Yesterday, sitting cross-legged on the cold bathroom floor—where my two-year-old insisted we had to be—I read Oh, the Places You’ll Go! aloud while she arranged her teddies into a small but rapt audience.
Between the rhymes, I found myself thinking about the unexpected places I’ve travelled over the past few weeks—not just physically, but intellectually and creatively.
There was a deep dive into ERP systems in the African tech space to support a Zimbabwean company’s rebrand. A scramble to decode EU regulations on packaging biostimulants for an ecological start-up working to transform seaweed into more sustainable resources for the agricultural sector. And somewhere in between, I tried to absorb just enough about venture capital to pitch Kalahari Design Studio to an impact fund interested in strategy-led design.
These are the kinds of detours I’ve come to seek out and relish as an intentional designer. In my growing practice, discovery is the part I value most. Not knowing, but learning. Not mastery, but the permission to be curious—and the belief that curiosity can lead to far more interesting outcomes than a narrow focus on deliverables.

Since setting out as a freelancer, one of the most rewarding parts of the work has been stepping into someone else’s world, understanding the journey they’re on, and figuring out how design can support, tell their story and energise their communication. Each project brings a new language, a new rhythm, and a new lens. It’s a slower, more intentional and more tailored process.
I recently registered my business, Kalahari Design Studio, and launched the website. This isn’t the professional life I had imagined before my daughter was born. I pictured something more conventional—returning to work, maybe changing jobs, balancing office hours with daycare drop-offs and pick-ups.
But I hadn’t factored in two things. First, the quiet persistence of my creative self—largely silent since adolescence—resisting the idea of a working life that didn’t fill my days with ideas, colour, and challenge. Second, the quiet joy of putting my daughter down for her nap in the middle of the day, even now, when it’s not always necessary. I’ve come to see that my working life needs to be meaningful. It also needs to bend to the shifting shape of real life.
This is an exciting moment. And I wonder where we’ll go next. Who we’ll meet. What we’ll learn. What we might make—together.