Notes from a year of saying no

Good design rarely announces itself. It shows up as the absence of friction: the menu you did not have to hunt for, the paragraph that read easily, the button that was exactly where your thumb expected it.

Start with the constraint

Every project has one constraint that matters more than the rest. Find it early, write it down, and let it make decisions for you when taste alone cannot.

Constraints are not the enemy of good work. Vagueness is.

The rest is patience: small adjustments, made consistently, until the whole thing feels inevitable.