Annalise Kerr

Design and video. Writes about craft, defaults, and refusing to let good enough become the target.

Why I write

I make things for clients, which means the brief changes on Thursday and the deadline does not. A lot of my working life is the gap between what would be good and what will be approved, and I lose that argument regularly.

I keep showing up for it because I do not believe the small decisions are small. Nobody can tell you why one thing feels considered and another feels assembled, but everybody feels it, and that difference is made of a hundred choices someone either made or could not be bothered to make. Caring about them is not precious. It is the whole job, and I would rather be the person who is difficult about it than the person who stopped noticing.

Writing is where I get to finish an argument. No revision round, no committee, no version where the good part comes out because it made somebody nervous. I did not expect it to matter to me this much. It turns out I love it for the same reason I love the work: it is a thing you can keep making better until it is actually right, and nobody can approve it away from you.

So that is most of what I write here. Design and video tools, why a few of them feel right and most do not, and where AI takes the tedious part versus where it quietly takes the judgment you were being paid for.

I am critical about a lot of things here. It is worth saying that this is because I still expect better, not because I have given up on any of it.

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