, I took a leap this year and entered a local art competition.
Now, I’m a designer by trade, an artist by night, if you’re being generous. I’ve taken watercolor and figure drawing classes here and there, but I’m no Matisse. These days, my fingers are far more fluent in keyboard shortcuts than brushstrokes.
Still, I’m a big fan of creative challenges. So when I saw the call for entries, I dove in.
Finding Inspiration
My inspiration came from Agnes Martin’s Leaf in the Wind. Her work is quiet but powerful, grids drawn by hand in graphite, deeply connected to nature but stripped down to its most essential form. The Norton Simon’s description of her approach struck me: “her light touch encourages private contemplation rather than a mandate of strained concepts or ideas.” That was exactly what I wanted to capture: a sense of calm, simplicity, and connection.
I set out to create a color study that echoed that same meditative quality.
The Creative Process
For weeks, I spent mornings at my local botanical garden with watercolor pencils and paper, collecting color swatches from real life. Not just “green” but the exact hue of a California oak leaf at 9 am. Day after day, I painted in plein air, testing again and again: Is that blue-green or yellow-green? How much water is too much? Where’s the warmth hiding in that shadow?
Each small swatch became a moment of stillness, a record of attention. I took notes on location, weather, even the birds that happened to pass by.
Eventually, it was time to switch gears from painter to designer. I laid out my color studies in a grid, organizing chaos into order. That’s when I started relearning a few lessons I hadn’t thought about since design school:
Details matter. Thank you to the professor who swore she’d fail us for a single smudge.
Math is hard.Grids are easy in InDesign, less so with a ruler, pencil, and calculator.
Supplies are expensive.So is time.
Leave time for clean-up. Dining room tables are harder to tidy than a dozen Chrome tabs.
And every Photoshop tool—masks, shadows, crop, align—was born from this analog world.
This project reminded me how easy it is to forget the craft behind graphic design. Digital tools make things faster, cleaner, and easier but they also create distance between our hands and our ideas. Sometimes the best way to reconnect with creativity is to slow down, make a mess, and feel the work again.
The Outcome
You’d think all that intentionality would yield results, right?
Nope. This piece didn’t make the cut. Apparently, I’ll need to work a little (or a lot) harder to earn a spot in that local exhibition.
Here’s what I realized after my painting wasn’t chosen: I got so deep in my own idea that I completely missed the bigger picture. The competition had a theme—and I hadn’t revisited it once after I started painting. Forest, meet trees.
It’s the same trap that can happen in B2B SaaS design. A designer runs with an idea they love, only to realize later it doesn’t quite serve the goal of the campaign. That’s why creative briefs and ongoing feedback are so important, they bring everyone back to the same source of truth.
Whether it’s a local art show or a high-stakes marketing campaign, the real risk isn’t making something ugly—it’s making something that looks good but accomplishes nothing.
When Design Execution Is Free, Taste Is Everything
AI can generate a landing page in thirty seconds. What it can't generate is the judgment to know whether it's any good, or the taste to make it better. Here's what that means for the design partner you hire next.
Read NowThe Skill Underneath the Skill
What this project actually taught me is something I've been thinking about more and more these days: the difference between designers who can execute and designers who have developed genuine judgment about what the work needs to do.
The months of observation in the botanical garden, the color swatches from life rather than from a palette, the slow looking that Agnes Martin's work demands before it gives anything back, none of that shows up in a finished piece. But it accumulates. It builds a reservoir of reference that changes how you see a layout, a color relationship, a typographic choice. It's what lets you walk into a room, look at a brand, and immediately understand not just what's wrong but why.
In a world where AI can generate a landing page in thirty seconds, that accumulated judgment is increasingly the only thing that separates design that performs from design that just exists. The tools are available to everyone. The eye that knows what to do with them is not.
That's the argument I've been making more explicitly lately. If you're curious where it goes, start here: When Execution Is Free, Taste Is Everything
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