howdy i'm kai! i built design garden — a co-op sprint for designers who ship — and this is my newsletter: field notes from the messy middle of making.

i also just moved it to a new home and merged everything into one list. if you came from Sprintfolio or the old Substack, you're in the right place.

if you google it right now, the AI overview comes up in comic sans. an easter egg. some designer at Google almost certainly opened a ticket, made the case, and shipped it. a small tribute to the era when the web started to get weird. the irony is that comic sans is a designer's mortal enemy.

GeoCities was free web hosting from the 90s that let anyone build their own corner of the internet. you picked a "neighborhood" based on what your page was about. EnchantedForest for fantasy, SiliconValley for the tech-brained, Colosseum for sports. then you got a plot and built whatever you wanted. visitor counters. scrolling marquee text. animated flames. guest books where strangers left comments like "nice page!!!" and meant it.

the old internet was coming alive and GeoCities was one of the first large collective playgrounds. weird, silly, full of people who just really wanted you to know about their specific thing. you could fall into a rabbit hole about someone's obscure hobby and come out an hour later feeling less alone.

nobody was optimizing.

people made things because they felt like it, for whoever happened to wander in.

we're kind of back in the GeoCities era, just with better tools. the barrier to entry is the lowest it's ever been. AI, no-code, vibe coding. more ways to build something and put it online than GeoCities ever dreamed of.

so why does so much of what gets made still feel the same?

the distinction isn't old internet versus new.

there's a way of making things organized around an audience. newest first, calibrated for who's watching, shaped by what tends to do well. a feed runs on this. you post, you watch the numbers, you learn what performs, you make more of that. it's what the tools are built to reward.

then there's a way of making things organized around what you're actually making. you build it because you want it to exist, or because you're trying to understand something, or because it solves a problem you actually have. you tend it over time. it's allowed to be unfinished. the audience, if there is one, is whoever finds it useful later.

that second posture is what people mean by a "digital garden." Maggie Appleton describes hers as "a collection of half-baked explorations i'm always tending to." her site has a dropdown to filter by growth stage: seedling, budding, evergreen. those are statuses. the writing is supposed to move through them. a feed tracks what's new. a garden tracks what's growing.

both postures have always existed, but watch what happened to the tools. geocities, livejournal, myspace, tumblr, facebook, instagram. each one reached a bigger audience than the last, and an audience that size has to be optimized for. sorted, ranked, fed the stuff that performs. the weird personal corner didn't scale, so it got designed out. gardens didn't disappear, the feed just became the default, because it was optimized for scale.

but it keeps swinging back.

look at how we touch tech right now. after years of busier and busier interfaces, the main way millions of people use the most advanced software around is by typing a sentence into a box. plain language into a blank field. we spent a decade building elaborate UI and walked right back to the command line wearing a friendlier face.

same story with what comes out. the AI crowd pushed everything into plain markdown, then started rendering it back into hand-built HTML pages. strip the platform, strip the chrome, get back to text and a page you made yourself. it's geocities energy, thirty years later.

Maggie Appleton has written about what she calls the "barefoot developer," someone who builds small tools as a side skill to their real work. not a developer by trade, just someone who coded their own reading tracker, their own portfolio system, their own whatever-they-actually-needed. made for themselves, not for scale.

and now the barrier to sharing has dropped just as fast. you could always post on someone else's platform, but that comes with their constraints, their algorithm, their feed. now a non-technical person can push a project to github, deploy to vercel, or vibe-code a whole site and have it live by the end of the day. yours, on your terms.

now that AI can generate a passable version of almost anything, the thing that gets recognized is the one with your unique fingerprints on it. AI slop is abundant and generic by design. and while it continues to improve, a tended thing is narrow, personal, made for a real problem.

that's what resonates with others, because you wrestled with it.

you made it real.

make the thing that sparks for you. make it well. it becomes the signal.

this is a letter to the designer who already feels that pull. the one who's curious about what's possible.

you come in with one thing. not everything — one thing. a project, a portfolio piece, a tool, a pivot. four weeks to tend it. one partner who knows what you're building and cares whether it ships.

"Design Garden magic happened again. I whipped up a quick website instead of a portfolio, submitted it as my application, and landed a paid project with a startup the next day." – Dan

"Like many personal ideas, it kept getting pushed aside. Design Garden gave me the structure to finally come back to it." – Sahar

what you plant in four weeks keeps growing after the sprint is over.

i'm building it for designers who want to get close to the build. people who have the thing they want to make and are tired of doing it alone. people who see the internet as a fresh playground waiting for their "weird" take on it. no course structure, no growth hacks. just real work, and people who care whether yours happens.

— Kai

i'm hosting a free live session on june 16: "Ship It Before It's Ready," with Alec Dilanchian (oneyear.garden) and Esther Sherry. it’s an honest conversation about finding your own "weird" and building a muscle for action, open Q&A, no slides, about 45 minutes.

if any of this intrigued you, come hang out, should be a fun catchup.