You know that feeling when you look at a sneaker or a chair and suddenly realize someone spent three years obsessing over the exact curve of the plastic? That's the rabbit hole. Honestly, before Netflix Art of Design (officially titled Abstract: The Art of Design) hit the platform, most of us just treated "design" as a fancy word for making things look pretty. We were wrong.
Design is solve-or-die. It’s engineering with a soul.
When Scott Dadich—the former editor-in-chief of Wired—teamed up with Netflix, they didn't just make another dry documentary. They built a visual playground. If you haven't sat through the Tinker Hatfield episode, you’re missing the blueprint for how the Air Jordan even exists. It wasn't about fashion; it was about a pole vaulter’s sensibility applied to leather and air.
The Real Impact of Netflix Art of Design on Our Brains
Most "creative" shows are boring. They feature a guy in a turtleneck talking about "minimalism" while staring at a white wall. Abstract broke that. It used the very medium of film to mimic the headspace of the designer. When they profiled illustrator Christoph Niemann, the screen itself became a sketchbook. It felt frantic. It felt alive.
That’s the thing about Netflix Art of Design. It proves design isn't a luxury. It’s the way we interact with reality.
Think about Cas Holman. She designs toys. But not the plastic junk that breaks in five minutes. She designs "unstructured play." Her episode in Season 2 is a masterclass in child psychology. She argues that if you give a kid a toy with a specific "way" to play, you've already failed. You’ve killed their imagination. Instead, she builds Rigamajig—basically big wooden parts that don't "do" anything until a kid decides they do. It’s brilliant. It's also terrifying for parents who want things to be neat.
Why Tinker Hatfield is the Heart of the Show
If you ask any sneakerhead about the most important episode, they’ll point to the one with Tinker. He’s the guy behind the Air Max 1. He's the guy who realized that showing the "air" bubble—making the invisible visible—would change consumer psychology forever.
He didn't start as a designer. He was an architect.
That's a massive distinction. Architecture is about load-bearing walls and survival. When he brought that to Nike, he stopped treating shoes like clothes and started treating them like buildings for feet. It changed the entire trajectory of the brand. He explains in the show that he almost got fired for the Air Max 1. People thought it looked "broken" because you could see inside it. Now, that "broken" look is a multi-billion dollar aesthetic.
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Breaking Down the "Abstract" Formula
The show doesn't follow a straight line. Thank god.
Each episode is a different flavor. The Neri Oxman episode feels like a sci-fi movie because she’s literally 3D printing with silk and bees. Then you jump to Ruth Carter, the costume designer for Black Panther, and suddenly it’s a history lesson mixed with Afrofuturism. It’s dizzying.
- The Cinematography: It changes to match the artist.
- The Pacing: Some episodes are slow and meditative; others feel like a caffeine buzz.
- The Stakes: You realize that if a bio-architect fails, the structure collapses. If a typeface designer fails, you can't read the emergency exit sign.
It’s Not Just About "The Greats"
One of the biggest misconceptions about Netflix Art of Design is that it’s just a vanity project for famous people. Sure, Olafur Eliasson is a global superstar in the art world. But the show digs into his failures, too. It shows the logistics of moving a giant block of ice from Greenland to a city square just to watch it melt. It’s inconvenient. It’s expensive. And as he points out, it’s necessary to make people feel climate change rather than just reading a graph about it.
That’s the "Abstract" secret sauce. It connects the high-brow concepts to the dirt under the fingernails.
Ian Spalter’s episode is another one that hits differently. He was the head of design at Instagram. Remember when the icon changed from the cute little retro camera to the gradient purple thing? The internet lost its mind. People hated it. Spalter walks through why they did it—how the old logo didn't scale and how they had to strip everything back to the "essence" of a camera. It's a lesson in brand ego. You have to be willing to be hated to progress.
The Problem With Modern "Design" Shows
Most shows focus on the "reveal." The HGTV effect. You see a mess, then you see a shiny thing. Netflix Art of Design ignores the reveal almost entirely. It focuses on the "middle." The part where the designer is staring at a wall, hating their own work, wondering if they’ve lost their touch.
