I spent three hours last night hand-drawing pixel fonts in Pixen, placing each dot with care. At 8x8 pixels, it was just like the many character sets I designed for my Atari 600XL in the early 1980s. Each pixel mattered then because we only had 128 characters to work with and maybe 16KB of RAM, or up to 64KB if you were lucky enough to have a RAM extension or a more expensive 800XL. Today, each pixel matters for completely different reasons: not because of technical constraints, but because those limitations force a special kind of creativity.
Here’s the thing: I could generate dozens of glyphs with newer tools in the time it took me to perfect that one character. But that’s not the point. The point is that placing those pixels by hand tickles something visceral, a thing that connects me directly to that nine-year-old who discovered I could make the computer display anything, if you understood character sets and memory.
That feeling of balancing ideas with constraints is what made me fall in love with making things with computers in the first place.
But it’s not just about computers. Last week, I opened a fresh box of Prismacolor pencils for a sketch, and the waxy smell hit me like a time machine. Suddenly I was a kid sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table, convinced I could draw anything if I just had the right colours. The ritual of it (breaking the seal, seeing them arranged by spectrum, selecting the first one) carries the same weight as typing git init in a fresh folder. The promise of what might be made.
And this isn’t just nostalgia. It’s something deeper: they’re formative experiences that shape the core of how we think and feel about making things.
The physics of memory
When I open the PICO-8 fantasy console, I hear those distinctly crunchy sounds. I remember the Atari 600XL, Commodore 64, and NES. My brain doesn’t just remember programming, it rebuilds the entire context of the time: the weight of the keyboard, the smell of warm electronics, the specific frustration of waiting for a tape to load, the pure magic when a three-voice harmony finally works.
These aren’t the fond memories we share at reunions. They’re the memories that make us who we are. They’re the reason certain design decisions feel right in our bones before we can articulate why.
My grandfather owned a reman mill, where they remanufactured lumber to transform low-cost materials and turn them into something useful (or more profitable) again. The control room had this panel that looked like something from NASA in the 50s: rows of amber lamps showing which saws were running, which conveyors and hoppers were loaded, the status of every major system. But what I remember most is the smell: fresh-cut lumber mixed with machine oil and sawdust so fine it hung in the air like fog. Spruce, pine, fir, and cedar are all deeply imprinted in my psyche.
The operators could read those lights from across the floor. One glance and they knew if something was wrong.
Twenty years later, I’m designing a production monitoring dashboard. I keep gravitating toward amber and gold for the status indicators. The client asks why not green for good, red for bad, like everyone else does?
I can’t explain it at first. Then I realize: I’m unconsciously recreating that mill’s control panel. The one that meant something important was being made. The one where amber represented active, which meant the system was producing, or in other words: value was being created.
That dashboard ended up being one of the most successful interfaces I ever designed. Not because amber is inherently better than green; it’s not. But because I understood, at a cellular level, what those indicators meant to the people watching them. They weren’t just status lights. They were proof of function, of things being transformed from raw to refined.
The kitchen as a first laboratory
Before I learned that mise en place had a name, I watched it happen. My grandmother and aunts would arrange ingredients for family dinner: everything measured, chopped, ready in its place. The cutting board here, the knife there, the bowls arranged by the order they’d be needed. They could cook huge meals without recipes because the physical arrangement was the recipe.
I didn’t realize I was receiving a masterclass in system design. The kitchen was teaching me about workflows, dependencies, and state management before I knew what any of those words meant.
Twenty-five years later, I’m setting up my development environment for a new project. Terminal here, documentation there, test runner in the corner. I realize I’m doing exactly what I watched in that kitchen: creating a physical and digital mise en place. The arrangement itself is part of the thinking process. When everything has its place, you can focus on the transformation, not the tools.
This is why I get irrationally angry at development tools that don’t let me arrange panels exactly how I want them. It’s not pickiness; it’s that the spatial arrangement is part of how I think. Just like those matriarchs could reach for the salt without looking because it was always in the same spot, I need my test results exactly where my peripheral vision expects them. The milliseconds saved aren’t the point. The cognitive load eliminated is everything.
Working in professional kitchens during college reinforced this. The difference between a smooth service and a disaster wasn’t skill; everyone could cook. It was preparation and arrangement. The stations that crashed were the ones where someone put the sauce spoons in the wrong place, where the garnish wasn’t prepped, where the workspace didn’t match the workflow.
