Latest in: Design
August 4, 2025
 · 
7 min read

The Art of Duck Alignment

Managing tasks on your own timeline, when some things simply won't wait.
July 28, 2025
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5 min read

What is Design Intent?

Why being deliberate with your design choices matter.
July 14, 2025
 · 
6 min read

Clap For Your Damn Self

Create something onto which others can base their assumptions. Nobody will do it for you.
July 7, 2025
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7 min read

Saying It’s Sustainable Doesn’t Make It So

If you want to design for sustainability, you can't just keep doing what you've always done.
June 23, 2025
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6 min read

Did You Stop to Ask Why?

Become better informed, make better decisions, and take more effective action.
June 16, 2025
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6 min read

There’s No Such Thing As User Error

Only usability error.
June 9, 2025
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5 min read

Minimalism, Maximalism, Optimalism

Wait, optimalism?
June 2, 2025
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6 min read

Agnostica Operatio

What happens if what you depend on vanished tomorrow?
May 21, 2025
 · 
5 min read

Want To Learn Something?

Lincoln's one-step guide to self-reliance
May 5, 2025
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6 min read

Designing For Murphy’s Law

How an innocuous design decision can cost a user thousands of dollars.
April 21, 2025
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5 min read

Mo Features, Mo Problems.

Just because the product is slapping you on the wrist, doesn't mean it's your fault.
April 14, 2025
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9 min read

AI for Designers – What’s Now and What’s Next?

Post-hype, what is AI doing for and to designers?
March 24, 2025
 · 
5 min read

A Criticism-powered Jetpack

How learning to parse criticism improves the design and designer
March 10, 2025
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8 min read

Keyshot For Solidworks: A Retrospective

How to Import Meshes and Make Better Decisions for Self-Reliance
February 24, 2025
 · 
5 min read

The Halo in the Holistic

To have a great design, first you need a good one.
February 17, 2025
 · 
6 min read

The Devil in the Details

How attention to detail turns good design into great design.
February 10, 2025
 · 
6 min read

Get Mad

An old Industrial Designer yelling at Copic marker refills.
January 27, 2025
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5 min read

2025

What will you spend your time doing this year?
December 16, 2024
 · 
6 min read

Have You Got Taste?

What is taste in a world of tasteless hype? And importantly, what do we do about it?
December 9, 2024
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5 min read

How Much Design Gets Lost In Realisation?

How do the tools we use change our designs as they exit our heads?
November 25, 2024
 · 
5 min read

The Fragility of Ideas

How to deal with the fickleness of our human creativity.
November 18, 2024
 · 
6 min read

Is Design Too Cool For School?

Is a degree still a necessary investment for a career in Industrial Design?
November 4, 2024
 · 
4 min read

They Can’t All Be Bangers

It's ok that your work sucks sometimes.
October 21, 2024
 · 
5 min read

Show Your Working

How can a single concept deliver as much value as 50 concepts?
October 14, 2024
 · 
7 min read

Tesla Cybercab

An Opinionated Design Analysis
October 7, 2024
 · 
5 min read

Learning Design Skills

The skills we want to learn as designers are usually not the ones we need.
September 30, 2024
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5 min read

The Aesthetic Bandwagon

If you're copying what's cool now, it's already too late.
September 23, 2024
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6 min read

Rendering Low-Res Screens for Product Visualisation

How to add a little more texture to your renderings.
September 16, 2024
 · 
5 min read

The Cult of Work

Spending more time and ticking more boxes doesn't mean more value.
September 9, 2024
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5 min read

Get Obsessed

How obsessions can solve your design problems.
August 12, 2024
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5 min read

Take Care

Can you take care without taking time?
August 5, 2024
 · 
5 min read

Ideation and Being Human

What has boredom and failure ever done for us?
July 29, 2024
 · 
5 min read

Punk Design: An Immune Response.

What might post-AI art and design look like?
July 8, 2024
 · 
5 min read

Have You Got A Hangover?

#noregrats
June 17, 2024
 · 
5 min read

Do We Always Need to Ship?

