The tech industry loves putting people into tiny, labeled boxes. You’re either a UX researcher who never touches CSS, a frontend developer who panics without a pre-packaged Tailwind template, or a graphic designer who hands over static artboards and hopes for the best.
I’ve never been good at staying in one lane. There isn’t a day where I don’t make something new—whether it’s a Next.js web application, a 3D printed mechanical part, a custom illustration, or motion graphics—simply because I want to know how it works.
Physical Constraints Teach Better Digital Design
When you design only for screens, it is easy to get lazy because pixels are weightless. You can stack ten megabytes of JavaScript frameworks on a landing page and pretend nothing is wrong because your developer laptop has 64GB of RAM.
Working with physical media and custom code changes how you think:
- 3D Printing: Teaches you about structural tolerances, overhangs, and what happens when a design looks great in CAD but collapses under gravity.
- Illustration & Print: Forces you to master composition, negative space, and line weight before relying on flashy animations.
- Hand-Rolled SCSS & Semantic HTML: Reminds you that a responsive 12-column grid takes less than a hundred lines of clean Sass, without shipping a bloated UI library.
// Clean, predictable column math without framework bloat
@mixin column-width($col-span) {
max-width: math.percentage(math.div($col-span, $columns));
flex: 1 0 calc(#{math.percentage(math.div($col-span, $columns))} - #{$gutter});
}Bringing It All Together on the Web
Every medium feeds back into the next project. Understanding illustration makes your iconography and SVG work cleaner. Understanding CAD and physical fabrication makes building industrial web tools intuitive. And understanding TypeScript and modern React means you never have to wait around for someone else to bring your design to life.