I keep looking backward. Not in a stuck-in-the-past, rose-tinted-glasses sort of way. More like a jewel thief casing an old museum. The past is full of things that worked brilliantly, things that were abandoned too soon, things that the relentless march of progress discarded not because they were bad but because the next thing came along and everyone forgot to ask whether the old thing was actually better.
Modern Retro - my most personal project, the one I'm proudest of - is built entirely on this idea. Take eighty-six modern brands and reimagine them as 1970s retail stores. The concept is simple but the resonance runs deep. People don't just like the images. They feel something when they see them. A warmth. A recognition. A sense that something about the 1970s aesthetic - the earthy tones, the hand-painted signage, the wood panelling, the general absence of screens - touches something that modern design has lost.
That response isn't nostalgia in the sentimental sense. It's nostalgia as signal. It's telling me something about what people miss, what they value, what the present is lacking. And that signal, if you pay attention to it, is one of the most powerful strategic tools available to anyone building anything.
The formula: recognition plus surprise
Modern Retro works because of a specific formula, and it's a formula that applies far beyond AI-generated images of vintage shopfronts. The formula is: recognition plus surprise. Give people something they recognise - a brand they know, an aesthetic they remember, a cultural reference they carry - and then surprise them by placing it in an unexpected context. The recognition creates comfort. The surprise creates delight. Together, they create the thumb-stop moment that every piece of content is fighting for.
A Spotify shop in 1970s Brooklyn. An Airbnb travel agency in a Soho side street. A Tesla showroom with wood-panelled walls and brown carpet. Each image takes two familiar things and smashes them together in a way that shouldn't work but absolutely does. The viewer's brain does the work - they see the brand they know, they see the era they remember (or imagine), and the collision of the two creates something genuinely new.
This formula is everywhere if you look for it. The best restaurants in London are doing it - taking traditional cuisines and presenting them in contemporary settings, or vice versa. The best fashion brands are doing it - mining archives for silhouettes and prints, then recontextualising them for modern bodies and modern lives. The best music is doing it - sampling and reimagining sounds from previous decades in ways that feel both familiar and fresh.
What the past got right
The thing about the past that the tech world, in particular, refuses to acknowledge: some things were better before. Not everything. Obviously not everything. Nobody wants to go back to a world without the internet or modern medicine or central heating. But specific design choices, specific cultural practices, specific ways of making and sharing and experiencing things - some of those were genuinely superior to what we have now, and the fact that we abandoned them doesn't mean they were wrong.
Print magazines got editorial design right in a way that most websites still have not managed. The layout, the pacing, the way a double-page spread could stop you in your tracks - that's editorial craft that decades of web design have not replicated. I grew up on The Face, i-D, Dazed. Those magazines weren't just content delivery mechanisms. They were objects. They had weight, texture, smell. The design wasn't secondary to the words - it was inseparable from them.
Teletext got information design right. Yes, Teletext. Those blocky, limited-colour pages on your television in the 1980s and 1990s. CultureTerminal echoes that aesthetic deliberately - the idea that a daily feed of cultural intelligence can be delivered with the simplicity and directness of a Teletext page, where the constraints of the medium force a clarity that unlimited design options often destroy.
Rebuilding what was abandoned
Curio is another exercise in strategic nostalgia. It's inspired by Nuzzel, a tool that used to show you the links your network was sharing most. Nuzzel was killed in 2021 when it was acquired, and nothing adequate replaced it. The internet lost something when Nuzzel died - a simple, elegant way to see what the people you trust were paying attention to. Curio is my attempt to rebuild that idea, not by copying Nuzzel but by asking: what was the core insight there, and how would you rebuild it for how people use the internet now?
That question - "why did we stop doing this?" - is the most strategically powerful question you can ask. Because the answer is almost never "because we found something better." The answer is usually "because something newer came along and we got distracted." The new thing wasn't necessarily better. It was just newer. And in a culture addicted to novelty, newer wins even when it shouldn't.
So I keep looking backward. Not to live there, but to raid it. To find the design patterns that worked, the product ideas that were abandoned prematurely, the cultural moments that contained truths we have since forgotten. Every project I build contains some element of this - a nod to something that existed before, rebuilt with modern tools and modern understanding but carrying the DNA of something that was already proven to resonate.
Nostalgia as competitive advantage
In a world where everyone is chasing the next thing, looking backward is genuinely contrarian. It's, paradoxically, one of the most forward-thinking things you can do. Because while everyone else is competing for the same narrow strip of "what's new," you have the entire history of human creativity to draw from. The past is a vast, largely uncompeted market of proven ideas waiting to be reimagined.
The brands that understand this are the ones that endure. They know that heritage isn't baggage - it is equity. They know that a reference to the past, done with taste and intention, creates a depth that purely new things can't achieve. It says: we're part of a lineage. We didn't appear from nowhere. We have roots, and those roots give us stability and meaning.
My projects have roots. Modern Retro is rooted in the aesthetic of 1970s retail. CultureTerminal is rooted in the editorial traditions of print and Teletext. This blog is rooted in the essay tradition of long-form writing, when publications trusted their readers enough to give them twelve hundred words instead of a listicle. Even the portfolio itself is rooted in a design sensibility that owes more to printed books and gallery catalogues than to modern web design trends.
These roots aren't limitations. They're foundations. They give each project a sense of place, of belonging, of having come from somewhere real. And in a digital landscape where most things feel temporary and disposable, that sense of rootedness is rare and valuable.
Look backward. Find what was abandoned too soon. Ask why it worked. Then rebuild it with everything you know now. That isn't nostalgia. That is strategy.