Those restaurant shifts taught me something crucial: systems under pressure reveal their true nature. A poorly architected system might work fine at low load, but add the pressure of a Friday night rush (or production traffic) and the cracks become canyons. You learn to build systems that degrade gracefully, that have clear failure modes, that can be debugged while they’re on fire. Because sometimes things will be on fire, literally in the kitchen’s case, and figuratively in production’s.
The library discovery
Before I learned that design was a thing with rules and theory, I discovered it in the children’s section of our small-town library. Where the Sidewalk Ends sat on a low shelf, its simple black and white cover unlike anything else in that rainbow explosion of picture books. No gradients, no cartoon characters, just stark pen and ink lines that somehow suggested more than they showed.
I was maybe eight, old enough to read chapter books but still drawn to anything with pictures. Opening that book was like discovering a secret: you could be serious and playful at the same time. The drawings were simple enough that I thought I could do them, just black ink on white paper, but they captured entire worlds with a few essential lines. A tree became a character with just the right curve of a branch. A face became unforgettable with three perfectly placed dots and a squiggle.
This was another lesson in the power of restraint.
The visual grammar
Silverstein’s illustrations weren’t decorations; they were integral to the meaning. Each drawing did exactly one job: support the words without competing with them. The white space wasn’t empty; it was purposeful, giving the simple lines room to breathe and your imagination space to fill in the details.
The typography was equally disciplined. Clean, readable fonts that got out of the way of the ideas. No fancy treatments, no ornamental capitals. The design served the content so completely that you forgot about design altogether. You just experienced the story, the joke, the moment of recognition when a few words rearranged how you thought about something.
This was interface design before I knew interfaces existed. Every element justified its presence. Nothing was there for show.
Words that change you
But it wasn’t just the visual simplicity that stuck with me. It was discovering that writing could be subversive, that words could play tricks and reveal truths simultaneously. Silverstein proved that profundity didn’t require complexity, that the deepest insights often came wrapped in the simplest language.
Reading those poems taught me something crucial about communication: the goal isn’t to sound smart. The goal is to be understood, to connect, to change how someone sees something. The best writing disappears into understanding, just like the best design disappears into use.
Years later, writing technical documentation, I’d remember those stark pages. How every word earned its place. How clarity was a gift to the reader, not a failure of sophistication. How the most complex ideas could often be expressed in the simplest terms if you understood them well enough.
The constraint lesson
Those pen and ink drawings taught me the same lesson I discovered in pixel art and code: constraints force creativity. Silverstein could have used watercolors, could have filled every page with elaborate illustrations. Instead, he chose black ink on white paper and made that limitation into a signature strength.
Working within tight constraints, whether it’s a four-color palette, a 48-character limit, or just black ink, strips away everything non-essential. You can’t hide behind ornament. Every choice has to count. The result isn’t diminished by the limitation; it’s distilled to its essence.
This connects directly to why I love terminal interfaces, why I’m drawn to minimal design systems, why the best code often looks almost simple. Not because complexity is bad, but because earning complexity means first mastering simplicity.
The texture of making
Block printing taught me about commitment. You carve away everything that isn’t the image, roll ink across the surface, press paper down, and only then see what you’ve made. You can’t undo a cut. Each stroke of the knife is permanent. It’s terrifying and liberating in equal measure.
Sound familiar? It’s the same tension as pushing to production. The same mix of confidence and terror. The same satisfaction when it works.
But here’s what printmaking really taught me: the beauty often comes from the mistakes. That line that went too deep creates an interesting texture. The spot where the ink didn’t quite cover becomes a highlight. The grain of the wood itself becomes part of the image. You learn to work with the material, not against it.
I see the same thing in software. The constraints of the system, the quirks of the platform, the limitations of the browser: these aren’t obstacles to overcome. They’re the grain of the wood. Work with them and you create something that feels native, natural, right. Fight against them and everything feels forced.
My first real understanding of this came from pixel art on the Atari. With only four colours per scanline and specific palette limitations, you couldn’t draw whatever you wanted. You had to think in terms of what the machine could do. But those constraints forced creativity. We discovered that you could suggest detail that wasn’t there, that the human eye would fill in gaps, that sometimes less resolution meant more expression.
