Grace Walker

At the start of the year I added a new sideboard to my office. I had a besta unit that I used for storage for the longest time, but I wanted the space to have more warmth. The new piece makes the whole room feel more alive, and I find the height to be more functional as well. I like to leave books out and flip through them when I’m looking for momentum on an idea.

I try to be intentional about refreshing my space regularly - I’ve really felt that my environment has a huge impact on my ideas. I had a baby last year, and one of my biggest priorities on maternity leave was building my creative energy. After the first couple chaotic months settled, I started spending time in my office with my daughter, at first just cleaning and organizing, and then working on small projects. Now that I’m back to work full-time she is in my office less, but making my space more baby friendly has been a great change.

I usually bring whatever’s left of my coffee down to my desk, open up my blinds and turn on my lights. Unless it’s the middle of winter, I’ll open my window to make sure I have fresh air while I work. Most of our team works on the east coast, so I usually scroll through messages when I wake up and come back to what I’ve saved to respond to when I sit down at my desk.

I’ve been really leaning into physical cues lately - if I need to focus on something I will turn on Moby’s Play: The Complete Recordings and put on my blue light glasses. It usually puts me in a mindset to spin new work and explore.

I use Sublime Text all the time. It’s so simple, just a nice tidy text editor. Sometimes I’ll use it to take notes, or clear styling from text. Obviously you can use it to view and edit code. But mostly I just think it’s a beautiful, focused space to type. It’s one of the first things I install on any new machine.

Movement builds momentum. In the physical world this makes a lot of sense, like starting a run with a warmup, but I think the same principles apply in the digital world. I can get hung up on starting things in the correct order, but if I just jump in and start grabbing screenshots or sketching an initial version, it helps me build momentum. Prototyping tools like Figma Make are great for this - I can send a super high level voice note of what I’m working on and get something that helps start me down a path. The longer I’ve been a designer, the more I relax about creating a great thing right away. If I start moving, I’ll get where I need to go.

I’ve been spending a lot more time with historical references. My local used book sale has been a great resource over the years. I love flipping through a book and researching a piece that pulls me in. I’ll find out when was it created, by who, what was their world like, and how is it similar to my own. I love looking at work from another era and trying to figure out how I can carry it’s spirit into my own - not to copy or imitate, but to be inspired by it’s structure or attitude. I’ve found myself inspired by pieces from the Atomic Age lately. So much work from that era had a surprising optimism in the face of earth-altering technology.

I’ve never been more excited about design - it feels like an immense gift to be a creative director at the moment! Our team ran a design sprint recently and I had an idea for a custom halftone pattern that uses Spellbook’s logo gem instead of a circle or standard shape. A few prompts later I had working prototypes in Figma to share with the team. The tools I built in Figma evolved into a full visual composer that I now use everyday to create static and moving halftone textures. More textures will inject more layers of meaning into digital design, I think there’s a lot of beautiful possibilities ahead.

It’s actually a really interesting parallel to our work at Spellbook, where I see how legal teams are using AI in massively transformational ways. I’m excited about an agentic future that enables volumes of work to flow faster, but also one that opens entirely new possibilities that were previously deemed too tedious. AI is already core to my process, and I’m excited to find the edges of it’s usefulness in my work. I’m currently finding a lot of value in production work like web development, but I also find it very useful to interrogate ideas and form opinions faster.