the perfumery
Back
i am a 21 year old designer.
on design
I care a lot about interface & brand design. I also think designers are some of the closest things we have to modern day fairies. We draft the journeys that your eyes and your agents trace across the stellar interwebs-- casting the shortcuts spells that make companies, people, and digital surfaces legible.
The work of a designer, is generative in a way that depends on the prior-structure of how they grew up-– a sprite-ish & specific pouch of references, sensitivities, aesthetic commitments. Design is an accumulation of judgment, memory, reference, insecurity, obsession, friendship, and historical context.
In the coming years, what I fear losing is not creativity itself, but my relationship with labor, attachment, and discernment as a designer. The best work I know does not trend toward a universal mean or an un-precocious story. It is bold and unapologetic and is shaped by people with particular fixations, communities, contradictions, and histories.
Taste is sensitivity and magic. Delicately, it emerges through friction: revision, failure, over-documentation, and excessive care.
past lore
In 2023, I was the only dedicated designer on Roblox’s VR division. I shipped a controller menu & motion-sensitivity settings for 2M+ Roblox VR users while being part of the team that released a bespoke font (Builder Sans)! I was itching to be part of a smaller team and joined Kino AI a year after; designing a new brand, design system, and footage labelling product used by A24 & Survivor. More recently, I’ve been focused on growth– redesigning the post modal at LinkedIn & making exa.ai’s onboarding flow much niftier (doubling our first search rate).
I think about a future where code is bi-directionally synced to the canvas and legible as a design material– just as much as color and spacing is. I believe Figma has the ability to stay the highest-fidelity reflection of design intent, before and during a ship. I want the software to feel accurate, lively, and interactive– like the pixie dust that daring, beautiful work emerges from.
present
Cozy, warm, & unpretentious— I built this site intending for it to be my new internet corner. A little space to share the many things i’ve made over the years :) Easier to maintain than my past sites, full of joy (& bugs).
I reach for fuzzy peaches & apricots because they are storied. Their pitted flesh tastes fuller when my mind curls into a daydream about the history that made them so precious to me.
Outside of the office, you may find me brewing fruit teas, installing more fonts (I'm at over 1k typefaces now), and finding more cats to pet.
My favourite peaches are the donut shaped ones (蟠桃).
the bush
a collection of essays on design
looking for my portfolio? see thekumquatery.com
created by aileen
year: 2026
License © 2025 -2026
last updated:
friday the 22nd
May 2026
Brooklyn, NY
colophon
DotGothic16
by Fontworks Inc
bitmap font that recreates the feel of pixel fonts from old video games
Newsreader
by Production Type
crunchy, elegant variable font by Paris based foundry
Homemade Apple
by Font Diner
nothing says handmade goodness like a delicious Homemade Apple pie ;)
technicalities
- i was inspired by chinese ink paintings & fantasy concept sheets.
- this website was built using figma sites
images generated in:
lexica.art
i have a free subscription to lexica.art (thanks aadil & sharif)!
moodboard
Cozy, warm, & unpretentious— I built this site intending for it to be my new internet corner. A little space to share the many things i’ve made over the years :) Easier to maintain than my past sites, full of joy (& bugs).
the predecessors and inspirers of this site. aileenland pays homage to or was inspired by (unaffiliated):
Dear diary,
What if they automated me?
i am a 21 year old designer.
the perfumery
Back
i am a 21 year old designer.
on design
for the jumping-off text, your strongest move afaict isn't the bitter lesson or andreessen. it's ellen ullman, close to the machine (1997). here's why:
ullman is writing about the phenomenology of programming at exactly the moment when software started mediating human experience at scale. her core anxiety is identical to yours: what happens to the INTERIORITY of making when the artifact is invisible, when the user never sees the seams, when the craft is entombed in the product. she's also a woman writing about a male-coded field with a literary sensibility, which creates a formal resonance with your voice that the pg/andreessen canon won't.[1]
past lore
In 2023, I was the only dedicated designer on Roblox’s VR division. I shipped a controller menu & motion-sensitivity settings for 2M+ Roblox VR users while being part of the team that released a bespoke font (Builder Sans)! I was itching to be part of a smaller team and joined Kino AI a year after; designing a new brand, design system, and footage labelling product used by A24 & Survivor. More recently, I’ve been focused on growth– redesigning the post modal at LinkedIn & making exa.ai’s onboarding flow much niftier (doubling our first search rate).
