Introducing: The Friday Five
Each Friday, I’ll publish The Friday Five, a weekly ledger drawn from the shop floor, the windshield, and the workbench.
The structure borrows its language from the old farmer’s almanacs, those annual guides that combined observation, wisdom, tools, and seasonal preparation in one place.
The names of each section come from that tradition.
Proverb
Almanacs have always carried secular proverbs — short lines meant to steady the reader and distill hard-earned wisdom. Here, the Proverb is simply the watchword for the week, a guiding line worth carrying forward.
Tool
Farmers reliant upon almanacs seek practical intelligence on well-built things as much as they do words of wisdom. Just as their almanac offered more than ideas, this almanac will proffer a tool I’ve come to rely on in my work.
Text
Almanacs were read, reread, and marked up over the course of the year. I will share a passage worth considering, something I read this week that lingers.
Signal
Before radar and satellite forecasts, people watched and listened for signs: the movement of birds, the direction of wind, the changing tone of the season. My signals are most often cultural in nature — something I see or hear that hints at what’s to come.
Weather Advisory
Of course, the farmer’s almanac was best known for its weather predictions.
The Weather Advisory here isn’t a forecast but a reminder, a cue for preparation and readiness in the week ahead.
With that, the ledger begins.
The All Plaidout Almanac
Week 1 • Spring • Year One
Friday Five — Vol. 1, No. 1
Proverb
“Well begun is half done.”
— from Aristotle’s Politics, Book V, 1303b.19-30
A good line to keep close at the start of anything worth doing.
Tool
Photoshop.
It has become one of my most valuable workbenches. For years I wanted to become proficient enough in it to perform all my professional roles there: photographer, writer, designer.
Over time, as my work moved into design, creative direction, and brand leadership, Adobe’s signature program became — more often than not — the first tool I reach for in the earliest stages of a project.
It’s where I test ideas, clean images, and incorporate visuals into decision-making, mapping everything from a restaurant concept to a new garment to a more complete sales journey until the work accumulates into finished product.
Like any good tool, Photoshop’s value isn’t novelty.
It’s familiarity: a workbench that has become a world-builder.
Text
“An object,” Patrick Syme, an Edinburgh flower painter, noted with evident frustration, “may be described of such a color by one person, and perhaps mistaken by another for quite a different tint.”
From Kassia St Clair’s essay on Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, the nineteenth-century color taxonomy consulted by Charles Darwin aboard the HMS Beagle.
Long before Pantone numbers, naturalists and artists struggled with the same problem designers face today: how to describe color precisely enough that another pair of eyes might see what you saw.
Signal
I first heard her sing in 2023, and in the time since, the Best New Artist Grammy-winner has quietly found a sunny spot on my weekly playlists… just as spring is set to return.
Dean builds her songs the way my favorite designers construct their garments.
As she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in the clip above, her work is built around small emotional observations layered carefully until something simple begins to feel inevitable.
She’s alighted in me a renewed appetite for sincerity over spectacle. And speaking of a spectacle, watch and listen as the New York Vocal Collective cover Dean’s hit “Man I Need.”
Weather Advisory
On the Workbench this week: Calibrating risk. I’m working through how a life once driven by speed begins to find its footing in steadiness.
Originally published in The All Plaidout Almanac on Substack, March 6, 2026.