suburban outfitters

aka: what this is, where I'm from, and why it's called Cul De Sac

While I’d love for this to be a top-down design newsletter, where I tip you off to high-brow design, labels, and trends I tirelessly curate, it’ll be far from it. I want to start with a quick prequel to explain Cul De Sac’s name and origin story.

I grew up in Valencia, California, which, for the uninitiated, is a suburb about 45 minutes north of Los Angeles. Not only is it not LA, it’s not even “The Valley” you’re thinking of (that’s San Fernando). It’s the valley above that (Santa Clarita Valley). To put that into perspective, my Dad was able to commute into work at Universal Studios every morning, but aside from special occasions, we had no real connection to “town”.

Santa Clarita Valley has a truly fascinating history, which I’ll get into in future posts. But for the purposes of this introduction, I want to introduce Valencia (the town within SCV I grew up in) as a brand new (our specific neighborhood was built in the late 90s) series of secure cul-de-sacs, all connected by heavily landscaped trails. It’s home to Six Flags Magic Mountain, and Cal Arts, the seamless co-existence of which I’ll write a whole post on. We grew up listening to Blink, skateboarding (poorly), and smoking weed in said trails.

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This is all to say: I didn’t grow up reading Vogue; I had CCS. I didn’t discover new bands at Rough Trade; I had the Tony Hawks Pro Skater soundtrack. I didn’t shop at Union, I had Val Surf. I didn’t even know what graphic design was; I just knew skate stickers and tees were the most alluring things I’d ever seen.

And I’m not complaining; I think a lot of “designers designing for other designers” are super wack, and I doubt you need more of that in your feed. I think finding gems within “suburban mall culture” is tight (or at least can be), and I invite you to examine it more precisely as I explain what I find so attractive about it.

On a trip to visit family in Chicago in high school, my cousin's boyfriend Pierre (a supremely cool British guy who chain-smoked and put my brother and me onto all kinds of cool comics, movies, and bands) told me about his job: he was a graphic designer. He explained what that meant, and I quickly started fucking around with a cracked version of Photoshop elements I had on my blue bubble iMac G3.

Despite terrible grades and a growing addition to weed, I was able to get my shit together enough in high school to get into The School of Visual Arts in NYC. I’ll get into college more later, I’m sure, but the main point is that when I moved to the city for college, everyone immediately started putting “NYC” on their work, or at the end of their studio names. Erasing the reality that 99% of these kids were from the suburbs of Philly or N.J., New York was a much sexier personality to adopt. I came home most summers in college, and loved the super high contrast between a busy school year in the city, and a slow-as-molasses summer in Valencia.

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I ended up staying in NY for a decade, but when it came time to name my studio (Cul De Sac started in 2017 in Brooklyn), I wanted to be honest and proud of where I was actually from. Thus, Cul De Sac was born. I still think it’s a great name and does a perfect job of conjuring a place, which is ultimately the source code of my work.

I genuinely believe there is a lot of very cool shit in plain sight. Since subculture no longer exists, I want to use this newsletter as a way to show you my lens on the mainstream, and maybe in the process help you realize that The Gap currently has cooler shit than Our Legacy.

This newsletter doesn’t have a single focus. It’s just a place to park everything I’m obsessed with, confused by, shopping for, or in search of. Some weeks, it’ll be what I’m designing or working on, and other weeks, it’ll be about music, travel, clothing, theme parks, souvenirs, sobriety, or technology (I’m fascinated by the role AI is going to play in the design industry and will continue to share my insights).

Sometimes it’ll make sense. Sometimes it’ll spiral. It’s a moodboard, a diary, a pile of images and ideas — all filtered through the Cul De Sac lens.

“Studies have shown people who live on cul-de-sacs are happier — they feel safer, know their neighbors better, and spend more time outside. It’s not just a dead end — it’s a social design feature masquerading as a street.”

I love that.
I love the idea that breaking the grid can produce so much joy.
That by looking at one another, we can feel more at home.

Anyways, if you made it this far, much love. This is Cul De Sac.
A newsletter about design, culture, ephemera, clothing, and everything else that feels important to me, maybe one day my kids will get a better understanding of me better by reading this shit.

xoxo Colin