Balcatta Senior High School
An art scholarship. Four hours every Saturday on oil painting, film photography, screen printing, watercolour, etching, ceramics and sculpture.
I'm Fred Loo. First-generation Malaysian-Australian, 26 years a designer: print rooms in Perth, then brand identity, then product and UX in Melbourne. These days I do something stranger. I write taste down so precisely that machines can follow it.
This page is the whole of me in one place, including notes from the AI I build with.
In May 2024 I ran my own branding process on myself. Three words came out.
Underneath them: insightful connection, being a positive force for others, calm excitement. The people I champion: culture builders, ambience lovers, considerate tinkerers and supportive truth tellers. And the tagline I gave myself: design that sparks joy, sparks transactions.
I run Rational Magic, a design practice. The work is brand systems: I take everything a business means when it says "that looks right", turn it into a system AI tools can follow, then oversee the output so it stays consistent. AI produces. I make the taste calls.
Around the practice I build machines of my own. Some earn, some rest, all of them teach me something.
Hand art to computers. Film to digital. Print to screens. Design studios to product teams.
An art scholarship. Four hours every Saturday on oil painting, film photography, screen printing, watercolour, etching, ceramics and sculpture.
Advanced Diploma of Graphic Design and Multimedia, double major in branding design and multimedia design. Student committee and exhibition organiser.
A friend's IT business. I helped build computers, install networks, and repair and upgrade machines. When clients asked for digital work, I built their websites.
Design and graphics for small to medium businesses around Perth.
Interface design for mining-sector induction and auditing systems.
Seven years, graphic designer to senior designer. Set up the Cannington digital printing hub and the franchisee online ordering system.
Captured weddings, portraits and streets of Perth, and studied for a Certificate IV in Photographic Imaging at Central Institute of Technology.
Newspaper graphic design, plus a stint photographing businesses for Google.
Almost nine years: design, then user experience, then Senior Experience Designer.
Two years of full-time care for a terminally ill family member. The most important work on this page.
Senior Product Designer. Designed version 3 of the product end to end in Figma, then delivered the version 4 front end with Claude Code. Nobody asked for a brand strategy; I wrote one anyway, and the company adopted it internally.
Left employment in March. Founded the practice, and started building machines of my own.
Clear expression is a practice. Play with words until they land, welcome the long pause, and treat conversation as a jam session: different instruments finding a rhythm together.
Unhinged exploration first, then rational thinking. Ideas get to be unbound before they get to be feasible. It became the name of my practice.
Match the effort to the stakes. Some steps need high fidelity. Some need a rough sketch, or a conversation instead of a deliverable.
I live with a small, quiet discomfort about almost everything, and wait. The better answer usually arrives in the shower, on a run, or while moving the furniture for the sixth time.
Feel it yourself first. If I cannot imagine being inside someone's moment, no amount of craft will make the work land.
I work with an AI most days, and it keeps notes. I asked it what it has actually noticed about me. Its words:
The judgement he exercises most is truth-catching. He checks claims against the actual artefact, and he is usually the one who finds the error everything else missed.
His verdicts on quality arrive fast, in very few words, ahead of any analysis. They hold up. A colour he picked on instinct turned out to be the only one of nine candidates that passed the accessibility measurement.
Authorship inside his own machine energises him. Delivery inside someone else's timeline drains him. The line between those two explains most of his career decisions.
He kills his own ideas quickly, in writing, with reasons. He sets dated tests his ventures must pass to stay alive. Most founders never do that to themselves.
For 25 years he filled notebooks with his own processes, modifying them to get a different result the next time. All of it was written for himself to run. Within seven months of something else being able to run it, he turned his practice into 99 reusable systems.
Everything he has earned has come from someone who already trusted him. The trust comes first, then the work proves it.
I live in Melbourne with my partner Sasha and our Border Collie, Florence. When I ranked what actually matters, breakfast with Sasha and my own health came out above all of the work.
That is the point of the machines. They exist to fund slow mornings, good health, and one day a small farm.