RomânăDesign notes for
clearer digital brands.
Insights on web design, brand identity, digital content, and creative process.
The Thirst Trap: Glassmorphism and the Science That Doesn't Hold Water
The story says frosted-glass UI whispers to a million-year-old part of the brain that just found a river. I shipped the aesthetic and repeated the story. Then I traced its evidence chain: four links, one load-bearing study, and a replication that came back empty.
The Architect Layer: The Part That Stays Mine
Most days I work with a model in a second window: it drafts, I decide what's any good. The cognitive science of focus, intuition, and insight is really a description of the expensive part, the part worth keeping when a machine can do the cheap part.
Attention as Architecture: A Field Guide
Sensory gain, monotropic attention, a contested interoception literature, and a co-occurrence science that is barely a decade old. The personal experience opens the question; the research carries it.
The Anatomy of a Founder Myth
I build founder narratives for a living, so I went and checked which parts of the science are real, which are invented, and what that means for how you tell your story.
Play as a Cognitive Mode: The Excuse I Wanted to Be True
The internet keeps handing me a flattering fact: smart people are basically playful children. My whole working life looks like the evidence, which is exactly why I checked. The three cited sources don't prove it. What they support instead is quieter and better: a real, modest case for exploration, openness, and flow as a cognitive mode.
Designing for Two Readers
A pitch deck used to have one reader. Now it has two: the client, and the machine the client reads it through. On designing for both, and the older tension it dragged up, that the structure was always the real object and the surface just its face.
Introspection as R&D
Conscious thought is a thin surface over a much larger process. Watching that machinery, then testing what you see against a system you can instrument, is an underused and unusually fast way to learn how to build with AI.
How I find where a website loses people
My process for finding the moments a website quietly loses visitors. Why you can't see them from your own POV, how to inhabit a stranger and walk the site as them, and what to fix first.
Practical design insights, delivered with precision.
Occasional notes on websites, branding, content systems, and building a stronger digital presence.