This project emerged out of a friendship and collaboration with a New York City based photographer who works as a filmmaker, artist, and storyteller. We had been in touch, introduced through a friend back in 2018, and he had mentioned an exciting client he had been working with called Observed. As my friend told me more about Observed, an Earth Care studio working across graphic and furniture design, art, and editorial, I was intrigued. In the spring of 2025, when the opportunity came up to work together on a website refresh and expansion into digital-first editorial, I was excited to take the project on and see what we could come up with together.

Observed's mission is broad and ambitious, but always rooted in the communication of their foundational values. As compassionately self-professed "Experts In Exploring," Observed is a project that cares a lot about how things come to be; not just what they end up being. They draw inspiration from the living language of the natural world and seek to impart this earthly wisdom into all aspects of their practice. They even maintain a nursery and garden in upstate New York. Given this perspective, it became clear early in our collaboration that we would treat their digital platform much like a garden, tending to it as one might a living organism.

From the outset we decided that our work together would have two goals: (1) build a modern website and editorial platform with a flexible content architecture and a tasteful, contemporary front-end, and (2) gently set the internal compass and processes used to work with digital for the studio more generally. Our collaboration has straddled these two goals with even emphasis - allowing a rare setting in which design, implementation, and even infrastructure or content, are given an opportunity to develop organically. As a result, we have thrown out many of the traditional waterfall procedures used to make websites (ie: content, then design, then development) and have instead opted for a more spacious and intuitive process that accounts for discovery and spontaneity. Through this framing I’ve been able to act as a representative of what is possible in contemporary digital design and offer Observed leverage to think big and even reimagine their digital aspirations.

In 2025 we launched the first incarnation of the Observed website, understanding it as the first step toward a much larger build. This site drew photographs and video from their archive and presented them in an engaging grid layout where visitors could view them. Not only did this implementation incorporate fluid motion design for expanding and closing elements, but also introduce the notion of “Micro” and “Macro” - further connecting Observed’s commitment to the language of the living world with the properties of websites. Visitors were able to switch between views to look at cropped excerpts from images, defined by Observed in a CMS, in a dynamic and engaging experience.

Our partnership continues because the exploration isn't finished - and for Observed, that's exactly the point. Together we keep making space for discovery in a world that tends toward optimization. In 2026 we're expanding editorial offerings, always with the technology in service of Observed’s values and spirit.