“Do Good Things,
Save the Planet.”

– Quote, from me, to my students,
pretty much every single day.

Hi, I’m Robert. Although I was born in Canada and raised in California, I’ve spent nearly 20 years in the UK and live in Cumnor, a small village just outside Oxford.

I’ve always thought there’s a real difference between art and design: artists seem to create new things out of nothing, while to me, design is fundamentally an organisational skill about relationships. It’s taking existing things and arranging them in relation to each other until everything is in harmony.

I’ve been doing this my whole life. My mother said she used to come home and find I’d rearranged all the furniture. I still do it, constantly. It’s unusual for anything in my home to stay in the same place for more than six weeks. A new rug arrives and things move. A new table and things move again. The season changes and it’s time to pull out the blankets and make room to bring some plants inside. I don’t feel settled until everything in a room is in proper relationship with each other and reflects this particular time and place.

The same instinct runs through everything I do. Graphic design, garden design, interior design, photography, even cooking: to me these are all versions of that same organising skill. My garden is mostly in pots on a patio, partly because of necessity, but mostly because I can move them around depending on the season, the light, what’s in bloom. That ability to keep adjusting, keep refining the relationships between things, is what brings me joy.

This site is where that sensibility goes to work on the world. Gardens, houses, places I’ve visited, and the harder-to-categorise things under the Spirit heading: folklore, history, the numinous edges of the everyday. These are things I love and love to share with others.

For thirty years I’ve worked at the intersection of design, technology, and communication, from building some of the first digital textbooks at McGraw-Hill in the 1990s, to teaching Photography and Graphic Communication at A-Level at a sixth form college in Oxford, to running tarothistory.com, a website and forum for the historical study of tarot cards that I founded 20 years ago. I’m still drawn to the edge where technology meets design, including the work at spiritusloci.ai.

If you’d like to get in touch, contact me.