Design
Errands
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L ike the wild grass that grows and overtakes the nutrients of the flowers behind my grandma's corn garden, no matter how many times you rake them away, they keep coming back.

Design Errands is s a "fun" phrase I use to refer to quick, repetitive design tasks that seem trivial at first glance. These designs are usually a small part of a bigger project, and if you separate them from the project, they feel meaningless. That's why they're rarely shared on social media as standalone works.

Also, I call it "errands" not because the quality is bad, but because of the unfamiliar feeling I have with the products I design—usually in situations where I have to rush to finish so someone else can use it. I rarely know the full context, what it's for, or the deeper concept; I just execute based on a given guideline. Sometimes I'm called in for a task from a project that urgently needs manpower, with a brief that's minimal—"should be a quick one" as they say—and it really is quick, and after sending it off, I forget about it. For someone who likes to ponder, this is strange, and after doing it a lot, it feels empty. Designs come and go, leaving little deep thought for me. The work quality is fine, the technique is solid, but the connection is lacking.

For me, someone who values long-term relationships—whether with people or with work—this website is the only design in recent months that doesn't feel like "errands." It helped me hold onto a bit of faith in the work I'm doing. Let's hope it's not my swan song.

I don't hate these errands, I'm just trying to accept it more easily. In reality, this is extremely necessary for professional design workflows. I was wrong to keep the mindset of "design for design's sake." It is different. First, it's an act of helping colleagues, then it allows many people to participate throughout, and enables multiple projects to run at once... Eventually, it becomes a way to optimize efficiency and boost productivity for small and medium businesses.

Even though I've only returned to full-time design for about half a year (see my background below), the number of design errands I've done probably equals the total of the past 4-5 years. Now I've made this little site to share these design errands, with little or no context about where they were created.

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Contexts of
this site's creator
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After I graduated, I started job hunting in Singapore. Instead of sticking to what I studied in school, I found myself leaning more into front-end web stuff. Since I wasn’t formally trained, most of my gigs were either under-the-table or short freelance contracts for about a year. It wasn’t stable, but it was fun—I finally got to do something I actually enjoyed.

Towards the end of last year, I needed a proper residence pass, so I went back to graphic design and managed to land a job at an ad agency. That’s where I met people who had zero history with me, and I had none with them either. In a way, these felt like the “cleanest” relationships I’ve had—no expectations, no baggage. I just showed up at the office every day from 10 to 7, slowly got to know everyone, tried to blend in, speaking their language (English—which I’m not exactly great at when it comes to casual conversations). It was a big change for me, because before this, almost everyone I knew was somehow connected to someone else. There was always some overlap. But here, it felt like I was starting fresh. Maybe these coworkers don’t even care that I tinker with web projects on the side, haha. But they’re the ones I’ve been physically around for the past 5–6 months, 10 hours a day.

Back in design, one of the first tasks I got was to redraw an online map—something like Google Maps (but in Singapore, people use OneMap because it’s more accurate). The account team would send me a giant stitched-together screenshot, and my job was to turn every building, street, and MRT station into vectors. At first, it was kind of satisfying because it was so clear-cut: I knew what to do, which tool to use, and how to get it done. More like the work of a “craftsman” than a designer. But after a while, it got painfully boring. I had to keep standing up, stretching, snacking, drinking water, and running to the toilet (thanks to all that water) just to stay awake.

I think it’s partly because, before graduation, most of my design work was at the concept/mockup stage—making things look polished—so I hadn’t really gone through the grind of production work. That made it feel dull. Plus, spending a whole year after graduation trying different things before coming back to design left me feeling a bit like a rookie again. While doing those redraw tasks, I’d catch myself thinking about how this is not just my reality, but the reality for a lot of people in this field. I thought about how many vectors I’ve drawn, adjusted, and nudged into place. Probably way too many. Sometimes I’d think it was all pointless, just wasted effort. Then I’d remind myself that this is the invisible groundwork that makes it possible for some big idea or fancy concept to exist. It’s not the first time I’ve done this kind of work, but it might be the first time I’ve thought so much about it. Since the work itself doesn’t require much thinking, my mind kept wandering back to the work itself.

Tracing maps, retyping text from blurry PDFs, doing random little tasks—stuff I’ve done plenty of times as a junior designer. I usually don’t talk about it because it doesn’t feel meaningful. It’s just the “bread and butter” that keeps bigger projects moving. But recently, since these small tasks have been taking up more of my day, I’ve started noticing how much they shape the way I think and practice design. And in a weird way, I’ve started to see them as just as important as the “important” stuff.

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Notes on the construction
and design of this site
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This website concept was built to simulate vector editing similar to Adobe Illustrator—though in a much more basic version. Users can directly interact with the designs, almost like they’re working on the original file itself. What makes it special is that nearly everything on the page can be edited as a vector, except for long text blocks. That limitation is partly due to web accessibility standards, but more importantly, I wanted to focus on the vector nature of images and graphic objects, rather than text (which of course is also very important for a designer).

The interface details, like the vector-editing function icons, were all redrawn by me from Adobe Illustrator CS2 (the oldest version my computer could run). That gives the whole thing a nostalgic and familiar feel.

There’s also a secondary concept running through the site: the faint gray-black outlines that appear under certain vector objects (like the navbar on top or the footer below). These are meant to mimic the process of “redrawing vectors” by layering in old pencil sketches or hand sketches with broken pixels. It’s a way of bringing back the traces of the vectorization process. This idea of “redrawing” also comes through in the use of the Tiểu Học font. That font reminds me of primary school, sitting and practicing handwriting, tracing over printed outlines with a fountain pen that looked exactly like the iconic “pen tool.”

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About
vector graphics
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Vector graphics offer flexible, non-destructive editing for design work. Instead of relying on pixels, vector graphics are built from paths, anchor nodes, and handle bars—letting you tweak every attribute and every stroke in a systematic, precise way. That’s what makes vector graphics a kind of universal language, an essential tool in professional graphic design.

But vectors can only really “live” inside their own special environments—dedicated software like Adobe Illustrator or Figma. Printing aside, the internet still favors raster images like PNGs and JPGs. Which means even if you just want to post something on social media, you eventually have to flatten everything—layers, strokes, backgrounds—into one colored pixel grid, in a process called rasterization. Basically, no matter how complex a visual you create on a computer, it always ends up being converted into abstract code optimized for screen display.

(That said, I still prefer vectors when they’re in the middle of being created. Honestly, the reason I like them is probably because of all those little UI elements—the anchor nodes, the handle bars, and so on—that pop up while you’re drawing. They make everything look more detailed than it really is.)

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