About DSGN BY D.
DSGN BY D. is a New York design collective that writes about typography and design education and makes objects built entirely from type. It was founded by C.J. Yeh and Christie Shin, both tenured professors at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY.
D. is for Designers
Not a founder's initial. Not a family name.
D. describes who makes the work and who the work is for. That used to be a redundant thing to say. All design was made by designers, so the sentence collapsed on itself.
It does not collapse anymore.
We are not against technology
We built the Creative Technology and Design program at SUNY FIT. We teach with these tools, we work with them, and we wrote a book about doing it: Empowering Design Education with AI. We are not the people writing "no AI was used" in a footer.
The objection to new tools has never held up. Photoshop automated away a darkroom's worth of craft. The camera was dismissed as mechanical capture for most of a century. Follow the logic honestly and you end at a pencil, and the pencil is also a tool.
The tool was never the thing that made the work yours.
We are against over-leveraging it
Over-leveraging is not a matter of how much technology you use. It is a ratio.
It is what happens when the volume of output exceeds the number of decisions behind it. When a system produces forty options and a person picks one, that is one decision wearing forty costumes. The work looks abundant. It is not.
You can see it in the field right now. Competent output has stopped being scarce. Anything that only clears the bar of competent has stopped being proof of anything.
We do not believe in "human in the loop"
The phrase gives away the shape of the thing. There is a loop. It belongs to the machine. A person is inserted at a checkpoint to approve, correct, or take responsibility for what the process produced.
We reject that arrangement as a description of design. We are talking about authorship, not oversight. Keep a human in the loop when a system is deciding who gets a loan.
The loop is ours. The tools are in it. Not the other way around.
A designer decides what the problem actually is. Then a designer decides which problem to solve, decides what the thing should look like, and overrules the system every time it is confidently wrong. Those decisions are the work. Everything downstream is volume.
Christie calls the accumulated shape of those decisions an intellectual fingerprint. What you noticed. What you threw out. What you refused to let the model talk you into. Two designers given the same brief and the same tools leave two completely different traces, and the trace cannot be prompted, because it is the thing doing the prompting.
Human in the loop puts the designer at the end of the process. We put the designer at the front, and we stay there.
Why type-centric
Letterforms are where decisions become visible.
There are twenty-six of them and everyone already knows what they are supposed to look like. There is nowhere to hide. Spacing that ignores the pair, an x-height that drifts across a word, a G that does not know what a G is for: these are not rendering failures. They are the absence of a decision, made legible.
Inside this collective, we work in type. The constraint is not a style. It is a way of refocusing on the core of communication.
- Why objects
Writing about type is an argument. Making an object out of type is the same argument with something at stake, because somebody either buys it or does not.
Nobody approved these. No brand manager, no category strategy, no panel with opinions about the color blue. We made them because we wanted them to exist.
The D. is an open slot
A collective is a group of designers making work under a shared name while keeping their own. Right now that is two founders and a small number of collaborators. We are keeping seats at this table open for like-minded designers.
Design was always thinking, and then making the thinking real. That has not changed.
This is where we do it with no client, no brief, and nobody to approve the result. A playground in the literal sense: a place where the point is the playing. Everything here started as a thought and ended as something you can hold.