A working designer's rules for making things clear, calm, and quietly usable: establish hierarchy, respect the grid, spend attention like it is expensive, and remove more than you add. Craft over decoration, restraint over reflex.
6 chapters · 29 rules
This is a principle-first field guide to product and interface design, written by someone who has sat through enough critiques to know which rules survive contact with real work. It treats design as a craft of hierarchy, clarity, and restraint rather than a hunt for novelty, and it states each rule plainly, reasons it honestly, and marks the moments it should bend. The aim is not to make you a more decorative designer. It is to make you a more deliberate one.
For designers who want a durable set of principles to argue with, and for the engineers, founders, and product managers who shape interfaces without the title. It suits the newcomer building their first instincts and the senior hand who wants a clean checklist to hold their own work against. No particular tool or platform is assumed, only that you care whether the thing you make actually serves the person using it.
Added the restraint chapter and the states-nobody-demos rule, reworked the color section around grayscale-first and accessible contrast, and rewrote the critique rules after years of running them in studio.
Expanded interaction and feedback, added the perceived-performance and destructive-action rules, and introduced the spacing-scale worked example.
Initial publication — four chapters on hierarchy, type, color, and process, written for a single studio's onboarding.
“It says out loud the things I used to spend a year teaching by osmosis. 'Start in grayscale' and 'design the states nobody demos' alone changed how our juniors work.”
“The engineers argued with the restraint chapter and the designers argued with 'default to convention,' which is exactly why it was worth reading together. Quotable and unusually honest about when the rules bend.”
