Practices
The disciplines that cut across every stack — design craft applied during a decision rather than after it, and tests that are worth trusting.
Design craft is not a separate conversation
Every design decision has an interface consequence, and it is taken at the same table as the domain.
Before proposing or reviewing anything a person will look at or touch — a screen, a component, a flow, a layout, an interaction — read both craft pages in full. Not a skim, and not after the proposal is written. Craft applied afterwards is decoration; craft applied during is design.
| Page | Read it for |
|---|---|
| The design system | Which layer a component belongs to, when it earns promotion, and what that costs |
| Layout and spacing | Layout, spacing, visual rhythm, hierarchy; fixing monotonous grids and crowded compositions |
| Motion and polish | UI polish, component design, animation decisions, and the invisible details that make software feel deliberate |
| Empty states | What a surface with nothing in it says, in each of the three shapes it can take |
| Registers | Tables an operator scans: row density, cell invariants, and where a row's actions live |
| Iconography | Choosing and sizing one icon family, and why illustrations are a second register |
This is the designer lens with its own pages. A decision that survives the other three lenses and produces an interface nobody wants to use has not survived that one.
These two pages are here so that a decision is never taken with craft absent from the room. For sustained interface execution — a full redesign, a visual audit, a polish pass — they are the standard the work is held to, not a substitute for doing it.
Testing
| Page | Read it for |
|---|---|
| Testing | What a test foundation must guarantee before its results mean anything |