Beyond the Brush: Finding Design in the Everyday

Life in the lab : chapter 2

When most people think of graphic design, they picture Photoshop, slick illustrations, or an iPad loaded with Procreate. But design doesn’t have to begin on a screen or even with a pencil in hand. What if the real magic lived in the overlooked, ordinary things around us—like coffee stains, torn paper, or a splash of red wine?

Imagine building a visual language not from digital brushes, but from textures created by dipping strips of paper into coffee, matcha, or wine. The result is something raw, alive, and entirely unpredictable. That unpredictability is the point—it mirrors the terrain of places like Lesmurdie, where the land feels carved by time and chance rather than by design.

It’s less about control, more about discovery. And maybe that’s what design really is: not just making things look polished, but finding beauty in the accidents that remind us life itself is always shifting, never fully in our hands.