It’s honest.
Design is mostly just making mistakes until one mistake looks like an intentional choice. Paula Scher, the legendary graphic designer at Pentagram, talks about this in the first season. She designed the Citibank logo on a napkin during a meeting. It took her seconds. But as she explains, it took her thirty years of experience to be able to do it in seconds. You’re paying for the thirty years, not the napkin.
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What We Can Actually Learn From It
You don't have to be a designer to get something out of this. That’s why it keeps popping up in people’s "Recommended" feeds years after it premiered.
It teaches empathy.
When you see how Ilse Crawford thinks about a room—how she thinks about the way a chair feels against your back or the sound a floor makes—you start to realize that your environment dictates your mood. If you’re grumpy at work, maybe it’s not the job. Maybe it’s the fluorescent lighting and the desk that’s two inches too high. Design is the silent language of how we feel.
Why Season 2 Felt Different
Season 2 took a harder turn into the "why." It moved away from just "cool objects" and into "systemic change."
- Bio-Architecture: Neri Oxman isn't just making pretty things; she's looking for ways to grow buildings instead of building them.
- Digital Product Design: Ian Spalter shows that the apps we use are designed to be addictive, and the designer's job is often to find the balance between "useful" and "predatory."
- Costume Design: Ruth Carter shows how clothing encodes culture and power.
It’s a lot heavier than the first season, but it feels more urgent.
The Future of Design Content
Is there going to be a Season 3? Netflix is famously quiet about these things. But the legacy of Netflix Art of Design is already set. It spawned a whole wave of "process-porn" documentaries. People realized they actually like watching experts be experts.
We’re tired of fake drama. We want to see how a typeface is born.
Honestly, the show is a bit of a time capsule now. Looking back at the Instagram episode feels like looking at a different era of the internet. But the core principles—the stuff Tinker Hatfield says about athletes or what Bjarke Ingels says about "hedonistic sustainability"—that stuff is evergreen. It’s about the human desire to impose order on chaos.
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How to Apply These Design Principles to Your Life
You don't need a degree from RISD to use this stuff.
Stop looking at the whole and start looking at the parts. If you're frustrated with a process at your job, "design" a better one. Don't just complain about it. Map out the touchpoints. Where does the friction happen? That’s what a designer does.
Embrace the "unstructured" moments. Follow Cas Holman’s lead. Give yourself permission to mess around with ideas that don't have a clear "goal." Sometimes the best solutions come from just moving the pieces around on the table to see what fits.
Watch the show with a notebook. Seriously. Not to take school notes, but to sketch. Even if you can't draw. The act of visual thinking—translating a sound or an idea into a shape—activates a different part of your brain.
Your Design Checklist
If you're looking to dive deeper into the world of Netflix Art of Design, start here:
- Watch the Tinker Hatfield episode first. It’s the most accessible entry point and explains the "why" of design better than any textbook.
- Pay attention to the sound design. The show uses audio to illustrate the creative process in a way that most people miss on the first watch.
- Look at your own space. After an episode, look at one object in your room—a lamp, a remote, a shoe—and try to imagine the three biggest problems the designer had to solve to make it.
- Research the "Pentagram" firm. If you liked Paula Scher, look up their other work. They basically designed the visual world we live in, from the High Line in NYC to the logos of major tech companies.
Design isn't just a career. It’s a way of looking at a broken world and deciding it doesn't have to stay that way. That’s the real takeaway from Abstract. It’s a call to action. Go make something that doesn't suck.
Next Steps for You:
Start by re-watching the Paula Scher episode (Season 1, Episode 6). It’s the perfect bridge between "art" and "utility." Once you've done that, pick one "invisible" object in your daily life—like your toothbrush or your car's dashboard—and research the history of its design. You’ll find that everything has a story, and usually, that story involves someone fighting a giant corporation to make things just a little bit better for you.