Getting a product to market isn't everything, is it?
May 6, 2024
 · 
5 min read

You Can’t Just Phone In Your Mechanicals

An OTA won't make your design problems go away.
April 22, 2024
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5 min read

When Does A Designer Become A Reverse-Centaur?

Do we control the tools we use as designers? Or do they control us?
April 8, 2024
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5 min read

What is Frontend Design?

Frontend Design is the design work that takes you from having a problem, to knowing how to solve it.
March 25, 2024
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5 min read

Learning By Doing

There is only so much you can achieve by thinking and planning and refining. It's often much better to start, and learn by doing.
March 11, 2024
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5 min read

Purity of Purpose

Everywhere you look the products we use are crappier than ever because they've lost the part that made them good in the first place.
February 26, 2024
 · 
5 min read

The Design Is Only The Beginning

Implementing a design is orders of magnitude more difficult than just creating a design.
February 12, 2024
 · 
5 min read

An Argument for Semantic Versioning in Mechanical Design

Sure, letters and numbers are pretty standard, but they are not standard.
February 5, 2024
 · 
6 min read

Have We Reached Peak Obround?

Obround: noun. (geometry) A shape consisting of two semicircles connected by parallel lines tangent to their endpoints.
January 29, 2024
 · 
6 min read

Pro-Repair Design

The right to repair is one thing, but who's going to repair it?
January 22, 2024
 · 
5 min read

The Industrial Design Value Problem

How do you think the "person that designs the pretty box around it" reputation came to be? We gave it to ourselves.
January 15, 2024
 · 
6 min read

Design is Chaos

It can be utterly disheartening when the development process doesn't fit within the confines of those well-illustrated tetragons.
December 18, 2023
 · 
5 min read

Charades

Trying to diagnose a computer problem through a telephone with an inexperienced "technician" on the other end is exactly like playing charades.
December 10, 2023
 · 
7 min read

Less But Better

If we want consumers to buy domestically produced goods, consumers need to be 'untrained' out of buying lots of cheap junk.
December 4, 2023
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5 min read

Don’t Be Weird

Don't replace one set of problems, with another set of problems.
November 27, 2023
 · 
7 min read

Success Attracts Success

I work with startups day in and day out. The startup life is hard. One thing I see often and hear more is just how hard it is to start from nothing.
November 12, 2023
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6 min read

So You Have A Proof Of Concept? – Pt 2

Part two of taking your proof of concept and levelling it up. Creating your design and prototyping.
November 6, 2023
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6 min read

So You Have A Proof Of Concept? Now What?

So you have a proof of concept, but what do you do next? In two parts, I'll go over the process of levelling up your prototype. Design inputs and ideation.
October 23, 2023
 · 
6 min read

Too Busy for Bad Design.

Most people are too busy to realise the products they use everyday are just a little bit off.
October 16, 2023
 · 
8 min read

Designing for Business

Assuming you’re in the business of making goods (like maybe medical devices), the right design decisions at the right time can mean the difference between a business being a success, and a business continuing to struggle.
October 8, 2023
 · 
10 min read

The Tools: Analogue.

The analogue tools I use in my Industrial Design consulting.
September 27, 2023
 · 
9 min read

The Tools: Hardware.

The hardware tools I use in my Industrial Design consulting.
September 25, 2023
 · 
8 min read

The Tools: Software.

The software tools I use in my Industrial Design consulting.
September 18, 2023
 · 
4 min read

Design Thinking and Chesterton’s Fence

Avoid changing a given situation before you understand some of the reasons why it's remained unchanged for so long
September 11, 2023
 · 
8 min read

Why Are Medical Devices White?

Ever wondered why medical devices are always white?
September 4, 2023
 · 
6 min read

Does Design Lie to You?

This one goes deep, you may want to buckle up.
August 28, 2023
 · 
5 min read

Kill Your Darlings

Take that clever little bit of wit, that sentence, or that idea that you keep hanging onto, and delete it.

ⓒ Lincoln Black 2024

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Virtimachi Pty Ltd

ABN 31 651 760 762

PO Box 7156 Kariong

NSW 2250 Australia