Influences

Inspiration comes from far and wide. I'm a big believer in carrying forward worthwhile tradition, and find much of my thinking from ghosts.

Massimo Vignelli

Vignelli famously limited himself to six typefaces: Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Futura, Times Roman, and Helvetica. Rigid grids. Limited color palettes. He treated constraints not as limitations but as the foundation for clarity. "If you can design one thing, you can design everything," he said—and he meant it, moving fluidly between subway maps, furniture, corporate identities, and tableware.

I love expressive designers like Milton Glaser, but that maximalist approach rarely translates to software. Embellishment in an interface is usually noise. Vignelli gives me permission to strip things back, to trust that strong typography and clear hierarchy are enough. This site runs on Neue Haas Grotesk specifically because I wanted that Swiss modernist discipline. Vignelli's fingerprints are all over it.

Peter Drucker

I came to Drucker through Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which gave me something I didn't know I was missing: a framework for thinking about innovation systematically. Before Drucker, I thought innovation was either lightning-strike genius or incremental tinkering. He showed me it can be managed—that there are sources of innovative opportunity you can deliberately look for, and disciplines you can apply to exploit them.

That reframing matters when you're building products. Innovation isn't magic, it's work. Drucker made that concrete.

Fred Brooks

The Mythical Man-Month is canonical for a reason. Brooks's Law—"adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"—is one of those truths that everyone in software knows but management keeps forgetting. The coordination costs compound. More people means more lines of communication, which means exponentially more time spent not building.

But it's Chapter 3, "The Surgical Team," that haunts me. The idea that one chief programmer should hold the entire system in their head, with everyone else in a support role. That model got abandoned when deployment barriers disappeared and management figured they could just throw bodies at problems. We've been doing hog butchering ever since. I wrote more about this and what AI changes about it.

Edward Tufte

I own all of Tufte's books and have worked through them cover to cover. His obsession is making data legible—ensuring that visualizations communicate the facts rather than obscure them. The data-ink ratio, the critique of chartjunk, the righteous anger at how PowerPoint's format constraints literally contributed to the Columbia disaster.

Tufte's work is a constant reminder that design decisions have consequences. A bad chart isn't just ugly, it's dishonest. It hides truth. That's a heavier responsibility than most designers acknowledge.

Paul Rand

Rand's visual work speaks for itself—IBM, ABC, UPS—but it's his writing and philosophy that influence me most. He was one of the first business-oriented designers, insisting that everything he made serve the company's goals, not his ego. "Don't try to be original," he said. "Just try to be good."

He also understood that a logo doesn't need to literally describe what a company does. It just needs to be distinctive and memorable. The meaning comes later, through association. That's a liberating idea when clients want their logo to "say" too much. Rand's work proves that restraint and purpose beat cleverness every time.