The other day, I remembered that I own an NFT.

I bought it in 2021 and then immediately forgot about it. Like everyone else, I assumed the market had disappeared with the celebrity endorsements, pump-and-dump schemes and fraud that came to define the period.

Instead, I found that NFT sales reached $678.9 million in January 2025. In July, another $574 million changed hands across more than five million transactions.

The numbers were difficult to reconcile with the silence around them. Nobody talks about NFTs anymore, yet hundreds of millions of dollars are still moving through the market.

In 2021, auction houses treated NFTs as the future of collecting. Christie’s sold Beeple’s Everydays for $69.3 million, established a Digital Art department and launched an on-chain auction platform. Sotheby’s created Sotheby’s Metaverse and later opened a secondary marketplace.

Christie’s closed its dedicated Digital Art department in 2025, although it continues to sell digital art through its wider contemporary-art business. Sotheby’s still operates a Digital Art department, but the idea that NFTs required an entirely separate commercial universe has weakened.

In late 2025, MoMA added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles to its collection through donations from collectors and members of the on-chain-art community.

The works entering MoMA were donated. That distinction matters. They did not pay market prices or bet on their recovery. It accepted the works into its collection, making a curatorial and historical commitment rather than a financial investment.

Museums do not only collect what succeeded. They also preserve experiments that changed how art was made, owned or understood.

MoMA’s selections preserve two of the clearest legacies of the period:

• CryptoPunks: blockchain as identity.
• Chromie Squiggles: blockchain as a creative system.

CryptoPunks were not the first NFTs, but they established much of the structure that later defined the profile-picture collection: 10,000 algorithmically assembled characters with visible rarity, public ownership and a secondary market.

The Punk became an image, avatar, asset and social signal at once. Thousands of later projects copied the structure.

Erick Calderon’s Chromie Squiggle represents a different breakthrough. It is an on-chain generative artwork comprising 10,000 unique outputs. The artist created the rules, code generated each variation and the blockchain recorded its production and ownership.

The crash made the distinctions visible

During the boom, high prices made speculative attention look like historical significance.

Conceptual experiments, algorithmic artworks, celebrity promotions and interchangeable cartoon animals appeared on the same marketplaces. They were judged through the same interface: floor price, sales volume, rarity and number of owners.

Once prices fell, institutions could begin separating art that merely used blockchain as a sales mechanism from art that investigated what blockchain could change.

The museum was not collecting an “NFT aesthetic.” It was preserving different answers to a new question:

What happens to art when ownership, generation, exchange and provenance become programmable?

The people who own these assets are helping place examples inside institutions. This dynamic is not unique to NFTs. Collectors have long donated works to museums, whose recognition can strengthen the cultural standing of an artist and, indirectly, related works they continue to hold.

But blockchain makes the relationship unusually visible.

So, what’s up with NFTs?

The commercial and cultural NFT experiments are separating:

The commercial experiment asked whether blockchain could create an enormous market for digital scarcity. It did, briefly. Auction houses built departments and platforms around it. Much of that infrastructure contracted when speculative demand disappeared.

The cultural experiment asked whether blockchain created genuinely new forms of art, ownership and online behavior.

Museums appear to believe that it did.

Svensk Form represents a version of design that now feels almost radical.

Sweden did not wait for an object to be finished before asking someone creative to make it desirable. Artists entered production early enough to change the object itself.

They worked inside porcelain factories, glassworks, textile mills and furniture companies. Some eventually became artistic directors, with influence over materials, techniques and what entered production. They did not merely communicate the value of industry. They helped decide what industry should make.

Artists to industry

This was not simply a government program, although the Swedish state later became an important participant.

The movement grew from Svenska Slöjdföreningen, the organization now called Svensk Form. Founded in 1845, it supported the drawing school that became Konstfack and worked to improve the quality of Swedish production.

In 1914, the organization formalized an unusually direct proposition:

The problem was industrialization. Mass production could make more objects for more people, but manufacturers were producing goods considered ugly, impractical and poorly adapted to modern life.

The proposed solution was not to retreat into craft. It was to place artistic experience inside the machine.

At Orrefors, the painters Simon Gate and Edward Hald began working directly with glassblowers and cutters. Their collaborations helped develop new approaches to engraving and established the glassworks internationally. Hald had trained as a painter. Inside the factory, painting became glass.

Beauty was a public question

In 1919, Gregor Paulsson published Vackrare vardagsvara: more beautiful everyday goods.

Paulsson argued that well-designed household objects should not be reserved for wealthy people. Industry could distribute quality at scale, but only if artistic judgment entered industrial production.

Design was therefore attached to a social project. A glass, chair or dinner service was part of the material environment in which ordinary life occurred. Improving those objects could improve life itself.