Those early days of PEEK and POKE, of hand-crafting display lists and cycle-counting for smooth animation, created an aesthetic that still influences how I think about interfaces. Clean. Constrained. Every element was justified. Not because minimalism is trendy, but because when you have severely limited RAM, everything needs to earn the space it uses.
The trap of golden handcuffs
But nostalgia can be a trap, too. My love of Atari computers kept me loyal to that architecture well into the late 80s. While everyone else was learning x86 assembly and VGA graphics modes, I was still optimizing for ANTIC display lists that nobody cared about anymore. I was like those print designers who refused to learn digital tools, convinced that real design happened with X-Acto knives and wax.
I failed to separate my love and knowledge of a specific low-level architecture with what it taught me. I was in love with the brand and Atari’s particular way of doing things, not the principles that defined it. It took me years to realize I was optimizing for a world that had moved on.
I see this same trap everywhere now. Developers who insist on vim because “that’s how real programmers work.” Designers stuck in Photoshop because that’s what they learned first. Teams using outdated frameworks because that’s what feels comfortable. The tool becomes the identity, and changing tools feels like betrayal.
The key is to extract the principle, not preserve the prison. What made the Atari special wasn’t the 6502 processor or the ANTIC chip; it was the direct connection between intention and output, the ability to understand the entire system, the joy of making something from nothing but logic and electricity. Those principles translate to any platform.
I said a sad goodbye to Atari in the 1990s, when I had to buy a PC for university. That PC was the least inspired device I have ever owned. Two-tone beige. Hercules graphics, and a monochrome green monitor. At least it had a clicky keyboard and small harddrive. I learned to focus on coding and writing on that machine, but I drew very little inspiration from it.
Mining the vein
Not all memories have design DNA in them. The ones that do share certain characteristics.
They involve creation, not just consumption. Reading Choose Your Own Adventure books was fun. Writing my own branching narrative in BASIC was formative. The difference? One made me a participant, the other made me a god of my own tiny universe.
They represent breakthrough moments. The first time I made the computer play a tune using SOUND commands. The first sprite that moved smoothly across the screen. The first time I realized I could define my own character set and have graphics in text mode. The first successful loaf of bread where I understood why it rose. The first print where the ink coverage was perfect. These weren’t just technical achievements; they were moments of expanded possibility.
They taught through constraint. Those early sound chips (the POKEY in the Atari, the SID in the Commodore) couldn’t do everything. But learning to make music within their limitations taught more about sound design than any modern DAW. When you only have four channels and basic waveforms, every choice matters. Same with the kitchen: when you only have one good knife, you learn to use it for everything. When you only have basic ingredients, you learn what each one really does.
Standing in my workshop last year, carving a linocut while my code compiled, I finally understood. That PICO-8 pixel art, my grandfather’s mill controls, the kitchen mise en place, the printmaking process: they’re all the same desire. To make something from nothing. To leave a mark. To control chaos through tools and process.
The medium changes but the feeling doesn’t.
The question becomes: how do we bottle that feeling? How do we translate those visceral memories into interfaces that work for people whose formative experiences were completely different from ours?
Translating feeling to function
So how do we use these visceral memories to create better designs? It’s not about recreating the past; that path leads to skeuomorphism and frustration. It’s about understanding what made those experiences powerful and finding new expressions of the same principles.
Silverstein’s stark pages taught me that white space isn’t empty, it’s intentional. Modern interfaces that cram every pixel with functionality miss this lesson. Sometimes the most important design element is what you choose not to include.
Apple’s early iOS skeuomorphism wasn’t just decoration; it was comfort through familiarity. The leather texture in Calendar, the wooden shelves in iBooks, the green felt in Game Center. These weren’t arbitrary choices. They were attempting to trigger those same formative memories, to make the foreign feel familiar.
The problem was they were too literal, too surface-level. They copied the texture without understanding the function.
The correction went too far the other way. Flat design stripped out not just the fake textures but also the affordances that made interfaces understandable. We lost the shadows that showed what could be pressed, the gradients that suggested depth, the subtle animations that revealed state changes. In our rush to be “honest” about digital materials, we forgot that humans still need visual cues about what they can touch, move, and change.
