The copper taste of blood arrived before the swear word. It was a sharp, localized betrayal, the kind that happens when your mind is hovering 44 millimeters above a digital canvas while your physical body attempts the mundane task of chewing a lukewarm sandwich. I sat there, staring at the screen, the lowercase ‘g’ of my latest typeface staring back with a cold, geometric indifference. My tongue throbbed in a rhythmic 84 beats per minute, a reminder that despite my obsession with vector points and Bézier curves, I was still a creature of fragile, soft tissue and poorly timed impulses.

David N.S. would have understood this. David, a typeface designer I met back in 2004, once spent 104 hours trying to decide if the counter of an ‘o’ should be perfectly mathematical or slightly, almost imperceptibly, human. He was a man who lived in the friction between the ideal and the actual. He often argued that the modern obsession with efficiency-what we might call the ‘perfection of the path’-was actually a slow form of cultural suicide. We were sitting in a dimly lit studio in 1994, surrounded by physical proofs and the smell of ozone from an old laser printer, when he told me that the most important part of any design wasn’t the line itself, but the error that the designer decided to leave in.

Idea 34: The Optimized Prison

This brings me to the core frustration of our current era, a concept I’ve been wrestling with under the internal label of Idea 34. The frustration is simple yet soul-crushing: we have optimized the life out of our work. Every tool we use is designed to remove the ‘bite.’ We have spellchecks that iron out the idiosyncrasies of our prose, AI that generates ‘perfect’ layouts based on 64 variables of engagement, and project management software that turns the messy act of creation into a series of sanitized 4-minute tasks. We are so busy removing the friction that we’ve forgotten that friction is where the heat comes from. We are building a world that is smooth, efficient, and entirely forgettable.

I look at the ‘g’ on my screen again. It is too perfect. It was rendered using an algorithm that ensures the stroke width is consistent across all 24 weights of the font family. In 1984, this would have been a miracle. In 2024, it feels like a prison. The contrarian angle here-the one that makes my colleagues wince almost as much as I do when I bite my tongue-is that we should be intentionally reintroducing inefficiency into our systems. We need to stop trying to be faster and start trying to be more difficult. Inefficiency is the only thing that preserves human identity in a digital landscape that is rapidly becoming a hall of mirrors.

When everything is optimized, nothing has a signature. If two designers use the same ‘optimal’ tool to solve the same ‘optimal’ problem, they will inevitably produce the same ‘optimal’ result. This is the death of the individual. David N.S. used to say that he could recognize a designer’s work by the way they failed to handle a specific curve. One designer might always leave the descenders a bit too long, another might have a signature wobble in their uppercase ‘S.’ These weren’t ‘features’ in the modern sense; they were scars. And just like the scar on my tongue that will likely be there for 14 days, they told a story of a specific moment in time where a person collided with a problem.

There is a deep, quiet terror in admitting that the best version of your work might be the one that contains a mistake. It goes against everything we are taught in the age of the algorithm. We are told to scale, to automate, and to streamline. But you cannot scale a bitten tongue. You cannot automate the specific, localized pain of a creative block that lasts for 34 hours. You can only live through it.

I remember David showing me a set of proofs from a project he did in 1974. He had used a physical press, and the ink had bled slightly on the edges of the paper. That bleed, that tiny 4-micrometer imperfection, gave the text a warmth that no digital screen could ever replicate. It invited the eye to linger. It acknowledged the presence of the reader in a way that a sterile, high-resolution display never does. The reader knows, subconsciously, that they are looking at something that was handled by a human being who could, at any moment, make a mistake.

The Paradox of Frictionless Living

We are currently obsessed with the idea of ‘frictionless’ experiences. We want our banking to be frictionless, our shopping to be frictionless, and our art to be frictionless. But what is a life without friction? It is a slide into nothingness. When you are trying to fund a project that takes 384 days to complete, you start looking at every metric, from interest rates to credit scores on Credit Compare HQ, just to keep the lights on while you argue with a semicolon. You need that financial stability, sure, but the irony is that the stability is only valuable because it buys you the time to be unstable in your craft. It buys you the right to spend 44 hours on a single letterform that most people will never consciously notice.

I admit, I have fallen into the trap myself. I have spent $444 on software plugins that promised to ‘clean up’ my vector paths automatically. I have used templates because I was tired and the deadline was only 14 hours away. And every time I do, I feel a little bit more like a ghost in my own studio. I am not creating; I am just selecting from a menu of pre-approved options. The frustration of Idea 34 is the realization that the more ‘power’ our tools give us, the less agency we actually have. We are becoming curators of our own obsolescence.

The Necessary Struggle

We need that wrestling back. We need to embrace the possibility of ruin. If you are a writer, maybe you should try writing 1044 words without hitting the backspace key. If you are a coder, maybe you should try solving a problem without looking at a library that has been downloaded 44 million times. If you are a designer, maybe you should draw your curves by hand first, with all the wobbles and inconsistencies that come with a human nervous system.

I know what the critics will say. They will say that this is luddite nonsense, that we cannot turn back the clock to 1994, and that efficiency is what allows us to feed 8 billion people. And they are right, in a strictly utilitarian sense. But we are not just utilitarian creatures. we are meaning-seeking creatures. And meaning is rarely found in the ‘optimal’ path. Meaning is found in the detour, the struggle, and the unintended consequence. It is found in the 34 minutes you spend staring out the window because the words won’t come, and in the sudden, sharp realization that you’ve been looking at the problem from the wrong angle for 4 days.

This relevance of this perspective is particularly acute now, as we stand on the precipice of a world where generative models can produce ‘perfect’ outputs in 4 seconds. If we compete on perfection, we lose. The machine will always be more perfect than us. It will always have more consistent line weights, better kerning, and more ‘optimal’ color palettes. Our only competitive advantage is our ability to be wrong in a way that is interesting. Our only hope is the ‘bite.’