The Drawer I Stopped Apologizing For

There is a drawer in my studio — a real one, wooden, slightly sticky on the left side — where finished things go. Not finished as in done. Finished as in I gave up on them before they could disappoint me.

For a long time I treated that drawer as a private shame closet. Then, sometime this spring, I opened it while looking for a spare battery and ended up sitting on the floor for an hour, flipping through dead ends. And I had a thought that felt almost rude in its simplicity: this stuff is more interesting than my portfolio.

So I started publishing it. Not as a stunt, not as a "raw and vulnerable" brand play, but because the drawer was doing more for my craft than the polished shelf ever did.

Why We Hide the Middle

Polished work answers a question nobody asked. "Can you make a thing that looks like a thing?" Sure. Everyone with a decent eye and enough time can do that.

The messy middle answers the actual question people have about you: how do you think when it's not going well?

That's the part of creative work most of us scrub out before anyone sees it. We post the poster, not the eleven thumbnails that died to get there. We publish the short film, not the version where the audio was recorded in a closet in Bushwick and sounded like a submarine.

I get why. The internet rewards completion. A finished piece has a shape; a half-finished one has a smell. But the smell is the point.

Three Things From My Archive

1. The zine typeface that never got a fifth letter

Back in the winter I started drawing a display face for a small print zine — heavy slabs, slightly wonky baseline, the kind of thing that looks great at 90pt and terrible at 12pt. I got through A, B, C, D and part of E before I realized the whole alphabet would take four months and pay zero dollars.

For a while I filed it under failure. Now it's one of the most-visited posts on this site. Turns out people don't want to see a typeface; they want to see the decision-making behind a typeface. The four letters are less interesting than the note I scribbled next to the fifth: "E is where the idea runs out. Is the idea wrong, or is the letter?"

I still don't know the answer. That's the hook.

2. The voice memo that was never a podcast

I recorded an intro for a short audio series three summers ago, sitting on the floor of my apartment with a blanket over my head because the radiator was humming. Eleven takes. I published take seven.

It's bad. You can hear me breathing. I say "okay so" four times in forty seconds. But there's a moment around 0:22 where I laugh at my own sentence and then immediately get serious again — and several people have told me that laugh is the reason they kept listening to anything else I've made.

Nobody has ever told me that about a well-edited episode.

3. The poster that became a paper airplane

A fold-out poster commission that got killed two weeks before print. The client pivoted, I got paid a partial, and the file sat in a folder called OLD_DO_NOT_OPEN for about eighteen months. When I finally posted the flat artwork with a short note about why it got cut, two people asked if they could license the pattern for a tote bag.

That's the quiet magic of the drawer. Dead work isn't dead. It's just early.

The Part Where I Give You a Template

I don't want to be the guy who says "be vulnerable" and leaves you to figure out the logistics. So here's the actual thing I do. I call it the Three-Line Reveal, and it works for basically any abandoned piece:

Line one — context. What was this supposed to be, and for whom? Two sentences, no self-deprecation yet.

Line two — wreckage. Exactly where it broke. Not "it didn't work out" but "the second act had no engine" or "I couldn't solve the letter E." Specific beats sad.

Line three — next. What you'd try now, or what question is still open. This is the line that turns a confession into a conversation.

Then post the artifact. Photo, scan, audio, whatever you've got. Don't clean it up. Don't add a filter that makes the mess look intentional.

I've done this maybe twenty times now. The pattern is consistent: the messier the artifact, the better the responses. People reply with their own dead projects. Someone always says "I have one of these too." That's the entire goal.

A Small Warning

Sharing unfinished work is not the same as dumping everything. I keep a short list of things that stay in the drawer: anything involving someone else's unfinished work, anything under an NDA, and anything I'd feel weird about a future collaborator seeing without context.

Everything else is fair game once it's old enough that I no longer feel defensive about it. Nine months seems to be my number. Yours might be three, or three years.

What the Drawer Actually Built

Here's the honest accounting. Publishing the messy stuff hasn't gotten me bigger clients. It hasn't gone viral, and I don't expect it to.

What it has done is shorter: it made conversations easier. People arrive at a call already knowing how I think. They ask better questions. They stop treating me like a vendor and start treating me like a person with opinions about letterforms.

That's worth more than a clean portfolio, honestly. A portfolio says look at this. A drawer says come in, it's a mess, grab a chair.

Mine's still sticky on the left side. You get used to it.