The laser pointer is dancing a frantic, nervous jig across the whiteboards, its red dot vibrating like a trapped insect. I’m sitting in a leather chair that costs more than my first car, watching the VP of Strategy-a man whose tie is knotted with the precision of a surgical procedure-explain why we aren’t actually going to launch the project we’ve spent the last 63 days perfecting. He doesn’t say, ‘We are scared of the market response.’ He doesn’t say, ‘The CEO changed her mind.’ Instead, he leans forward, his eyes glazing over with that specific brand of executive zeal, and says, ‘We need to socialize this idea and get buy-in before we commit to a path forward.’
I feel a dull thud in my chest, rhythmic and heavy. It might be my heart, or it might be the ghost of the 3343 photos I accidentally deleted from my personal cloud drive this morning. Three years of visual history-the texture of a wall in Berlin, the way light hits a specific copper kettle, the faces of people I might never see again-vanished because I clicked ‘confirm’ on a prompt I didn’t read. I was distracted by an email about ‘aligning our core competencies.’ That loss feels cleaner than this meeting. At least the deletion was absolute. It was a ‘no’ that meant ‘no.’
💡 THE TYPOGRAPHIC TRUTH
As a typeface designer, my entire life is built on the architecture of clarity. If the counter of a lowercase ‘e’ is too small, the letter collapses into a black smudge at 13 points. If the kerning between a ‘T’ and an ‘o’ is 3 units off, the word breaks. You cannot ‘socialize’ the legibility of a glyph. It either works or it fails.
Corporate jargon is a kerning error of the human soul.
The Survival Mechanism of Obscurity
In this room, however, ‘no’ doesn’t exist. Neither does ‘yes.’ We are currently suspended in the linguistic fog of the ‘circle back.’ We are floating in the ether of ‘taking it offline.’ I’ve spent 23 years obsessing over the terminal of a ‘j’ and the weight of a slab serif. I know that truth is found in the details. But corporate communication is designed to obscure those details. It is a feature, not a bug.
When the VP says we need to ‘align stakeholders,’ he is actually saying that he wants to spread the potential blame so thin that when the project eventually fails, no single person will be holding the smoking gun. It’s a diffusion of responsibility that acts as a survival mechanism. If everyone is responsible, then no one is. If we ‘socialize’ the idea, we aren’t proposing it; we’re just letting it float in the air like a virus, waiting to see who it infects first.
“
It’s a coward’s way of speaking. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a font that has no sharp edges-something soft and rounded, like a bloated sans-serif that tries so hard to be friendly it ends up being utterly forgettable.
– Design Observation
The Authority of Being Wrong
I think about the 13 hours I spent last week adjusting the descenders on a custom font for a luxury watch brand. I was searching for authority. I was searching for a line that said, ‘This is the time, and it is undeniable.’ There is no authority in ‘let’s touch base.’ I remember a moment, maybe 83 days ago, when I tried to ask a direct question in one of these meetings. I asked, ‘Is this project actually going to make money?’ The silence that followed was so thick I could have measured its x-height. They looked at me as if I had spoken in a dead language. They didn’t answer. They ‘contextualized the revenue stream within the broader ecosystem of our brand evolution.’ I went home and drank 3 glasses of scotch just to wash the taste of the word ‘ecosystem’ out of my mouth.
Cost of Obscurity
$373
Lunch Spent Discussing “Synergies”
We are losing our ability to be direct because directness requires courage. It requires the willingness to be wrong. When I deleted those 3343 photos, I was wrong. I was careless. I owned the void that followed. But in the corporate world, the void is where people hide. They hide behind ‘low-hanging fruit’ and ‘pivoting.’ They hide in the ‘bandwidth’ they claim not to have.
The Tragedy of Lost Vocabulary
I’m looking at the VP again. He’s talking about ‘leveraging our legacy assets.’ I realize that he has probably forgotten how to speak like a human being. He has spent so long in the ‘echo chamber’ of the executive suite that his vocabulary has been replaced by a set of pre-recorded phrases. It’s a tragedy, really. He’s a smart man-he has an MBA from a school that costs $93,000 a year-but he can’t tell me if we’re going to do the work. He can’t give me a straight answer because he’s forgotten that a straight answer is a gift, not a liability.
Clarity is an act of love.
I think about the photos again. Maybe deleting them wasn’t a tragedy. Maybe it was a reset. Those 3343 images were a burden of ‘legacy assets’ I was carrying around. Without them, I have to look at the world as it is right now. I have to look at this meeting as it is: a waste of 63 minutes of my life that I will never get back.
The Small Rebellion
I decide, right then, that I’m going to stop nodding. When he asks for my ‘input on the scalability of the initiative,’ I’m going to say, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ I’m going to watch the red dot of the laser pointer stop moving. I’m going to wait for the silence.
If we want to fix the way we work, we have to start by fixing the way we talk. We have to stop using words as shields. We have to be willing to fail out loud.
T H E S T R A I G H T A N S W E R
(No ligatures. No flourishes. Clarity absolute.)
Conclusion: Undeniable Action
I’m going to go back to my studio, and I’m going to spend the next 23 hours designing a font that is so sharp it could cut paper. I’ll call it ‘The Straight Answer.’ It won’t have any ligatures. It won’t have any flourishes. It will just be letters, standing alone, clear and undeniable, like a fish jumping out of the water in Cabo, 3 miles from the shore, under a sky that doesn’t need to ‘circle back’ to anyone.
The Elements of Directness
Minutes Wasted
Deletions Owned
Years of Precision