Over time, I’ve accumulated a scattered set of philosophies about what it actually means to design and build interfaces. This is an attempt to gather the principles that guide my work in one place.
Quality is a function of time
The startup ecosystem has been largely driven by a single mandate: “move fast and break things”. It is a mentality that champions rapid deployment over deliberate craftsmanship, treating velocity as the ultimate metric of success. But to understand the true nature of design, I prefer to look to the reminder in The Social Network (which was, ironically, delivered by the same person who coined the aforementioned motto) that “fashion is never finished”. I think this idea perfectly captures the reality of our discipline: good design is a living, breathing entity that defies the artificial constraints of a sprint.
In the pursuit of great work, there is always another layer to peel back, another point of friction to smooth out, and another subtle detail to elevate. True perfection in design is an illusion; it is a horizon line that moves as you walk toward it. You can never quite reach it, but the act of walking toward it is what gives the work its integrity. Our highest responsibility as designers is to push as close to that unattainable threshold as humanly possible, understanding that a design is never truly finished, it is simply released.
Achieving that level of depth and resonance requires profound patience. It demands the discipline to slow down, reflect, and sit with a problem in a world that constantly pressures us to speed up. You cannot hack a masterpiece, and you cannot rush intuition. Ultimately, quality is not a lucky accident or a product of sheer speed, but the direct mathematical function of the time, thought, and care invested in it.
Give a fuck about everything
The most memorable web interactions and digital experiences aren’t born from sheer technical prowess - they are the direct result of creators who genuinely care about every single detail. It is an ethos of uncompromising intentionality. When you interact with a beautifully crafted product, what you are really feeling is the residual energy of a designer who refused to settle for the baseline of “good enough”. They imbue an obsessive degree of fuck-giving into their craft, treating the seemingly invisible micro-interactions with the same reverence as the core feature set, and leaving absolutely no detail unaccounted for.
Crucially, giving a fuck doesn’t have to be exhausting or complex. It lives in the simple, accessible choices that take only minutes but are so often ignored. It means taking the time to write a human-sounding error message instead of leaving a generic system warning. It means making sure your text contrast is actually legible, adding a smooth fade to a button’s hover state, or ensuring an icon aligns perfectly with its text label. It is the choice to design a thoughtful empty state rather than serving a blank screen. True craft is not always about grand gestures, but more about that relentless commitment to these small, manageable moments of quality. You have to get excited about giving a fuck, because that compounding care is what ultimately separates the functional from the unforgettable.
Taken from Paco Coursey, via Rauno Freiberg’s Devouring Details course:
Details. Imbuing every aspect of your work with care. Animate those icons. Brand that scrollbar. Polish that :active state. Load a single typeface glyph to render the world’s best ampersand. Make it fast. Make it accessible. Add keyboard shortcuts. Add tooltips. Animate the transition between two open tooltips. Manually measure text and avoid line wrapping widows. Design favicons that reflect app state. Convert internal URLs to rich previews. Render a custom input text caret and animate it better than any web browser does. Design a whole new stylesheet for printing. Design a whole new page for mobile. Dynamically generate video thumbnails and use them in a custom video player. Optimize your re-renders. Every single interface has infinite opportunity for polish and delight. Reading that list is exciting – imagine a product that goes the extra mile, then goes an extra ten miles. It makes me want to drop everything spend my life crafting the details. I want to build extraordinary things.
Pay attention to our shared world
This principle is a natural extension of the previous one: if you are going to care about the details in your own work, you have to actively pay attention to the details in the world around you. My brain has always been hardwired for trivia: collecting the kinds of esoteric facts and cultural fragments that serve you well behind a Jeopardy! podium (trust me, I know first-hand), but which most people simply tune out. Over time, I’ve realized that this propensity for noticing the unnoticed is actually a designer’s greatest asset. In addition to allowing you to accumulate visual inspiration, being culturally dense keeps you down to earth.
