Daring Next got a little Substack sister
Daring Next has a new sister publication called NEON White Interiors. Here is what it means for this one.
Daring Next got a sister publication last week. NEON White Interiors was launched in a completely different part of Substack and I am beyond excited.
If you are not familiar with the Daring Next origin story. It first came to life on my Squarespace site as AI, Me and Other Mysteries. The real mystery was me. I had just quit my job, my mental health was in tatters, and I had firmly sworn that I was not going to go back to regular employment ever again. The publication name didn’t stick around for long and by the time I launched on Substack in September 2025, Daring Next had become the fixed identity. It became my vehicle for exploring just what my new chapter could look like, what the fuss with AI was all about and exactly how I fit into it all.
Anna Levitt published a post in February that covers some of my back story:
The arc for Daring Next has been fascinating. It started in open water, a broad AI curiosity tangled up with personal reinvention, and a first tentative dip into experimenting confidently in public. I quickly realised that for me, breaking something is the whole method and it became material to share because there were other people just like me, also figuring something out, wondering which way was up and if they had anything to offer. My lane was very recognisably locked in for me during the second quarter of 2026 as I observed a sharpening in the topics I choose to write about – voice, culture, identity, sensitivity, recognition, calibration, all key themes that have mattered greatly to me.
Every single post I have written arrived out of a particular tension. When I say I write from the messy middle, it’s not just a metaphor on a page, it’s actually been the real deal. Every single week. My love of social sciences, with Linguistics and Anthropology my focus during university studies, means I eagerly stepped into the role of participant-observer and embraced it, equal parts the best thing ever and absolutely ridiculous!
This has been less an AI newsletter and more a consciousness under pressure newsletter where I just happen to use AI as the pressure. AI was the ocean and I was writing about the boat.
I have never had a content pre-written and saved up for you weeks in advance, with the exception of perhaps one of two collaborations finished more quickly than expected. I have often wished I could be that person, but Daring Next has not been that kind of beast. It’s mattered to me that I stay true to where I actually am each week and don’t package everything up with a neat bow. You’ve been asked to sit with ambiguity a lot, and for those of you who have kept reading, thank you for sticking with it!
Underneath everything has been one of two methodologies, sometimes both at once: solve the possible and design the relationship. I approach everything in life with the view that any problem is solvable. I may not yet know how but if I sit with something long enough, without making it overwhelming and perhaps a little bit fun, a solution always appears. I view constraints as features, building for myself first using my own very real constraints and failures as data. Despising generic solutions, I’m always the first test case so that by the time I hand anything to someone else, it has already survived real conditions. The quality of any output depends entirely on the quality of the context going in. When I extract a framework for a specific solution, I far prefer to hand over the universal principles rather than a personalised tool because your context is not mine. If you understand how it works and how to think about it, that is always more valuable than being told here use this.
I’m incredibly proud of Daring Next. I’m proud of how I have grown through it, the things I have learned and the confidence gained, especially finding a voice in a public space without apologising. The community that has absorbed me with so much warmth and kindness, the conversations, the important work we have created together. All of it has been simply magnificent.
Daring Next has also been incredibly hard work. Every single week. I’ve struggled to communicate just what value I offer when I’ve been over here still trying to figure it out myself. Growth in this space has been painful, demoralising and not something I have been willing to compromise my values on just to move the needle. I feel very attached to this brand because it has not come easy and I’ve found myself fighting hard for it.
A blind optimism has keeping moving me forward – that even though I may not have any clue exactly what I am heading towards, that I can trust the process, that this all has a purpose. To just focus on the thing in front of me, believing that will lead to the next thing in front of that.
It’s been stressing me out the last couple of months. Migraines started returning and we don’t love those at all.
If you’ve spotted my Substack Notes feed recently, you’ll see I’m firmly in the camp of refusing to dice a post ten ways to Sunday and I have increasingly leaned towards images and animation. A need to simply create has started competing with everything else. I just want to have fun and play, and somewhere along the way, everything started becoming more stressful and serious where there used to be joyful discovery. I can’t see what Daring Next can be apart from what it already is. There are some obvious things it could be boxed into, but they honestly bore me silly and send me right back to the career I’ve been working so hard to pivot away from.
A loud, future-impacting click happened in my brain at approximately 8pm one quiet Friday night at the start of June.
