Teaching
Design education is at a crossroads. This is the other side.
The field has shifted faster than any curriculum has followed. What programs need to teach now is not what they were built to teach. That gap is closable.
The field
Designers have been struggling for a long time.
They struggled when the Internet turned their world inside out, and the graphic design world turned their back on them. They struggled when the iPhone came and they had to shift to UX because they could not do pixel perfect designs anymore. They struggled to design their interactive, living websites in a static tool like Figma, but they were told to just make it work. And now their world is falling apart because AI can do their job better than they can — but they forgot craft and never learned how to build.
“I can help them make sense of the chaos.”
The shift
The tools changed. The requirement changed with them.
The Internet, the iPhone, Figma, now AI — every shift accelerated production and left judgment behind. Designers who could make things beautiful had fewer reasons to understand why they were making them. That worked until it didn’t.
Now AI can make things beautiful faster than any designer. What it cannot do is decide what is worth making, or whether the thing being made will hold up for the people who need it. That is not a tool problem. It is a curriculum problem. And it is a solvable one.
30
Years in practice
MS Ed + MFA
Two graduate degrees
100+
Designers mentored
2
Courses built from scratch
The method
Judgment is teachable. It just requires a sequence.
Research before form. Synthesis before design. Build before ship. Test against reality, not intent. Every project. Every student. Every time.
Study
Research
Walk in before reaching for a solution. Sit with what is actually there.
Rethink
Synthesis
Work through it on paper until the problem has a shape and the form follows.
Create
Design
Let the research lead. Not instinct. Not a prompt. The finding.
Build
Build
Build what you design. Verify in production. A Figma file is not done.
Invent
Ship
A design on a shelf never fulfills its purpose. Ship it. Then defend it.
The proof
Three teaching contexts. One method. Real outcomes every time.
This curriculum is not designed from a distance. Every course, every mentorship session, every workshop has been built and tested in real conditions — with real designers, real deadlines, and real accountability for results.
Course 1 at Inkk Academy took 200 iterations of a ChatGPT prompt to reach a system that works the first time. Course 2 is being built right now, in real time. This is not theory. This is the method applied to itself.
Founder & instructor
Inkk Academy
Two courses. Eight sessions. One live site. Students leave with a production portfolio at their own domain, built with a professional AI workflow they can explain in an interview.
Mentor & curriculum designer, 2020–2024
Thinkful / Chegg
100+ designers mentored. Portfolio course created. Weekly sessions, assessments, office hours. Students placed in roles at companies that required the work to be real before they got there.
FedEx · Stifel Financial · Maritz
Employer Workshops
Not presentations. Sessions where participants made something and left with something real. The method works at every level.
What a program becomes
The designers who will shape what AI produces are the ones who know what is worth making.
If my career were a vault, it would be filled to the brim with hundreds of design ideas sitting stale in file cabinets, gathering dust. Designs that were right. Designs the research produced. Designs that never shipped because the process was not followed, or the budget ran out, or leadership wanted something shinier. That is what happens to good work when the method is not protected.
And then AI arrived. And the vault opened.
AI in the right hands, with the right method behind it, does not replace research. It makes the ideas that came from research buildable. That is the difference. And that is what I want programs to understand: the designers who will shape what AI produces are not the ones who use it fastest. They are the ones who know what is worth building, and why, before they prompt.
Contact
Let’s talk about what your program needs next.
Direct conversation, no pitch deck. Tell me what your program is wrestling with and where it’s behind. I’ll respond with how the method addresses it.
