The Empress: Joy, Care, and Why UX Needs Softer Power

The Empress is the archetype of abundance, care, and creation. She’s lush, radiant, surrounded by wheat and flowing robes, butterflies and rivers. She doesn’t grind; she flourishes. And she reminds us that design, at its best, should too.

The Empress as Designer

We don’t talk enough about care in UX. We talk about “impact,” “efficiency,” “scaling,” but not about softness, delight, or pleasure. The Empress reminds us that those things are not extras — they are essential.

For queer and trans folks, joy itself is a form of resistance. To design with joy is to design against erasure. To embed care in products is to say: your humanity is valid here. And honestly? That’s what separates mediocre UX from the kind that lingers in someone’s memory.

The Empress as Me

After leaving corporate life, I’ve been reclaiming The Empress in my own work: choosing projects that feel nourishing, building visuals that spark joy, and writing words that honor care as much as craft. I’m not interested in designing faster at the expense of feeling. I’m interested in design that feels alive.

Working with AI in this context has been fun. Sure, it can generate wireframes — but it can also generate lush imagery, experimental typography, textures and metaphors that make a product sing. Why shouldn’t our tools be generative in the truest sense: generative of joy?

The Empress as All of Us

The Empress calls on us to design with a softer power — one that nurtures rather than dominates, that delights rather than dictates. In a world obsessed with optimization, that’s radical.

If The Fool teaches us to leap, and The Magician to create, The Empress teaches us to care. And maybe that’s the most important design principle we could carry into 2025: design should not only work, it should make us feel alive.