How I work
If you have seen one of my project sites, you will have met this shape. It is my redrawing of Damien Newman’s design squiggle, it runs down the page as a divider, and nobody ever explains it. So here is the explanation, including what I changed and why. Fair warning: I am happiest at the messy end.
I want to be clear about this before anything else. The squiggle is Damien Newman’s. He drew it at the beginning of the 2000s, on a Wacom tablet, while working on complex desktop software, because he needed to explain the value of design to a client in under thirty seconds. It has been doing that job for the whole industry ever since.
One continuous line that starts as a knot and ends as a point. It covers researching, uncovering insights, generating concepts, iterating prototypes, and arriving at a single designed solution. The left is mess and uncertainty. The right is a single point of focus: the design.
It is the best thirty seconds of explanation our field has. I have used it in rooms where nothing else would have worked, and I have watched people who do not care about design nod at it.
thedesignsquiggle.comI redraw it, rather than reproduce it. My line is looser at the start and settles more slowly, because in my experience the mess lasts longer than the original drawing suggests.
I label both ends every time. Newman’s version is deliberately unlabelled, which is what makes it universal. Mine always names what is on the left and what is on the right for that specific piece of work, so it argues something rather than decorating a page.
I broke it into three close-ups. The squiggle is brilliant at a glance and useless for explaining any single part. So I drew three diagrams that zoom into where the work actually changes shape.
And I moved the emphasis. Most people use it to justify the clean end. I use it to defend the messy start.
The honest bit
Most people in this industry are drawn to the right-hand side. The clean line, the finished thing, the launch. I understand why. It photographs well and it is the part you can put in a portfolio.
I like the left. The contradictions, the five stakeholders who each want something different, the research that refuses to agree with itself. Pulling that apart is the part of the job I would do for free, and it is the part most teams want to skip.
That preference is not a quirk, it is the whole offer. Teams rarely need help drawing the straight line. They need someone who will stay in the knot long enough to find where it actually comes undone, and who does not panic while it still looks like a knot.
It is also why I work the way I do. I go wide before I go narrow, I read the boring evidence first, and I will not hand you a confident answer in week one. What I will do is make sure that when the line does appear, it is the right one.
The squiggle is the whole journey at a glance, which makes it useless for explaining any particular part of it. So I keep three diagrams that zoom into the three places where the work actually changes shape. Here is where each one sits.
These are the pictures I actually think with. I draw versions of them on whiteboards more often than I would like to admit.
Many inputs, one finding. Discovery starts as noise: reviews, analytics, support transcripts, competitor behaviour, and five people with five opinions. The work is finding the point everything else orbits.
The bright dot in the middle is the finding a team can act on. Everything to the right of it is just being organised about what follows, which is the easy half.
Many attempts, one rule. Dozens of experiments, pivots and dead ends, most of which look identical from the outside. Then a moment where the shape underneath becomes visible.
The single hexagon on the right is not one of the attempts. It is the rule they were all circling, drawn once and measured, so the next person does not have to rediscover it.
One rule, held under pressure. Every product starts as a tangle of competing forces: a roadmap, a deadline, an engineering constraint and someone’s strong preference.
The middle loop is the structure that resolves them, which is a single continuous line even though it does not look like one. The straight run at the end is the only part anyone else ever sees.
When I apply for a role I build a small site for it, with the research I would bring to that job. The squiggle appears between the sections of those sites, and it is doing something specific each time.
If any of this is useful to you, I would like to hear about the problem. Get in touch, and reach out if you want to see my work.