This is not a provocation for its own sake, but a plain acknowledgment of contradiction. We’re writing from inside the same system this book critiques: burnout, performance, and spectacle. Design today is a collision of careerism and content. We scroll through artificial slop, we prompt and optimize our way out of crisis, we dream of curated creative retreats to escape it all. But we stay tethered to platforms that alienate and flatten—looping back into the churn, struggling to hear ourselves think.
The essays in this book cut through the noise. “Design harder” at first lands like a blunt command, a vague motivational slogan, another demand for more labor. But, like any good mantra, its meaning deepens with repetition and reflection. Across these chapters, it becomes a framework for navigating contemporary design—from glyphs and software to ideologies and pedagogy. The writing asks how visual culture is produced, what values it encodes, and who benefits. It lingers on what often goes unnoticed: unpaid internships, editorial image economies, the friction between aesthetic ideals and working conditions. This is not a detached diagnosis but a grounded, wide-angle critique of the field and its machinery.
This book doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t settle into authority. Its tone can be sharp, then tentative; expansive, then personal. That instability is part of its honesty. At times, the arguments may feel too polemical or not polemical enough. That’s not a flaw but an invitation for critique—of itself, of the industry, of ourselves. Its strength lies in continuing the conversation, not resolving it. Design Harder is not a rulebook—it is a set of open-ended questions. What does it mean to make work within broken systems? What compromises have we made? What would it mean to design with care, not just style? We don’t agree with every line—and that’s the point. The strength of the text is that it invites you to disagree, to continue, to respond. This is not a book that demands alignment. It asks for engagement.
Of course, there’s irony in writing this. To contribute a foreword to a book examining studio performativity, micro-celebrity, and the optics of authorship is to take part in all three. But critique alone is not enough. We write this not to resolve the contradiction, but to remain inside it—to engage sincerely and with the understanding that navigating values under capitalism is always a negotiation. These essays ask us to confront our own complicity—not with cynicism, but with a commitment to wrestle with these complexities through a spirit of responsibility and playfully self-aware authenticity.
So, where does this leave us? Looking toward utopia, toward new horizons. Perhaps not a grand, singular Utopia, but the small “utopias” we can cultivate within reach. Leaping to utopia is never easy, but the small steps toward it often are. Fonts, logos, and software won’t save the world. But the people behind them—when they ask hard questions and create with care—can shift culture incrementally. This book is one of those steps. The next ones are yours.
—AUTHENTIC
(Christina Janus
and Desmond Wong)