This was not uniquely Swedish. Britain had the Arts and Crafts movement and later founded the Council of Industrial Design. Germany’s Werkbund also connected artists, architects and manufacturers. Paulsson was directly influenced by German design reform.

Sweden’s distinction was not the idea itself, but the system built around it. Design education, manufacturers, exhibitions, museums, consumer organizations and eventually the welfare state reinforced one another. Design became industrial competitiveness, cultural education and social infrastructure at once.

No single institution produced this result. A network created the conditions for manufacturers to believe that artists belonged inside industry.

The problem with good taste

Vackrare vardagsvara assumed that trained cultural authorities could determine what constituted a better life. The 1917 exhibition was praised for addressing ordinary households, but it was also criticized for misunderstanding how working families actually lived. Airy rooms looked progressive in an exhibition. They were less useful to families who needed every room for sleeping.

Design for everyone can quickly become taste imposed on everyone.

The movement also produced a marketable idea of Swedishness: rational, restrained, functional and morally good. The history is messier than the objects suggest. Factories still depended on labor, sales and export markets. Artistic directors did not eliminate commercial interests. They negotiated with them.

But the tension is precisely what makes the model useful now. The system did not eliminate the conflict between design, commerce and social ambition. It gave that conflict somewhere productive to occur.

Design now enters late

Most contemporary companies value design. What differs is where they place it.

In one model, the business opportunity, technology and operational system are established first. Design makes the resulting product understandable, coherent and desirable.

In another, creative judgment participates earlier, while the product and the systems behind it are still being defined.

Neither model makes design inherently better or worse. They simply give it different responsibilities and produce different possibilities.

Artists to Industry belonged firmly to the second model. Gate and Hald could not have changed Orrefors by selecting a typeface for its packaging. Their importance came from sustained proximity to materials, tools, technicians and manufacturing decisions.

They were inside the factory long enough to alter what the factory knew how to make.

The factory has changed

The contemporary equivalent of sending artists into industry is not giving an illustrator a desk inside a warehouse. It is placing creative judgment alongside engineering, operations, research, policy and business decisions while the system is still taking shape.

This is different from adding “design thinking” to a workshop. The Swedish factories did not invite artists to contribute a creative perspective and then return to their studios. They created positions, workshops and careers inside production.

The lesson from Svensk Form is not that every company needs better taste or that designers should make every decision. It is that the timing and location of creative judgment determine what it can change.

The contemporary equivalent of Artists in Industry is not bringing design closer to business. It is giving design a role in shaping the business itself.

Early in my career, A/B testing creative felt almost illicit. Change the image, move the button, rewrite the sentence and watch human behavior change. Why did one version make someone stop while another disappeared? Why did one button get pressed?

It made creativity observable.

Advertising has measured its effects for more than a century. In the 1920s, Daniel Starch tested whether readers noticed and remembered print advertisements. George Gallup later studied which parts of newspapers people actually read, helping turn audience response into something companies could measure before committing large amounts of money.

The purpose was reasonable: give the people funding the work some confidence that it might succeed.

The average answer

Research is good at revealing confusion, preference and risk. It can show whether people understand an idea, remember the brand or know where to click.

It is less reliable at recognizing something they have never encountered before.

When responses are collected across a group and reduced to a score, the result naturally moves toward the middle. The strangest reactions disappear into the average. The work becomes clearer, easier to explain and more familiar.

It also begins to resemble everything else that tested well.

Architecture offers a physical version of the same problem. Many new buildings resemble one another not because architectural innovation has stopped, but because the systems surrounding construction reward what is already understood. Financing, insurance, liability, building codes and standardized materials all make familiar solutions easier to approve and repeat.

The unusual building is not necessarily less viable. It is simply more difficult to price, insure and explain. Innovation still exists. The system makes familiarity easier to build.

Research can have the same effect on creative work. It rarely prohibits the unusual idea outright. It simply makes the familiar one easier to approve.

This is particularly dangerous in branding and advertising, where the first requirement is often attention. A brand must be noticed before it can be understood, remembered or desired.

Research can tell us whether an advertisement feels acceptable. It cannot decide whether acceptance is the most useful outcome.

The missing creative

Research teams are built around methodology, behavioral science, strategy and analytics. These disciplines matter. But the people interpreting the findings are not always experienced in making unusual creative work.

A low score can mean that an idea is weak. It can also mean that the idea is new, unfinished, badly presented or difficult to evaluate in the artificial conditions of a test.

Someone has to distinguish a confusing idea from an unfamiliar one. Someone has to know which uncomfortable detail is the problem and which is the reason the work might be remembered.

Without that judgment, research does not remove subjectivity. It transfers creative authority to the people who designed the test.

Weird is a strategy

Japanese advertising can appear unusually strange to Western audiences: mascots, abrupt narrative shifts, exaggerated performances, dense graphics and celebrity cameos that seem to have escaped from another advertisement entirely.

