This is the first edition of this newsletter, so it feels right to start with what this is and why it exists.

Present Standards is my independent design practice. It's centred on visual communication and critical discourse within design, but more honestly, it's the thing I've been building towards for a few years without fully realising it. A series of projects, ideas, and ways of working that have slowly converged into something that needed a name and a frame.

The name itself is a small statement of intent. Standards, in design, tend to point backwards; to established rules, fixed expectations, inherited ways of doing things. Present Standards is an attempt to locate them somewhere else: in the current moment, in the technologies, questions, and conditions that are shaping how we communicate visually today. I think a lot about where design sits right now, and how we're in a period where the tools are changing faster than the conversations around them. Generative technologies, new publishing formats, evolving digital spaces, these aren't future concerns anymore, they're present ones, yet much of the discourse around them either swings toward uncritical enthusiasm or outright rejection. Neither feels particularly useful. What interests me is the space in between: where you take new technologies seriously enough to work with them critically, to understand what they make possible and what they flatten.

That's the territory Present Standards operates in. The studio works across print, digital, and tools for the web; creating brands, publications, editorial platforms, and digital tools. Some of this is commissioned, some of it is self-initiated. The self-initiated work matters to me as much as the client work, because it's where ideas get tested without the constraints of a brief. It's where I can ask questions that don't have a client attached to them yet, and often those questions end up informing everything else. What connects all of it is a commitment to clarity and meaning existing together. I've never been convinced that accessible work has to be shallow, or that conceptually rich work has to be obscure. The best design does both, it communicates clearly while carrying something deeper for those paying attention. That's the standard I'm trying to hold.

Working across disciplines helps with this. I draw on editorial thinking, research methods, writing, and teaching alongside design. These are genuine inputs that shape how a project is framed, structured, and resolved. Design doesn't exist in isolation, and the more honestly a practice reflects that, the more interesting the work tends to be.

This newsletter will be a space for sharing work, thinking, and the occasional project that doesn't fit neatly anywhere else. It’s for all those things that live in-between. Research, half-formed ideas, questions I'm sitting with, findings that haven't found a project yet. I'll share them here as they develop.