Studio notes
learning restraint by building in public
this project didn’t start with a product. it started with a feeling — that most of the objects around our desks say too much, too loudly, for too little reason.
i’ve collected pokémon cards for years. not as investments, not as slabs, but as images. color. composition. small pieces of culture that carry memory. at some point, i realized i was already treating them like design objects — placing them next to plants, leaning them against books, swapping them out depending on mood.
there just wasn’t anything designed for that behavior.
so i decided to try building it.
editing before designing
the first real step wasn’t sketching — it was editing.
i made a rule early: this wouldn’t be about rarity, value, or completion. no chase cards. no loud graphics. no “collector” language. if the object didn’t feel calm, it didn’t make it past the first cut.
that meant saying no to a lot of things that would have been easier:
- too many variants
- too many cards
- too many ideas at once
editing became the work.
learning how to design (the slow way)
i didn’t come into this knowing how to design in 3d. i had to learn what a fillet was. what a chamfer was. why certain edges feel harsh and others disappear. why a fraction of a millimeter matters more than you think.
i learned by breaking things:
- prototypes that looked fine on screen but felt wrong in hand
- openings that were too sharp
- walls that were too thin
- tolerances that only reveal themselves when you actually print something
3d design forced patience. there’s no undo button once plastic is cooling on a print bed.
prototyping as a conversation
printing the first prototypes was humbling.
some were ugly. some were almost right. some worked, but only from one angle. i learned quickly that “looks good” and “lives well on a desk” are different standards.
plants helped answer questions i didn’t know how to ask yet.
cards did the same.
when something felt off, the answer usually wasn’t “add more.” it was “remove something.”
sourcing with intention
the same restraint applied to cards.
i spent a lot of time not buying things. scrolling, closing tabs, passing on cards that were popular but wrong. eventually, patterns emerged: certain pokémon feel domestic. certain ones feel like objects instead of characters.
oddish did that immediately. so did vileplume. they didn’t demand attention — they held space.
that’s when the idea of studies started to click. not variants. not options. studies.
speaking to manufacturers (and learning scale the hard way)
once the forms felt right, i had to face reality: printing a few things at home is not the same as producing a drop.
talking to manufacturers forced a different kind of editing:
- what actually needs to be perfect?
- what can be good, not precious?
- what scale unlocks better pricing — and what scale just creates stress?
i learned quickly that going bigger too early doesn’t make you feel more confident. it makes you feel trapped. so i chose smaller runs, knowing i could always make more — but i couldn’t undo excess.
setting up the store as a system, not a shelf
building the shopify store became an extension of the same philosophy.
i didn’t want a catalog. i wanted a studio archive.
that meant:
- drops instead of endless availability
- shared language across products
- quiet signals instead of urgency
- keeping sold-out work visible, not erased
the site isn’t there to convince people. it’s there to explain what something is — and then get out of the way.
where this landed
what came out of all this isn’t just a planter, or a stand, or a tray. it’s a way of working.
edit first. design second. produce carefully. release deliberately.
this first drop is small on purpose. it’s meant to be an opening sentence, not a thesis statement. future work will revisit these forms with different studies, different tones, different decisions — but this moment stays fixed.
if nothing else, this process taught me that restraint isn’t limiting. it’s clarifying.
and that’s the kind of object i want on my desk