You’re probably wondering who this blabbering fool is, so here’s a short-ish introduction.
I’m Felix Ng.
Growing up, my dream was to be a football player, then one day I broke my hand playing and decided the probability of breaking the other one was too high to ignore (imagine how ridiculous i would look walking around with both hands in a cast).
My next dream was to be a writer (a school teacher told me I had potential, and I took that far too seriously). So I studied communications hoping to become a journalist but... accidentally became a designer when a classmate asked me to help design her band's album cover. But… to get paid, the music label could only pay a business account. So we registered a company. That was 2005 (before the iPhone and social media). Twenty-one years later, here we are.
Along with my partner Germaine Chong, we’ve been running the studio ever since (which surprises us more than anyone). Neither of us had worked in a design studio or knew what one was supposed to be. After years of figuring it out, we landed on something we called 50-50: half the time designing for clients, the other half making things nobody asked for but seemed like a good idea at the time: a design film festival, a food film festival, a magazine, some books, a few exhibitions, a website for book recommendations.
We’ve since moved on from most of that. Which brings us to this.
A Field Note
I’ve been writing field notes on our studio’s website since 2020. A lot has changed since then. They started as a way to capture observations from projects or happenings and slowly became a place to organise the thoughts we’re thinking about.
Now they tend to fall into one of three categories:
1. Field Trips
In the past few years, I’ve been taking more field trips (yes, I’m aware it’s usually for kids, but growing up is overrated) to learn first-hand about a place and try to make sense of what’s happening and what might happen next.
They’re not a guide about where to eat, what to see, or what to do. There are people who do that very well. They have ring lights and a content calendar. I have a notebook and low expectations. So think of these as a travelogue, except there’s no guarantee it goes anywhere useful.
2. Projects
A journal of the entire process from a client project or something self-initiated. Think of them less as sleek case studies and more as a bag carrying all the messy in-betweens of a finished project. The stuff that never makes it onto the portfolio page but is often more interesting than the work itself.
None of the slow-motion sketching, animated colour palettes, or humanist sans-serifs "bridging the dichotomy of heritage and modernity." Just what actually happened, which is rarely as simple or as fun as the Instagram reel suggests.
3. Found
Object-specific notes, though sometimes the object is just a cover for something else entirely. A story, a conversation, or a big detour about nothing. Like this or this or this.
Oh, and about the name
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just call it Field Notes (taken, unfortunately, by someone with more important and more interesting things to say).
So instead: A Field Note. Which allowed me to name all posts with simply On ______, so when shared, each one reads as A Field Note on Osaka, A Field Note on Books, A Field Note on whatever else I’ve wandered to. (I’m unreasonably happy about coming up with this naming system, which I mention only because nobody else has congratulated me for it.)
TL;DR: Why Bother?
Like many of you, we used social media for a long time as a way to share what’s happening in the studio, or things we’re thinking about, but social media as a vessel to hold and share things hasn’t been working as it used to for awhile now.
So this is a small part of the internet I’m borrowing to do that instead.
The writing is to help myself figure things out. Not to sell or persuade anyone anything. They are wandering observations from field trips, or things we're trying to figure out, or the occasional projects we're working on or have worked on, or simply just odd ideas we're spitballing. Think of this as watching someone do a puzzle, except some of the pieces are missing and the box has the wrong picture on it.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. If you’ve made it this far, I already have enormous respect for you. Please don’t feel obligated to subscribe, because it’ll be heartbreaking when you inevitably change your mind and unsubscribe. If you’d prefer this in shorter, less considered bursts with a significantly higher chance of me regretting posting things, I’m on Threads. And if after all of this you still want more, there’s a subscribe button somewhere on this page.
