WiseNoise 11: Steven Wakabayashi
Steven Wakabayashi on Design as Data, Selling with Your Ears, and Why Health Comes First
There are some conversations that stay with you for a while. My WiseNoise conversation with Steven Wakabayashi was one of them.
Steven is the founder of Stranger Creative, a New York-based digital product agency working with clients including Apple, Google, Unilever and Walmart, and of QTBIPOC Design, a nonprofit creating pathways into the design industry for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and people of colour.
His route into design includes physiology, neuroscience, dance, big tech, a serious health crisis and months of silence in monasteries.
From neuroscience and dance to design
Steven studied physiology and neuroscience at UC San Diego, alongside dance at the university’s conservatory. His original plan was medical school. To pay his way through college he designed websites for the university, work that grew to include emails sent to hundreds of thousands of alumni. During a gap year, a medical school advisor suggested he freelance properly, and he fell in love with agency life in San Diego and never looked back.
Those apparently separate interests still shape his thinking. Neuroscience looks for patterns, signals and connections. Dance explores the body, rhythm, space and expression.
Design sits somewhere between the two. It needs structure, but it also needs instinct, feeling and room for the unexpected.
> “Design is a tool. Design is a vector.”
That line stayed with me. Design helps us move something from one place to another: an idea, a feeling, a story, a person’s understanding of a product or organisation. And, in this case, it brought two designers together for a conversation.
The painful experience behind QTBIPOC Design
When Steven tried to become a professional dancer, he was told at auditions, “We’re not looking for an Asian dancer.” More than 15 years on, those words clearly left a mark. In one particularly humiliating audition, the director gathered the casting people together to brainstorm the typecast roles Steven could play.
That experience became part of the reason he founded QTBIPOC Design in 2020, built on a simple but important belief: creativity is a privilege that is too often difficult to access depending on your background.
It began as a bootcamp, full of people in their thirties and forties pivoting into design after two, three or four careers, and has since become a nine-month fellowship for mid-to-senior designers at risk of leaving the industry.
One detail stood out to me: there are no recordings of the fellowship sessions. That’s intentional. Speakers, many of them huge domain experts, are given full permission to talk openly about their real experiences, including the struggles usually edited out of professional talks and portfolios. The secrets to success are often unspoken, and that honesty is what makes the space valuable.
Building a healthier design agency
Steven founded Stranger Creative the same year. It began as a solo freelance practice and has grown to around 20 people.
It was shaped by what he had seen in big tech and larger agencies: “work hard, play hard” environments with meetings at one or two in the morning, followed by a splash of water on the face at six. Eventually, his body said enough. A severe health crisis kept him in hospital for months, much of 2018 was spent in rehabilitation, and in 2019 he left everything behind to live in monasteries for the better part of a year.
Today, health is his number one priority. He sets boundaries, tracks holidays and workload allocation as key data points, and watches for people drifting towards crisis mode.
> “We think we can treat humans like machines. It doesn’t work.”
Even machines need to be turned off and back on now and then. The same is true for us. Even a 60-second pause to sit in stillness can interrupt a spiral, and space is often where better decisions begin.
Design systems, data and AI
A large part of Stranger Creative’s work involves design systems for enterprise websites with 10,000 to 30,000 pages.
That means building systems of assets, icons, cards, templates and rules that can work at scale. Steven’s team were early Figma partners, and their work includes projects for Everpure, Apex for Youth and Gartner.
The basic idea is to disassemble an asset into its component parts : image, text, colour, gradient and other properties : then recompile those parts into responsive templates.
This makes it possible to test more variations: instead of spending $100 on a single ad, you could run 100 ads at $1 each and find out what actually works. That’s where design becomes data.
Now, as enterprise clients respond to new AI mandates, Stranger Creative is also building markdown-based, machine-first documentation that can be understood by tools such as Claude, Replit and proprietary large language models.
There’s an important problem here.
A design system might contain 10,000 icons, 20,000 or 30,000 components and hundreds of variables. But the rules governing how those things should be used are not always written down.
A lot of design knowledge is implicit. Experienced designers know when something feels wrong, even if they can’t immediately point to a single documented rule.
AI systems struggle with that. Connect them directly to a huge design system and they can produce a hot mess of technically available but visually inappropriate choices.
The solution is to make the implicit explicit.
This connects with my own experience of working with clients on brand identity design and visual identity design. A client might receive a beautifully considered set of brand guidelines, but six months later the website, social media and campaign materials can start to drift.
Most organisations can’t afford a full-time brand guardian.
An AI-ready design system could help keep the brand consistent with the original intention: provided the thinking behind the design has been clearly documented.
Selling with your ears
For the episode’s Heavy Dessert, Steven chose “Your design and how to sell it”.
His advice was clear:
> “Sales is 90% listening and 10% confirmation.”
Selling isn’t about the perfect design and the perfect speech. It’s about asking questions, understanding where people are and using their language to explain how the work can help. If you’re doing more talking than listening, you’re selling wrong.
That immediately connected with my own approach at WiseLove Studio. The rationale behind a design should come from conversations with the client: their pain points, their industry, what needs to change. Then the design becomes evidence of a solution rather than a wall of jargon.
Between the measurable and the mysterious
Steven recommended Logo Modernism, a huge collection of logos from across several decades, and design libraries over Pinterest: open a random page, look at something outside your usual references. His design hero is Giorgia Lupi, whose work shows that data can be personal, emotional and full of character.
That feels like the perfect place to end: somewhere between the measurable and the mysterious.
Design needs data. It needs systems. It needs tools.
But it also needs connection.
And sometimes the thing that touches someone’s heart isn’t the most efficient option on the page.
Merci beaucoup to Steven for such an open and generous conversation.
You can listen to more WiseNoise episodes, subscribe to the WiseLove Studio mailing list, or contact me if you’d like to talk about a brand identity, campaign, illustration or print project.
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