When every surface is asking for attention, clarity is not enough. The work has to create a break in the environment. Weirdness becomes a way to produce that break.

As the surrounding field becomes stranger, an advertisement may have to go further to remain visible. What looks excessive in isolation can make perfect sense inside the noise it was designed to interrupt.

Inside a test, the unusual execution may appear confusing, polarizing or unnecessarily strange. In the market, those same qualities may be what prevent it from disappearing.

Research is designed to identify the risk of standing out. It is less equipped to measure the risk of blending in.

The creative dataset

Creative awards are easy to dismiss as an industry congratulating itself. Sometimes they are.

But awards may also be one of the only datasets built around creative judgment rather than consumer preference.

Research aggregates response. Awards aggregate the judgment of people who understand how difficult it is to make something unusual and get it into the world.

A jury of experienced filmmakers, designers, writers and creative directors can recognize what a conventional research panel may miss: which rule was broken, whether the risk mattered and if the work expanded what the industry believed was possible.

The winning work is rarely the average answer. It is the outlier.

Awards also create evidence inside companies. They show that the strange idea was not simply indulgent. It attracted attention, moved the industry or demonstrated a possibility competitors had missed.

That signal affects culture. Ambitious people look for places where ambitious work is recognized, protected and allowed to reach the public intact.

Awards are imperfect. Juries have biases. Categories reward trends. Prestige can become detached from effectiveness.

Conventional research has biases too. It rewards familiarity, clarity and whatever can be measured within the conditions of the test.

Put the jury before the launch

Awards recognize creative risk after it has been taken. The more interesting opportunity would be to move their model upstream.

Research companies already assemble panels of consumers. They could also assemble rotating juries of exceptional filmmakers, designers, writers, artists and creative directors.

The audience would measure comprehension, recall and response. The creative jury would evaluate originality, cultural potential and whether an initially uncomfortable idea deserved further development.

The two groups would answer different questions.

Does the work communicate?

Does it give anyone a reason to care?

This would not make research less rigorous. It would expand what the research is capable of seeing.

A low consumer score would no longer automatically mean that the work should become more familiar. It might reveal that the execution is weak, that the idea has arrived too early or that the audience is encountering something genuinely new.

Creative judgment would become part of the data rather than the opinion added after it.

Otherwise, the safest answer will keep winning - not because it is better, but because it is easier to measure.

Every format has constraints. But within those constraints, the tool determines which possibilities are close at hand.

For most of my career, I began a project by opening an application. That choice appeared operational, but it was already creative. The software implied the process because the process had been designed by the company that made it.

Photoshop established a shared approach to digital images through layers, masks, selections and filters. InDesign organized publishing around pages, frames and styles. After Effects organized motion around compositions and timelines.

These are not laws. They are product decisions that became creative conventions.

Now I begin with a different question: What would I make if the software had not already decided how?

Why am I opening Photoshop?

Indie software and custom tools are not new. Artists, designers and studios have always modified instruments, written scripts and commissioned software.

I have started building tools around particular projects. Each does less, but it knows more about the specific project: its materials, constraints and intended behavior.

Instead of adapting the project to the software, the project commissions its own tool.

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings were partly made with large squeegees built to move paint across the canvas.

The tool was not a more efficient paintbrush. Its scale and movement produced a different relationship between intention and chance. Layers were added, dragged, obscured and unexpectedly exposed. Richter could establish the conditions, but he could not completely determine the image.

The instrument changed what the work could become.

The project commissions its own tool

Choosing software was once an operational decision. Now, for more creatives, designing the tool itself can become part of the creative direction.

What should be possible? Which constraints might produce a better result? Does the project require twenty panels or three buttons?

This does not mean every creative should build everything. Existing software remains essential for collaboration, reliability and scale.

Some tools will become products. Others may exist for one studio or one afternoon.

Custom software is usually sold as efficiency. Its more interesting potential is invention.

I traveled to Art Basel and Milano Design Week this year. Across both, the common thread was craft.

At Basel, the artist’s labor was often visible in the work. Fibers hung loose. Knots remained exposed. Materials looked accumulated, stressed, sorted or repaired. The object arrived with evidence of what had happened to it.

In Milano, brands expanded the same gesture into architecture. The workshop moved into the exhibition. Material libraries, prototypes, proprietary fabrics and demonstrations of technique occupied the foreground.

At Bottega Veneta, Kwangho Lee filled the Via Sant’Andrea store with leather cords woven alongside artisans from the house’s atelier. Stone Island presented one jacket in six dark-grey fabrics, then upholstered the furniture in those materials so visitors could sit on the difference. 

The product was still there. But the process had become part of the product.

