A letter from the founder

There's a particular kind of feeling that comes with putting something you built with love on hold.
Not the loud, dramatic kind.
The quiet kind, the kind where you sit with a project you poured yourself into and realise the world has moved on faster than you could follow, and that's nobody's fault, least of all yours.

I started DesignBlocks in 2023 with one belief: that great design education shouldn't be a luxury.
That the gap between someone with raw talent and someone with a real career in digital design shouldn't be measured in thousands of dollars or years of gatekeeping. I wanted to build something comprehensive, honest, and genuinely affordable: a path from internship to leadership that anyone could walk.

I think I built something worth being proud of.

But I also have to be honest with you, and with myself, about what happened next.
AI didn't just change the tools. It changed the questions. The skills I was teaching weren't wrong, but the urgency around them shifted in ways I didn't anticipate. What felt timely became dated. What felt foundational started to feel insufficient. The landscape moved, and I had to decide whether to run to catch up, or pause and think about what running even means anymore. I chose to pause.

And in that pause, something became clear. Over the last couple of years, I've been shifting my focus toward building digital products: going deeper into what it actually takes to take an idea from a blank page all the way to something real that people use. That experience has changed how I see design education entirely.

The next version of DesignBlocks won't just teach you how to design. It will teach you how to build, from ideation to delivery, across the full arc of what it means to create a digital product in 2026 and beyond. Strategy, craft, iteration, shipping. The whole thing.

But here's what will never change: design is not a step in the process. It's the spine of it. Every decision, product, technical, strategic, is ultimately a design decision. That was true before AI arrived, and it will be true long after the dust settles.

This isn't a goodbye. It's a letter left on the kitchen table. I stepped out, I'll be back, and now I have a clearer sense of what I'm coming back with.

To everyone who joined the waitlist, shared the idea, or simply told me it made sense: thank you. You reminded me why this industry is worth fighting for, even when it's mid-transformation and a little disorienting for all of us.

I'll see you on the other side of whatever comes next.

With love,
Lorenzo Bocchi