Timeless
by Design

I bought a watch off eBay. A Seiko Lord Matic, probably from the late '60s. It arrived in a padded envelope from Japan, wrapped in more bubble wrap than seemed necessary for something that small.

I opened it, and just held it for a minute.

Fifty-odd years old. The dial is still clean. The indices still catch light the way they were designed to. The movement — a 5606, automatic — still ticks with the kind of quiet precision that makes you lean in to hear it. Someone in a Suwa factory assembled this thing by hand, decades before I was born, and it still works exactly the way they intended.

That's not luck. That's craft.

Why Japanese Design Gets Under My Skin

There's a word in Japanese — monozukuri. It roughly translates to "the art of making things," but that undersells it. It's closer to the idea that the process of creation is inseparable from the thing you create. The care is the product.

You see it in everything from Seiko movements to ceramic tea bowls to the way a joiner cuts a wood joint that will never be seen once the furniture is assembled. The invisible work matters as much as the visible.

That philosophy has always resonated with me. Maybe because I've spent years in design disciplines where the temptation is to prioritise the surface — the flashy animation, the trendy gradient, the layout that looks good in a portfolio screenshot but falls apart when a real person tries to use it.

What Timelessness Actually Requires

Here's what I think people get wrong about timeless design: they think it means "classic" or "safe" or "minimal." It doesn't. It means every decision was made with intention, and nothing was added to chase a trend.

Look at that Seiko dial. It's not minimal — it has applied indices, a day-date complication, a textured sunburst finish. There's a lot happening. But every element earns its place. Nothing is decorative for decoration's sake.

That's the standard I try to hold in my own work. Whether it's a brand identity, an eLearning module, or a website build — the question isn't "does this look current?" It's "will this still make sense in five years?"

Sometimes that means resisting the client's instinct to follow whatever's trending on Dribbble this month. Sometimes it means spending more time on the information architecture than the colour palette. It almost always means removing something rather than adding it.

The Invisible Work

The back of the Lord Matic is a plain steel caseback. You'd never see the movement unless you opened it up. But Seiko finished it anyway. Brushed steel. Clean edges. Because the standard of work doesn't change based on whether someone's looking.

I think about that when I'm building the parts of a project that no one will consciously notice — the spacing between elements, the way a navigation feels rather than looks, the hierarchy of information on a page that guides someone without them realising they're being guided.

A Small Reminder on My Desk

The Lord Matic sits next to my keyboard now. It's not worth much — a couple of hundred dollars, maybe. But it's a daily reminder of something I believe about design:

The best work doesn't announce itself. It just works. Quietly, reliably, beautifully — for decades.

That's the standard. That's always been the standard.