Peter Kaizer
Creative Side Projects
Design Bytes Media
An independent publishing imprint creating permanent homes for ideas at the intersection of design thinking, digital craft, and visual culture.
The project
Design Bytes Media is the imprint behind several independent publishing and education projects I've built since 2024. The core idea is straightforward: design thinking deserves a home that isn't subject to algorithmic pressure, sponsorship influence, or the churn of social media. Long-form essays, educational curricula, and reference tools all need space to be what they are — the imprint provides that container.
The tagline is "Ideas at the intersection of design and digital culture." In practice that means writing and tools aimed at design practitioners who care about the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves.
What lives under it
Design Bytes is the publication arm — long-form essays and short Bytes covering craft, systems thinking, design philosophy, and tools. Published on Ghost, free to read, with a bi-monthly newsletter.
From Figma to Fluent Code is the educational curriculum: a structured, five-phase path for visual designers to become fluent in modern HTML and CSS using the abstractions they already know from Figma.
Portfolio Starter is the hands-on capstone for that curriculum — a zero-setup HTML and CSS template learners build out as their first real project.
Modern Web Starter is a developer-facing companion: a zero-dependency foundation using semantic HTML, CSS cascade layers, and vanilla JavaScript for building without framework overhead.
Streetwise Gourmet sits adjacent to the design work — a Baltimore food publication co-authored with Matt Lallo that applies the same editorial standards (honest writing, no sponsored content, regional specificity) to food and restaurant coverage.
Editorial philosophy
The imprint operates from a single conviction: precision in every detail, from argument to layout. That applies to both the written content and the technical choices behind each property. Ghost for publishing, semantic HTML for templates, no tracking beyond what's strictly necessary. The design of each site is minimal by design — the ideas are the product, not the aesthetic.
"Good design is intelligence made visible. Good writing is intelligence made shareable." That's the standard the imprint tries to hold.