The relationship graph

On cold emails, warm intros, and the invisible threads of a career in design

Last month, Carl asked in our subscriber chat about the cold email that helped me land my first job. As I started writing that story, I realized it wasn’t just about one message—it was about the relationships that shaped my entire career path.

Career paths are messy. We love to retroactively impose order on them, crafting neat narratives about deliberate choices and strategic moves. But the reality? It’s more like a complex graph of relationships, happy accidents, and people taking chances on each other. At least, that’s how mine looks.

The power of putting your work online

I never planned to go to art school. Despite creative parents (my dad went through an Alexander Calder phase and built mobiles; my mom created all our Halloween costumes and an immersive puppet theater), both worked in medicine and my understanding of design as a career was nonexistent. I applied to RISD as a gesture to my mom, whose father studied Advertising Design there before becoming a boat captain, then passed away while she was in college. But, I visited and loved it.

RISD Yearbook Class of 1954, ft. Sheldon Lasnovsky

At RISD, while my Industrial Design (ID) classmates perfected their renderings, I was interviewing them about their work and pitching stories to design blogs. When I noticed our department’s only online presence was a forum thread about why you should never hire RISD ID students, I started a blog. That blog, RISD-ID.org, eventually outranked the negative thread on Google. (#SEOFTW)

If you build it, and publish it online, and then tweet at people about it repeatedly…

Having a blog wasn’t enough—you had to tell people about it. So I tweeted at John Maeda, then RISD’s president, who invited me to his office. He connected me with Babette Allina in Government Relations, where I spent the next three years learning how design could reach beyond aesthetics into policy and social impact. Through that office, I also met Marina Mihalakis, who taught me to bake a pie from scratch.

The blog caught the attention of an editor at Core77, who brought me on as a student contributor. This led to my own column and covering design events in New York. There, editors

Mason Currey

and

LinYee Yuan

shaped my voice as a writer. Writing led to more writing—when LinYee started MOLD Magazine years later, she hired me for a few pieces—a gesture of belief that meant so much.

Cold emails that worked

Here’s something they don’t tell you about cold emails: timing matters less than you’d think. Take SOFTlab, whose stunning dichroic installations filled my Tumblr feed. I fell in love with their work and sent an email saying so. That enthusiasm landed me a summer internship in New York, where I spent my days doing everything from buying out Staples’ entire stock of gold paper clips to cleaning the laser cutter.

But the cold email that started this story? I sent it to

Tina Roth Eisenberg

late one night while I was already deep in the interview process for an internship designing toothbrushes at P&G. I had even sent in my hair sample for drug testing. But something about Tina’s work—a blend of design, community building, and writing—felt closest to what I wanted to do. The timing worked out: She had just had a literal dream about bringing on someone to help her and employee #1

Kevin Huynh

with CreativeMornings, a global creative community and lecture series. That summer I found myself working from her DUMBO-based coworking space, Studiomates.

How to write a cold email

Community spaces as career catalysts

Studiomates became a node connecting countless dots in my career graph. Albert Lee, who I met there, introduced me to many of my early freelance clients and has always been incredibly generous with both his time and advice. The space introduced me to lifelong friends like Jonnie and Cameron (who later officiated my wedding), Jen, Kary and so many more. Through CreativeMornings, I tapped into a global creative community—years later, I still have personal tour guides in nearly every major city.

Craig Shapiro, an early CreativeMornings investor, hired me to work on content for his fund. This led to collaborating with Jake Hobart and

Jacob Heftmann

of XXIX on what I still think was a very rad newsletter. Jake and Jacob were both collaborators and mentors, bouncing ideas around as I weighed various professional and personal decisions. They’re the best—I get warm fuzzies just thinking about them. They also gave me a very realistic peek into what running a studio could look like.

The people make the place

That newsletter work caught the attention of a recruiter in Google’s Creative Lab via Working Not Working. The Lab operated like a small agency within Google, letting me work quickly on various projects with different people. So many wonderful people passed through there. (And some real pieces of work—but that’s for another time!) There, I met my future HAWRAF studio partners Andrew Herzog, Pedro Sanches, and Nicky Tesla. I also met Deneesha Lawrence-Williams, who keeps me on track to this day. Oh, and my husband, too.

Where HAWRAF’s clients came from (2016)

When HAWRAF closed in 2019, another Lab connection, Amber Bravo, reached out about freelancing on her team at Google Design. That led to a full-time role and eventually my current position at Figma when she left and I followed. Amber has probably spent more time with me than anyone outside my immediate family—over IRL and Zoom meetings, discussing my (lack of) facial neutrality, elevating my prose, and helping me grow in all ways. Thank you, Amber.

What this means in 2024

It’s easy to look at this story and think “ah, but that was then.” In today’s world of remote work, does relationship-building still matter? Of course. Yes, the tools have changed. We’re more likely to meet on Substack than in coworking spaces, and our first interactions might be quote tweets versus conferences. But careers are still built on real connections between real people.

The difference now is that we have more ways to form these connections, and paradoxically, that makes authenticity even more valuable. When everyone has access to AI-generated perfection, slightly messy, genuinely human stands out. When everyone’s posting polished LinkedIn updates, the raw, honest sharing of work-in-progress shines. When everything is optimizing for virality, taking time to thoughtfully and intentionally build real relationships matters.

Building your own graph

Career paths aren’t linear progressions. They’re complex graphs of relationships, often invisible until you step back and map them. Each node represents not just a job or a skill, but a person who took a chance, offered guidance, or simply showed up at the right moment.

Looking at my relationship graph today, I’m struck by how many key nodes came from moments that seemed insignificant at the time. A blog post here, a coffee chat there, a slightly awkward introduction at a design event. None of them felt like career-defining moments when they happened. But together, they created the invisible infrastructure that supported everything that came after.

So, write the enthusiastic email to someone whose work you admire. Help document and share other people’s work. The relationships you build along the way aren’t just stepping stones to the next opportunity—they’re the foundation that makes all the opportunities possible. Here’s to the messy reality of career paths, to the people who shape them, and to all the connections yet to be made. May your own relationship graph continue to grow in unexpected and wonderful ways.

—Carly