a new look for as seen on

i’m growing up and so is this letter

This issue is presented in partnership with Adobe Express.

I hope you like the new look. It took six months and three designers to get here — which feels both excessive and exactly right for something that was never really about design in the first place.

I started working on the redesign last summer without fully knowing what I was trying to change. Nothing felt broken. The newsletter was growing, the writing felt clear, the conversations around it were becoming more interesting. But every time I opened the page, there was a small, persistent mismatch between the ideas I was sharing and the container holding them.

as seen on began as a place to think in public about culture and the industries surrounding it. Over time, it became a cultural intelligence newsletter examining the people, brands, and systems that shape modern taste. The work moves across fashion, beauty, tech, media, and the business of culture, not as separate worlds but as overlapping forces that influence how we spend, signal belonging, and perform identity.

I write somewhere between reporting, analysis, and opinion, often moving between brand strategy and cultural observation in the same paragraph. I’m interested in how attention moves, how desire is constructed, and how certain things come to feel inevitable. Information is everywhere now; context is harder to find. The goal of this letter has always been to slow things down enough to ask why something worked, who it was really for, and what it reveals about taste, status, and value right now.

The tone changes depending on the week. Sometimes sharp, sometimes playful, occasionally a little too honest. But it’s grounded in one belief I return to constantly: culture and commerce are inseparable, and what we buy, share, and obsess over tells a larger story about who we are and where we’re headed.

A reader once wrote to tell me there are similar newsletters out there, but this one is their favorite. I think about that sentence more than any metric or growth chart. It reminds me that what was forming here wasn’t just content, but a point of view people are learning to recognize.

Around the same time, my own life was shifting. I left my full-time role at adidas, paused for a summer in Portland, and eventually landed in Lagos with a clearer sense of what I wanted to build and how seriously I wanted to take it. The newsletter changed with me. The audience became more specific. The writing felt less reactive and more interpretive, less about keeping up with culture and more about mapping it.

Visually, though, the publication still belonged to an earlier version of itself.

So the redesign became a long conversation rather than a single decision. Over the past six months, I worked with three different designers, each contributing something essential. One helped clarify structure and hierarchy, another pushed the typography toward something more editorial and enduring, and another helped translate instinct into a system that could actually live and grow week after week. Somewhere during that process, as seen on stopped feeling like a newsletter I wrote and started feeling like a publication I was responsible for building.

Working with designers Marita Musser, Nicole Klein, and Osafuwenko Tunde-Oni across the process, as well as the team at Adobe Express, the goal shifted from creating a look to creating a system. We explored typography first, then the wordmark, then the visual symbol and color language, building something that felt editorial rather than decorative.

Much of this experimentation happened inside Adobe’s creative ecosystem — from early type exploration in InDesign to logo development in Illustrator — before settling into Adobe Express, a cloud-based design platform that now houses the day-to-day publishing workflow for the newsletter.

The designers also helped build a full brand kit inside Express, so all of the elements we developed — the different logo variations, color palette, typography, and templates — now live in one place. It means that each issue, social asset, or new format starts from the same visual foundation, while still leaving room for experimentation.

Express makes it easy to move between formats — graphics, PDFs, web pages, and social assets — without losing visual consistency, which matters when a publication lives across multiple platforms at once.

What mattered most was continuity. I wanted a visual language that could hold essays, interviews, reading recaps, partnerships, and whatever comes next without needing to reinvent itself every few months. Something structured enough to feel intentional but flexible enough to evolve alongside the writing.

The questions at the center of this work haven’t changed. Why does something resonate now? Who is it really for? What does its success reveal about power, belonging, and taste? The internet produces endless commentary; I’ve always been more interested in interpretation — slowing things down just enough to understand what we’re actually looking at.

Part of what made this redesign possible was the accessibility of tools like Adobe Express, which lower the barrier between having an idea and giving it form — something that feels increasingly important as more independent publications are built outside traditional media institutions.

This redesign doesn’t mark a new direction so much as an acknowledgment of the current one. A recognition that this letter has grown into its own identity, shaped as much by readers as by me.

as seen on is still a newsletter. But it is also becoming an archive, a conversation, and a framework for understanding culture as it unfolds in real time.

Thank you for reading, for sharing, and for helping this publication become what it is.

I’d love to hear what you think of the new look.