About me

Shelby and Val standing onstage, with Val wearing a blue wizard hat — Shelby, Val and Val’s magic hat

If I spoke at a conference tomorrow, this would be my blurb:

Valentine Watkins is a Melbourne-based product content designer currently at Canva.

He specialises in product name validation and thrives at the midpoint of product design, UX research, product marketing, brand, localisation and legal IP.

He’s particularly interested in product launches and the lighting-in-a-bottle moment when launch language becomes the catch-all for a whole consumer category.

Once, he tried to make the idea of “product-language fit” a thing like “product-market fit” (it hasn’t fully caught on yet but he does own the dot com domain just in case).

Lately, he’s getting into AI in a big way, but then again aren’t we all? One time in 2019, he had writer’s block and wished someone would invent an API for content production. He no longer has that wish and is wondering if Ctrl-Z is still an option.

At uni, he wrote a Masters thesis on Shakespeare and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life but that was OK because his job title and specialty didn’t exist yet.

Outside of work he likes fine wine, cats, bargain-hunting, and going for big long city walks with his partner. He also likes going to the world’s various Disneylands but claims he’s not a Disney adult and it’s all for design research.

If listening to podcasts are your thing, I was also on the Canva design podcast once where I was interviewed by my pal Sally Woellner (hi Sally). You can find said podcast ep here (Spotify) and here (Apple) and here (Overcast) and here (Pocket Casts).

About this site

This site mainly exists to log my reading activity in Reading, because otherwise all I’d do is consume tech newsletters and podcasts.

Occasionally, I have an idea about content economics, tech or design that’s looping in my brain and I need to write it down to get it out. Those will appear on the front page. (Update: I wrote something new!)

AI disclosure

I don’t use AI for any part of my writing and editing process. There’s nobody else to blame but yours truly.

However, AI does power the backend of this website and helps me with formatting, coding and research.

Get in touch

If you want to get things I do sent to your inbox, you can join my mailing list by signing up in the webpage footer. I’ll send the occasional plain text email explaining what I’ve been up to. Nothing Substack-y.

You can also follow me on your favourite platform of choice:

Yes ok but why does the site look this way

Nostalgia and fast page loads, mainly.