cmrn
this is my journal of occasionally useful thoughts.
design. marketing. creative. photography. discussion.
in-house marketing designer (currently 🧦). weekly new hobby starter.
🇨🇦
https://cmrn.co
- The walk of shame home from going to get a beer because I forgot I need to bring my passport until I get my renewed license in the mail
- Project that's gonna be abandoned in a week, of the week 👀
- I'm a firm believer that if you're in a creative field you don't need to work a 9–5, but I need to get my side hustle back on to put this into practice.
- 15 minutes before a meeting: locked in, focused, can't do anything except stare at the clock 1 minute before a meeting: wait shit how did I end up halfway across the block without my laptop
- Always defend your design decisions. This doesn't mean die on every hill and be unwilling to take feedback. But make sure that you show that every choice you make has intention, and don't just let feedback and opinions overrule it all. That's the easiest way to devalue design (and yourself).
- One of the biggest forms of betrayal in the world is seeing a song greyed out in your playlist.
- I wonder how many companies are gonna hit the "we're disbanding our [primary service offering] to focus on [robots/AI]" this year. (and then close down in the near future after)
- "Remove old versions" who?
- Mannnn I plugged in the camera so excited to see this batch of photos and damn are they bad, haha 😅
- I’m always too stupid to use the Following feed because I’ll scroll a couple times, refresh, and then scroll the exact same posts.
- Budget airlines are crazy because it costs $4 if you want water, and then they don’t even have any in stock.
- Tantrums aren’t a bargaining tactic
- My personality type is whatever the opposite of bringing out a card game after 3 minutes of sitting around is
- Fingerprint to unlock your phone will forever be better than face unlock
- Kindle’s UX makes no sense to me with how much “tap in this very specific region of the screen to do something” that there is. I’ve had it for years and it still feels like trial and error.
- A while ago I was like “Meta Quest can’t be too bad, they simply acquired Oculus” and boy was I wrong.
- More than anything else, @monteiro.bsky.social’s ‘Ruined by Design’ made me realize how written on the wall the current political climate has been for years. Highly recommend it as a practical design ethics book, but it was a great illumination of how nothing happens by accident.
- Even if you don’t attribute outcomes to malice, you also can’t pretend that side effects aren’t also designed in. You cannot only have part of it.
- It’s funny how true this is of every hobby — what you see “on the box” is such a small part of the actual experience, every time.
- I swear you could do YouTube and just name every video "I'm Quitting" and they'd homepage you every time 📈
- Early nomination for colour of the year, sponsored by shouting into the void:
- Premium features in 2028:
- I just got 3 spam calls at once exactly when it turned 2:30...?
- Pet peeve: when accounts require a username even though they never appear anywhere. Like I don't know what my username is to pay my gas bill, maybe let me use my email...?
- Ground News makes me wonder if it's gonna go the way of Honey or Elon Musk sometime... I just can't fathom how/why they've been the sponsor of essentially every video for a year.
- They should invent an oven where using broil doesn’t give you temporary amnesia until you smell burning
- The agency direction compels me again lately in the sense that it (at least on paper) prefilters for clients who: A) see a direct value/need for design B) see your perspective as uniquely qualified Which generally makes for much more of a consultant relationship than a commoditized one.
- My 100-ft take lately: as day-to-day design needs explode (aka we live on social media), quality and care expectations drop. Many strategies have shifted to closing your eyes and spraying shots → leading to decisions being pulled upstream and a general “generate design” mantra (AI or not).
- Goals for the year: never actually finish my portfolio but probably redesign it from the ground up 11 or 12 times
- Pretty stoked with how my lamp prototype came out. #3dprinting
- Design job postings are getting fucking depressing 😅
- Most importantly, “a part” and “apart” mean near opposite things.
- New Year’s resolution: read more Airport: alright we’ll delay your flight for a few hours …works, I guess 📖
- Alright that was NOT me saying I wanted another delay though 🙃
- Tis the season of rest and recharge
- I had a weird relationship with social media last year where I craved it a lot, yet largely did not find it fulfilling to use. I think my solution is to try to be more give than take — replacing mindless use with actually engaging with people and integrating into communities/discussions.
- One of my design goals for next year is to get back into the mindset of my teenager design self again. I feel like I’ve lost the whimsy of doing little side projects and completely theoretical proposals that are just for fun. Also known as the reason I fell in love with design in the first place.
