Unwinding Systems
Breaking the grid
For as long as I can remember, grids have followed me around. Hovering beneath my designs, nudging my decisions, and sometimes reminding me of pesky technical requirements. Grids are a staple in a designer's day-to-day—a trusty tool for creating visual harmony in icons, posters, and user experiences.
In my years in motion design, grids took on new meaning as a way to orient timing and create spatial structure. In animation, grids can organize not just space but also the pacing of elements, helping the story flow with coherence and rhythm.
Now in UX, working on design systems at various companies has only deepened my appreciation for grids. At a basic level, grids create a logical hierarchy, guiding users through a more intuitive flow. They ensure consistency and structure that users come to rely on across different screens.
Yet the moments that have brought me the most joy are those where I get to bend—or even break—the rules of the grid. Placing elements outside the predictable, or animating something that defies expected timing, is often what holds our attention a beat longer. Monotony rarely finds its way into our creative brief, because we’re drawn to the unexpected.
"The grid is an armature for creativity, a foundation to build upon or break away from. It defines the parameters within which the artist or designer can explore—yet real innovation often comes from challenging those boundaries."
— László Moholy-Nagy (Bauhaus artist and designer)
I approached this series of ten paintings with a mindset of both structure and freedom. While grids were my starting point, they quickly became flexible, slipping out of place and unraveling to form surprising new compositions. But truthfully, I understood this approach only after the fact. The paintings came from a subconscious place, guided by instinct more than planning. As writer Adam Moss once put it, artists are often both participants and spectators in the act of creation.
The real joy, as it often is with painting, was in the process itself—the act of making. It was about letting my hands guide the material, building layers into a stable composition. In each painting, I imagined a set of rules to follow—and to break. The grid provided structure, a way to organize my initial thoughts, but as the painting developed, I let organic forms take over. Watching the grid’s guardrails unravel and give way to unexpected compositions became the fun part of this process.
Those initial forms became the foundation for each piece, but they emerged in unpredictable ways—through repeating, skipping, and layering elements to welcome imperfections. I accentuated these flaws with collage and layers of paint and wax, adding depth to the work.
I also introduced other design elements over the grids—outlining blocks and lines, arranging them playfully within variations of margins, spacing, alignment, and exploring color, texture, and elevation.
In a way, these paintings are abstractions of my work over the years. But instead of organizing information or enforcing a set of rules, they feel like snapshots of my subconscious—a moment in time, mid-transition to some new place I haven’t painted yet.
It’s this nonlinear process that I find so beautiful, full of unexpected things to discover. Colors I wouldn’t normally combine found harmony together; new shapes emerged from overlapping patterns, and layering textures in translucent passes yielded unpredictable results. These surprises kept me moving from one painting to the next.
In returning to painting and sculpting, I've come to see what, for me, is the clearest common thread between designing user experiences and creating art: ambiguity. It may seem like a stretch to connect the two, given that these are very different types of unknowns. But it’s those unanswered questions that keep me engaged in both worlds.
In UX, while we have a slew of best practices to guide us, I’ve seen time and again how design teams can start with a clear direction, only to pivot entirely based on customer feedback. It’s a bit like facing a blank canvas—that early stage, designing mostly in the dark, is my favorite part. In UX, we design for millions, while in art, the audience is just one. Yet in both cases, it’s the unknowns that make the process special.