You cannot build truly resonant experiences if your frame of reference is limited entirely to software. You have to actively seek out the broader spectrum of human creativity. Wander through museums and observe the visceral, raised texture of impasto painting, the dramatic interplay of light in chiarascuro, the geometric harmony of De Stijl, or the Japanese philosophy of kintsugi. Train your ear to learn the differences between legato and staccato, understand how Wendy Carlos pioneered electronic sound synthesis, or the rhythmic principles behind how Kanye flips a Kay Gees sample in “Celebration”. Watch a movie by Wes Anderson or Chantal Akerman or Park Chan-wook. Look to the sweeping, gravity-defying architecture of Zaha Hadid or Oscar Niemeyer. Sit in a modern chair and recognize the utilitarian genius of a Dieter Rams, a Ray Eames or an Eileen Gray. Study the avant-garde silhouettes of fashion designers like Rei Kawakubo and Demna Gvasalia, or immerse yourself in the ever-so sharp literature of astute authors like Lucy Ellman and David Foster Wallace. Do things.
On the surface, learning and knowing these things might not seem to have a direct influence on the interface you are designing today. But absorbing all of this infinitely expands your creative palette and, more importantly, makes you a worldlier person. When you immerse yourself in the art, history, and culture of different eras and demographics, you develop a profound understanding of the diverse backgrounds of the users you serve. It builds a deeper, more grounded empathy. You stop regurgitating the same trendy digital patterns and start designing with a genuine awareness of the human experience. You gain a wealth of diverse references to compare your work against, allowing you to find your own distinct voice while staying deeply connected to the people you are actually building for.
In essence, learn the price of a gallon of milk. It’ll serve you and your users (fellow humans!) well.
Don’t dread derivation
I’ve always struggled with a deep-seated fear of being perceived as unoriginal. In a culture that fetishizes pure innovation, the label of “derivative” can feel like a death knell for a creative professional. We see how ruthlessly pastiche is criticized in modern media (for example, the widespread disdain for bands like Greta Van Fleet among serious music fans for sounding like they entirely lifted the Led Zeppelin playbook). That fear of producing a mere imitation is paralyzing. It creates a mental block where, if I feel unable to conjure something entirely unprecedented out of thin air, my instinct is to simply bury the work.
But this pursuit of absolute originality is often a trap that ignores how creativity actually functions. We forget that some of the most vibrant cultural and artistic movements are built explicitly on the foundation of derivation. Consider the architecture of rap music: the entire genre fundamentally emerged from the art of the sample. Producers take an existing funk drum break, a vintage jazz loop, or a familiar vocal hook, and recontextualize those borrowed elements into something entirely fresh and culturally resonant. It isn’t condemned as unoriginality; it is celebrated as synthesis. As designers, we need to grant ourselves that same grace.
Nothing is created in a vacuum. Every great interface, aesthetic movement, or digital product is a remix of the ideas, patterns, and solutions that came before it. Dreading derivation only serves to keep our work hidden. We have to accept that imitating our influences is often the necessary first step toward eventually finding our own distinct voice. Releasing something that wears its inspirations on its sleeve is infinitely more valuable than releasing nothing at all out of a fear of comparison.
Simple is good, most of the time
As designers, our feeds are saturated with avant-garde interfaces that challenge conventions and push creative boundaries. It is entirely natural to want to emulate that ambition and reinvent the wheel, but this instinct often lures us into the “novelty trap”. When we prioritize cleverness over clarity, we unintentionally impose a cognitive burden on our users. We build complex experiences meant to make people stop and think, completely forgetting that the average consumer isn’t looking for a puzzle to solve. They simply want to get their job done with as little friction as possible.
Because of this, the most effective layout to ship is almost always the simplest one. While leaning on familiar, established UI patterns might feel uninspired or safe to the creator, those same patterns are intuitive and invisible to the user. We must remember that stripping away unnecessary complexity to help someone accomplish a task is not a creative compromise, but rather a challenge to make the most of our constraints. Grounding a product in pure utility means setting our egos aside and recognizing that the most successful consumer designs are the ones users never have to think about at all.
This is, of course, not to say that we should not ever push the boundaries. There is a distinct time and place for bold aesthetics. When the goal is to evoke emotion, breaking the rules is necessary. The key distinction is intent.