I think about a future where code is bi-directionally synced to the canvas and legible as a design material– just as much as color and spacing is. I believe Figma has the ability to stay the highest-fidelity reflection of design intent, before and during a ship. I want the software to feel accurate, lively, and interactive– like the pixie dust that daring, beautiful work emerges from.
present
Cozy, warm, & unpretentious— I built this site intending for it to be my new internet corner. A little space to share the many things i’ve made over the years :) Easier to maintain than my past sites, full of joy (& bugs).
I reach for fuzzy peaches & apricots because they are storied. Their pitted flesh tastes fuller when my mind curls into a daydream about the history that made them so precious to me.
Outside of the office, you may find me brewing fruit teas, installing more fonts (I'm at over 1k typefaces now), and finding more cats to pet.
My favourite peaches are the donut shaped ones (蟠桃).
the bush
a collection of essays on design
looking for my portfolio? see thekumquatery.com
created by aileen
year: 2026
License © 2025 -2026
last updated:
friday the 22nd
May 2026
Brooklyn, NY
moodboard
Cozy, warm, & unpretentious— I built this site intending for it to be my new internet corner. A little space to share the many things i’ve made over the years :) Easier to maintain than my past sites, full of joy (& bugs).
the predecessors and inspirers of this site. aileenland pays homage to or was inspired by (unaffiliated):
Dear diary,
What if they automated me?
i am a 21 year old designer.
the perfumery
Back
i am a 21 year old designer.
on design
for the jumping-off text, your strongest move afaict isn't the bitter lesson or andreessen. it's ellen ullman, close to the machine (1997). here's why:
ullman is writing about the phenomenology of programming at exactly the moment when software started mediating human experience at scale. her core anxiety is identical to yours: what happens to the INTERIORITY of making when the artifact is invisible, when the user never sees the seams, when the craft is entombed in the product. she's also a woman writing about a male-coded field with a literary sensibility, which creates a formal resonance with your voice that the pg/andreessen canon won't.[1]
past lore
In 2023, I was the only dedicated designer on Roblox’s VR division. I shipped a controller menu & motion-sensitivity settings for 2M+ Roblox VR users while being part of the team that released a bespoke font (Builder Sans)! I was itching to be part of a smaller team and joined Kino AI a year after; designing a new brand, design system, and footage labelling product used by A24 & Survivor. More recently, I’ve been focused on growth– redesigning the post modal at LinkedIn & making exa.ai’s onboarding flow much niftier (doubling our first search rate).
I think about a future where code is bi-directionally synced to the canvas and legible as a design material– just as much as color and spacing is. I believe Figma has the ability to stay the highest-fidelity reflection of design intent, before and during a ship. I want the software to feel accurate, lively, and interactive– like the pixie dust that daring, beautiful work emerges from.
present
I reach for fuzzy peaches & apricots because they are storied. Their pitted flesh tastes fuller when my mind curls into a daydream about the history that made them so precious to me.
Outside of the office, you may find me brewing fruit teas, installing more fonts (I'm at over 1k typefaces now), and finding more cats to pet.
My favourite peaches are the donut shaped ones (蟠桃).
looking for my portfolio? see thekumquatery.com
created by aileen
year: 2026
License © 2025 -2026
the bush
a collection of essays on design
last updated:
friday the 22nd
May 2026
Brooklyn, NY
colophon
DotGothic16
by Fontworks Inc
bitmap font that recreates the feel of pixel fonts from old video games
Newsreader
by Production Type
crunchy, elegant variable font by Paris based foundry
Homemade Apple
by Font Diner
nothing says handmade goodness like a delicious Homemade Apple pie ;)
technicalities
- i was inspired by chinese ink paintings & fantasy concept sheets.
- this website was built using figma sites
images generated in:
lexica.art
i have a free subscription to lexica.art (thanks aadil & sharif)!
moodboard
Cozy, warm, & unpretentious— I built this site intending for it to be my new internet corner. A little space to share the many things i’ve made over the years :) Easier to maintain than my past sites, full of joy (& bugs).
the predecessors and inspirers of this site. aileenland pays homage to or was inspired by (unaffiliated):
Dear diary,
What if they automated me?
i was a designer at figma, among other companiesl. i study design at the university of waterloo. the bush is a collection of essays i wrote on sabbatical that have been using to grapple with how quickly and deviously the industry has been transformed with LLMs. the process was sort of like being stuck in the bush, and not knowing which way i want to go.