The sweet spot is somewhere in between. Take terminal interfaces: they’re still thriving decades after GUIs supposedly replaced them. Why? Because for many of us, they feel like “real” computing. The monospace fonts, the immediate feedback, the sense of talking directly to the machine; these trigger our formative memories of when we first felt powerful with computers.
But modern terminals aren’t trying to literally recreate VT100 terminals. They take the essence (immediacy, clarity, control) and enhance it with contemporary capabilities.
Or consider the resurgence of mechanical keyboards. It’s not just about the tactile feedback, though that matters. It’s about the ceremony of it, the sound that says “work is being done,” the physical investment in the tool of your craft. My grandfather’s mill had the same quality: every action had weight, sound, consequence. Digital work can feel ephemeral, disconnected. Physical feedback grounds it, makes it real.
The cross-generational bridge
A junior developer recently told me their formative memory was Minecraft, not playing it, but realizing they could make things with it. That moment of discovering that redstone was programming was that same spark I got from PEEK and POKE, they got from redstone contraptions. Different texture, same revelation: the machine isn’t magic, it’s malleable.
This is crucial for design: nostalgia isn’t universal, but the underlying experiences often are. The twelve-year-old discovering they can change how Minecraft works is having the same experience I had with the Atari, my grandfather had with mill machinery, my grandmother had with her sewing machine. It’s the moment when tools become extensions of will rather than mysterious black boxes.
When I’m designing interfaces now, I don’t think “what would twelve-year-old me want?” I think “what would make someone feel like they felt when they first realized they could make the machine do their bidding?” Sometimes that’s familiar patterns, sometimes it’s new paradigms that just feel right.
The generation that grew up with touchscreens has different muscle memory than those of us who grew up with keyboards. Their nostalgia triggers might be the bounce of rubber-band scrolling, the satisfaction of a perfect swipe gesture, a haptic tap that confirms an action. These aren’t less valid than my love of clicky-clicky keys and phosphor glow. They’re different expressions of the same need: for our tools to acknowledge our actions, to respond predictably, to feel like extensions of our intent.
Now when I think about design, I look for the equivalents of my formative memories by observing and talking with the people we’re building for. When touch interfaces start feeling nostalgic, there will be a deep satisfaction of a well-crafted swipe gesture, or in the bounce of rubber-band scrolling. The undo gesture may feel like time travel, and could be a PEEK/POKE moment of power.
The failure files
Let me tell you about my failures with nostalgic design, because they’re more instructive than the successes.
I once recreated the feel of an accounting tool in a web app prototype. I leaned on artificial constraints with a fixed-width typewriter font and the classic gridlines with soft greens from old paper ledgers. The whole thing was a love letter to 1980s paper accounting. Testers and users hated it, and we updated it to a more modern look that paid homage to those soft colours and columns of perfectly aligned numbers.
That accounting prototype was too skeuomorphic. The closer you get to something that feels real, the more likely it triggers the uncanny valley. There is an uncomfortable place between the familiar and artificial, and given the constraints of interfaces, it falls short. The feeling is unease. It feels off.
Nostalgia without purpose is just friction with a fancy name.
Building the bridge
When I designed that data visualisation dashboard (the one with the amber lights) I didn’t just think about pixels and response times. I thought about how my grandfather’s mill operators could see machine status from across the floor. Bold, clear, impossible to misinterpret. No squinting, no hovering for tooltips, no ambiguity. If something was wrong, you knew it from thirty feet away.
I thought about how good kitchen knives feel in the hand: weighted right, responsive, an extension of intent rather than a foreign object. The best interfaces have that same quality. They disappear into use. You stop thinking about the interface and start thinking through it.
The dashboard succeeded because it wasn’t trying to be a mill control panel. It was applying the principles that made those panels work: visual hierarchy that matches importance, colours that convey meaning without a legend, spatial arrangement that tells a story. The users didn’t know they were looking at something inspired by a lumber mill. They just knew it felt right.
This is the real power of nostalgic design: not recreating old things, but understanding why they worked and finding new expressions of those principles. The mechanical keyboard doesn’t have to look like an IBM Model M; it just needs to provide that same satisfaction. The pixel art doesn’t need to be 320x200; it just needs that same intentionality about each pixel.
The practice
So how do you actually use this in practice? Here’s my framework.
