Our fall reunion took us across Chicago, into beautiful spaces with incredible artists, designers and organizers. Community is medicine.

Listen, we love remote work. The flexibility. The dogs! The mindful distribution of time, energy and resources. Deep flow states while sitting on the ground in the comfort and creativity of our own space. It’s great! Still, there’s nothing like quality face-to-face time.

FALL REUNION 2026

We spent the final week of October together in Chicago, the city where it all started. We arrange these midwestern meet-ups a few times a year, but this one felt special. Goals of the trip: 1. Revisit our 2025 intentions; 2. Get organized for the last quarter of the year. 3. Fill our cups with excellent conversation and company.

The moment Kristin arrived at O’Hare, we were off to Hyde Park for the final night of comedian Bassem Youssef’s week-long residency at Cedar’s Palestine Kitchen—part of the restaurant’s ongoing efforts to raise money for food aid in Gaza. Paul Elia and Azhar Usman opened, thousands of dollars were raised and friends, a reminder: LAUGH OFTEN. Say yes to spaces where you get to be loud and joyful with others! Joy can be revolutionary! It gives us what we need to keep going!

And keep going we did. Specifically to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. First for the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Awards, where we got to hug Richie Hoffmann and snap fit pics with Kazim Ali, then for Deem Journal’s third annual symposium. Amanda Williams regaled us with the tale of how one hundred thousand red tulips came to be. Radha Mistry walked us through profound provocations and speculative futures. “We are here to care for one another,” pronounced a panel on solidarity economies, and the crowd went wild. Keynote speaker Mabel O. Wilson said, “I set my compass to thrive.” We all replied yes, please. Between sessions we snuck up to the fourth floor to catch Yoko Ono’s sublime exhibit Music of the Mind. Chicago—get there before the show ends in February. Take three friends and wander til your heart’s three sizes bigger.

We dined with some of the world’s best women, screamed poems with our friends before Lake Michigan, and tabled for The Watermelon Tee at Seraj: A Taste of Palestine, a community benefit hosted by beloved friend and client Mai Kakish of Almond & Fig. And finally, before Kristin took off once more for the serene skies of the southwest, we sat down and took a good hard look at how the year’s stacked up thus far.

Pretty great, it turns out. We’ve made good on a healthy handful of our annual intentions—more bilingual branding, a beautiful site refresh, and fruitful collaborations with exquisite geniuses like Nate Beaty, Alfredo Ruiz and Lindsay McMenamin (congrats on your first week at One Design, Linds!). We created, designed and published a chapbook of poems! We started feeling pretty good about QuickBooks. And the good times don’t end there…

FALL WINS

We recently kicked off with Friends Fiduciary, a Quaker organization helping values-aligned nonprofits make conscientious investments—they hate war and so do we! Keep an eye out in Spring 2026 for a fresh new look and feel for Friends.

Nermin got to spend quality time with some bright young minds at Columbia College Chicago, sharing our values-centered approach as part of the Designers in Context series. Big gratitude to Guy Villa Jr. for hosting—it’s a dream to share this dream with others. There are better ways to work, kids. It’s up to us to make them.

Finally, we’re thrilled to share that Typeforce 13 won a spot in the 2026 Communication Arts Interactive Annual! Congrats to the whole Typeforce team, led by Nermin and Will Miller, with big assists from producers Lindsay McMenamin and Emily Berman, and code prodigy Bryant Smith on the site build.