Design as intent made tangible
Design, to me, is intent made tangible in constraints, systems, and choices people can live with. Call it “styling” and you miss the work: aligning purpose and form across time and context. That was my 2013 thesis, and it still guides me. 🎨👇
2013 context: flat design arrived (hi, iOS 7), and I wrote about thought expressed as form, finding simplicity in nature’s complexity, and the interdependence of Why and How. That aged well. Teams still optimize How because it is measurable. Why stays messy and essential.
Turning Why into practice means choosing architecture, not just looks: IA that fits mental models, patterns that balance progressive disclosure with learnability, and materials, motion, and copy that help cognition. This is the job. The pixels are the evidence.
Concrete tools that help: design systems and tokens to encode decisions, HIG and Material to reduce ambiguity, CSS Grid, Flexbox, and Container Queries for responsive layout, ARIA and WCAG to make intent legible, variable fonts to trade legibility with density.
Every choice has a cost: tokens add coherence but can ossify, rounded corners aid grouping but lower info density, “simple” UIs hide gnarly error states that still need care. I also learned minimalism is not simplicity. Clarity often needs redundancy and stronger contrast.
By 2025, our canvas grew: Figma-era libraries raised quality floors but risk sameness, ML shifted from demographics to intent, AI copilots push us to encode purpose, and spatial UIs add depth, occlusion, and reach constraints. I’m excited, and a little cautious.
Open questions I’m still working through:
- How do we keep Why inside systems so tokens don’t calcify?
- Which metrics protect understanding, not just conversion?
- Where should AI assist without eroding agency or accountability?