Identify the essence, not the surface. What makes Minecraft magical isn’t the redstone metaphor; it’s giving normal people the power to create machines from simpler objects. What made early programming magical wasn’t the BASIC language; it was the immediate feedback loop between idea and execution.
Test for universality. Your nostalgia is yours, but the underlying human experience might be shared. Everyone knows the satisfaction of a tool that fits perfectly in the hand, whether that’s a chef’s knife, a good pen, or a well-configured IDE. Design for that satisfaction, not for your specific memory.
Build bridges, not museums. Combine old feelings with new capabilities. Terminal applications with modern typography. Pixel art with unlimited colour palettes. Mechanical switches with programmable RGB. The contrast between old and new can be more powerful than pure nostalgia.
Know when to break the spell. Sometimes modern is just better. Touch typing is faster than handwriting. Digital colour correction beats darkroom chemicals. Vector graphics scale better than pixels. Don’t let nostalgia prevent progress.
The convergence
That moment in my workshop, linocut in progress, code compiling in the background: it all clicked. Every medium I’ve worked in, from BASIC to breadboards, from pixels to printmaking, from commercial kitchens to code reviews, they’re all teaching the same lesson.
Making things is about transformation. Raw materials to refined product. Intention to implementation. Chaos to structure.
The tools change. The materials evolve. The constraints shift. But that fundamental act of creation, of imposing order through craft and will, that feeling transcends medium. When you recognise that feeling in your own formative memories, when you can identify what specifically triggered that sense of power and possibility, then you can design experiences that give others that same sensation.
My grandfather’s mill took bulk lumber and turned it into finished boards and products. My grandmother’s kitchen took basic ingredients and turned them into Sunday dinner. My Atari took typed instructions and turned them into animated worlds. My printmaking takes blank linoleum and turns it into images.
They’re all the same process: transformation through tools, guided by knowledge, constrained by materials, elevated by craft.
The future of feeling
We’re entering an age where AI can generate anything quickly. Infinite images, endless code, unlimited words. The constraints that shaped our formative experiences (limited colours, limited memory, limited materials) are disappearing. What happens to craft when there are no limitations? What happens to nostalgia when everything is possible?
I think we’ll see a deliberate return to constraints, but by choice rather than necessity. Like photographers who shoot film despite digital being superior in every measurable way. Like musicians who use hardware synthesizers despite software being more capable. Like my insistence on hand-placing pixels despite AI being able to generate thousands of variations.
The constraints aren’t the point; they never were. The point is the intentionality they force, the decisions they require, the craft they demand. Whether you’re working within the 128 bytes of an Atari display list or the token limits of a large language model, constraints force creativity.
The circle is complete
I still collect pencils and display them in my office. Next to the pencils is my mechanical keyboard, with clicky switches and amber LEDs, similar to those control panel lights. On my screen, PICO-8 is open, a half-finished sprite character that’s taking way too long to perfect. My code editor is arranged exactly like a kitchen workstation: everything in its place, ready for the complexity to come.
These aren’t separate worlds (digital and physical, past and present, art and code). They’re all the same practice of transformation, filtered through different materials and tools. The twelve-year-old learning to POKE values into memory, the eight-year-old opening that first box of pencils, the college kid learning mise en place in a chaotic kitchen: they were all preparing for the same work. Making something from nothing, bringing order to chaos, transforming raw materials into refined experience.
The best designs don’t just solve problems. They trigger that same sense of possibility, that same feeling of control and creativity that our formative experiences gave us. They make users feel like I felt when I first realized I could define my own character set, like my grandfather’s operators felt reading those amber lights, like my grandmother felt with her ingredients arranged and ready.
That’s the real power of nostalgic design: not to recreate the past, but to recapture that feeling of discovery, mastery, and transformation. To give users that moment of realising the tool is an extension of their will, not an obstacle to it. To make them feel, even for a moment, like they can make anything.
The pixels still matter. Not because of the constraints, but because of what placing each one represents: intention, craft, the transformation of nothing into something. Whether it’s pixels or pencils, code or cuisine, mills or Minecraft, we’re all just trying to leave a mark, to transform raw materials into refined expression, to feel that ancient satisfaction of making something that wasn’t there before.
That feeling? That’s what we’re designing for. Everything else is just an implementation detail.