That made sense in the most literal way. Craft takes time. Time costs money. A difficult weave, a hand-finished surface or a material developed over years gives an object a history that can help explain its price.

This logic is especially familiar in luxury. Hours are counted. The atelier becomes evidence that the object could not have appeared instantly.

But what I saw seemed to point toward something broader.

Much of the work in Milano was not handmade in opposition to industry. It came from brands with sophisticated factories, global supply chains and significant technical capacity. The attraction was not necessarily an escape from industrial production.

It was the opportunity to see production as a sequence of decisions.

A knot can do more than signal the hand. It shows where somebody chose to pull. A material library shows that alternatives were considered. A failed prototype proves that the finished object was not inevitable.

Proof of work

The phrase belongs to computing. Proof of work demonstrates that computational effort has been expended before a result is accepted. Here, it describes something less technical but increasingly important: visible evidence that human judgment occurred before the result appeared.

That evidence matters because results are becoming fast. The result may be impressive. It simply provides less evidence than it used to.

This may also explain why process is moving beyond galleries and exhibitions. Behind-the-scenes content is not new, but making is increasingly presented as the main event rather than supplementary material. Studio visits, material experiments, and “how it was made” films allow the audience to remain with the decisions instead of skipping directly to the reveal.

There is, of course, a risk of "Process theater".

The process shown by a brand is still a curated image. It can reveal experimentation, touch and transformation while editing out repetition, hierarchy, logistics and scale. The workshop can become scenography. Labor can become a texture applied to an otherwise ordinary product.

But that does not make every display of process false. A constructed presentation can still reveal something real: the intelligence inside a material, the years contained in a technique or the decision that changed the outcome.

The distinction is whether the process explains the work or merely makes the work look expensive.

Show the constraint that shaped the result. Preserve the version that failed. Name the person who solved the problem. Reveal the source, system or standard that made the final experience possible. Let people see where human judgment entered.

Process documentation does not have to remain backstage material released after the real work. It can establish authorship, create trust and distinguish one polished result from ten thousand others.

Craft may be everywhere because craft is still expensive. But it may also be everywhere because polish has become cheap.

I fell in love with design through typography. But the part that continues to interest me most is typesetting: the set of decisions that determines how language occupies space and how it is read.

Typesetting was once a distinct stage of production, often handled by a specialist. Today it usually sits within design and is increasingly shaped by software, templates, and systems.

I remember studying Julia Born’s typesetting. She used the space left by the final line of one paragraph to determine where the next paragraph began. Instead of forcing the eye to travel all the way back to the left margin, the text continued closer to where the previous thought had ended.

Typesetting has existed for centuries. Many of its conventions date back to the earliest printed books and have become so familiar that they feel inevitable. 

Born did not follow the inherited rule more elegantly. She recognized that the rule itself could be reconsidered. It was an extremely small gesture and, in typographic terms, about as punk as it gets. The beauty was not applied afterward. It was produced by breaking the rule for a reason.

Making language behave

In the 1920s, Bauhaus designers including Herbert Bayer rejected capital letters as part of an attempt to make written language more rational and universal. The distinction between uppercase and lowercase appeared unnecessary: two alphabets doing the work of one.

The Dutch artist herman de vries arrived at lowercase through a different logic. He writes his name without capitals and asks that the titles of his works appear that way too. For de vries, capital letters introduce hierarchy. Lowercase allows every word to occupy the same level.

Concrete poets worked with a related understanding. A poem did not exist only in the meaning of its words. Arrangement, spacing, scale, and repetition produced meaning too. The page was not a neutral container for language. It was part of the language.

Typesetting after the internet

Online, people typeset constantly without describing it that way. Capitalization, punctuation, spacing, and line breaks establish tone before the words have even been read.

Lowercase can make a message feel intimate, effortless, or slightly unedited. Conventional capitalization can feel professional, official or parental. ALL CAPS introduces urgency or excitement. Irregular MiXeD cAsE performs irony by making the language appear unstable or unserious.

These are typographic decisions, even when they are made inside interfaces that offer almost no control over typography.

The missing step

A company may spend years refining a logo and commissioning a typeface. The typeface arrives with an elaborate rationale about its proportions, personality, and history. Then the language is set in entirely conventional ways.

This is not necessarily bad. Default conventions are often clear, familiar, and optimized for reading. But when every brand follows the same conventions, much of the character promised by the identity disappears in use.

Typesetting is where a brand’s voice becomes visible. Line length, spacing, indentation, alignment, capitalization, punctuation, and rhythm can make language feel quiet or insistent, formal or intimate, restrained or expressive. These decisions can make information easier to follow while reinforcing the values and tone of the brand.

A logo identifies the brand. A typeface gives it a voice. Typesetting determines how that voice speaks. Leaving it to default is not a failure. It is a missed opportunity for storytelling.