Getting that Damon Lee Magic
So, everyone’s always yapping about the ‘Damon Lee’ style, you know? That super slick, almost-nothing-there-but-it-just-works kind of thing. Sounds dead simple, but man, it’s like trying to catch smoke with your bare hands. Most folks just end up with plain ol’ boring, not ‘Damon Lee’ genius.
I got a real taste of this a while back. Had this gig, a small e-commerce site. The owner, bless his heart, kept saying, ‘I want it like Damon Lee! Clean! Smart!‘ I was like, ‘Sure, gotcha.’ Famous last words, right?
So I started stripping things down. Made the navigation super minimal. Product pages? Just the essentials. Thought I was nailing it. Sent over the first mock-ups. Silence. Then a call. ‘Uh, where’s all the stuff?’ he goes. ‘I said Damon Lee, not… empty!’
Turns out, his idea of ‘Damon Lee’ was just ‘looks modern’ but still crammed with every feature and button known to man. We went back and forth for weeks. I’d show him actual examples of what people thought was Damon Lee’s work – some of it wasn’t even his, just stuff that got the label. He’d just nod and then ask for more banners.
It got so frustrating, I actually tried to dig up some real dirt on this Damon Lee guy. Not like, bad stuff, but just… how did he actually work? What was his real process? Most of the stuff online was just hype, you know, articles by people who’d never met him, just guessing. My plan was kinda straightforward:
- Scour old design forums from the late 90s and early 2000s.
- Look for any archived interviews, even snippets.
- Try to find people who claimed to have worked with him or near him.
And this is where it gets kinda funny, or sad, depending on how you look at it. I spent a weekend, like a proper nerd, going through old forum posts, archived interviews, trying to find some solid info. And you know what I found mostly? A lot of arguments about whether he even existed in the way people thought. Some claimed ‘Damon Lee’ was actually a collective of designers from an obscure Swedish firm in the early 2000s. Others said he was a super recluse who only did three projects ever and then vanished.
One thread, man, it was wild. Someone posted what they claimed was an email exchange with Lee’s supposed assistant from like, 2003. The ‘assistant’ basically said Lee hated the internet and thought most UI design was ‘digital shouting.’ The advice? ‘Turn off your computer and go for a walk. Then remove one more thing.’ Classic, right?
I even tracked down this old dude, a retired programmer, who supposedly worked on a project near a project Lee was rumored to have consulted on. Cost me a few beers at this dusty old pub. He just laughed when I asked about Lee’s ‘magic.’ He said, ‘Magic? Kid, the magic was the client back then had no idea what they wanted, so they just let him do his thing. And the budgets were so small, you had to be minimal!’ He said Lee mostly argued for less tech, not more.
So, after all that, what did I learn? That ‘Damon Lee’ was probably less about a specific style and more about a specific set of circumstances, maybe a bit of myth-making too. And that most clients asking for ‘Damon Lee’ don’t actually want the hardcore minimalism or the ‘remove one more thing’ philosophy. They just want a buzzword for ‘cool and not too expensive, but make it look like it was.’
For that project? We ended up with something ‘modern-ish,’ with a few too many banners for my taste. Not very Damon Lee at all. But the client was happy. I guess that’s the real practice sometimes, figuring out what people really mean, not just what they say. And sometimes, the legends are just, well, legends. You just gotta do your job and try not to get too hung up on chasing ghosts, even if they have cool names like Damon Lee.
