06-reference / design-mood-board

radicaldesigncourse

Wed Apr 22 2026 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) ·design-reference
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Radical Design Course (Jack McDade)

What’s notable: a near-black textured field with a hand-drawn chunky-marker display face doing all the heavy lifting — manifesto-as-hero, with two type weights (filled + outlined) interleaved in the same paragraph for emphasis instead of italics. Pink Memphis-style game-controller and Saturn ring float in the corners as decorative scraps; the wordmark itself is set on a slight rotation with a teal color-pop. Zero attempt to look “professional” — the entire surface argues that web design has become too polite, and the page is the demonstration.

Why this matters as a reference: the canonical example of design as polemic. Every choice (type, color, decoration, rotation) carries the author’s hand. Lesson for RDCO: a teaching/opinionated property can earn the right to look like itself rather than like a SaaS template — and that itself becomes the marketing.