A multi-modal designer, who also happens to be a dear friend, created a logo for me in 2018. It was for a brand called NEON White Interiors. The next logical step for many interior design students is to launch out with their own practise, and I naturally assumed that would be my own path too after completing my diploma. It wasn’t.
One interior consult and I knew I hated it. An interview for a kitchen designer threw up so many red flags I knew that was not the way either.
The dream for interior design as a career pivot was parked away, alongside the logo. I continued to love design and work in admin roles, helped friends with styling choices, enjoyed decorating and rearranging my own home, indulging in home décor shops at every opportunity. I just wasn’t sure if it would become anything more. My passion is play to me.
Which is exactly what clicked in my brain.
This IS the next step. Not a reinvention of Daring Next but a completely new adventure. Within a week, I had not only dusted off the logo, I had an entire product planned out and content ideas for six months. A visual brand with four complementary visual stories. Pinker than I ever thought was possible on the page of something I had created.
The NEON White Interiors About page
Anthropic’s Fable 5 was insanely valuable in that week despite its extremely short tenure. It just got the brief, appearing to innately grasp who I was, what I valued and where I wanted to take this even as I was still finding the words to articulate the dream out loud. After a frustrating few days hitting dead ends with Claude Sonnet/Opus variations and ChatGPT, Fable 5 allowed me to work through the visual direction in a morning and by lunchtime I not only had four content pillars planned, I had matching visuals, a visual reference guide and more. By the end of that afternoon, I had NEON White skills in place and an education curriculum for the next six months’ worth of posting. My head was spinning in the very best way.
An AI and Tools content pillar was important to me, but I don’t agree with the mainstream approach of loading photos of my own home into some tech company’s app and calling that a wise life choice. I wanted something different and distinctly Daring Next, in the NEON White space. Fable immediately got it and I’ve lamented ever since it was turned off that a huge ambitious plan never fully got pieced together. I’m excited to begin anyway, because the foundation work is really amazing.
NEON White Interiors is where I get to combine my passion, my qualification, a love for teaching and my someday I might into NOW. It fell into place in that remarkably quick way the very best things do. THIS is what I have been working towards, laying the foundation for, one step in front of the other, for months now. This is what Daring Next led me to, and it is so very daring next.
When I asked Claude to analyse all of my newsletter archive recently, it told me this: Every pattern I’ve seen across every newsletter point at the same thing. You help people see what they’ve been building without realising it. You make invisible expertise visible. You sit with someone in their fog and find the thread.
Reading that felt so remarkable to me, and it still does. Now, I’ve sat in my own fog for long enough to find my own elusive thread. Finally.
I have literally no idea what will become of Daring Next as a publication and honestly, that’s sort of exciting. There is a part of me that just wants to slash-and-burn and focus solely on NEON White. Whenever I see my homepage though, it stops me. A visual brand I fought to find, work I published shaking nervously but insanely proud of. Daring Next is mine, hard won and spectacular because of it. Each and every post represents who I was in at that moment, what I learned, how I thought about it and what I decided. I simply cannot cast the Daring Next Navigator out to sea.
What has happened though is that I have outgrown the version of Daring Next that I started with.
So, we’ll see! This space may go quiet for a while as I continue to develop NEON White and find my way there. I can’t promise weekly posts right now or a consistent presence in the newsfeed. If you want to check out what I am up to, head on over to NEON White - I’d love to see you there! The posts are far more bite-sized and the dream is to create a beautiful, warm space to dwell in for a beat, not just in our homes but also on your screen.
It’s taken almost a full year to find my path. To all of you lovely people who have cheered me on and believed in me along the way, I’m so very grateful. Thank you. Daring Next has always been about the people, and I couldn’t do this without you.
Here’s to daring next and all the wonderful things ahead for us all.
~ Dallas ~
Further reading…
Where it began:
A post about interior design that formed part of the inspiration for Natalie Nicholson to write a song for Daring Next called Always the People:
The Daring Next messy middle manifesto:
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Oh I love interior design! Can't wait to see what you write about. Years ago when we were selling a property I finally got around to styling it and was like wtf, why did I wait until we're selling to do this. I haven't made that mistake again, but interior design feels like something that is ongoing. Every time I refresh a space, I find myself a few months later finding ways to keep improving it and personalising it, and I think that's what you've done with your writing as well! The more we do it the more we figure out what we want to do next. Looking forward to reading more about your interior design thoughts, off to subscribe now!
I’m so excited for you Dallas! This was a lovely way to bridge from where you were to where you are going.