I remember the first time I picked up a copy of Monocle. I didn't read a single word. I didn't need to. Within a second - maybe less - I understood what they were about. Precision. Intelligence. Trust. The typography was deliberate, the grid was immaculate, the photography was considered. Before any headline registered, before I turned a page, before I read a single sentence, I already believed in whatever they were saying.
That isn't marketing. That isn't branding in the traditional sense. That's design doing something far more powerful than decoration. That's design functioning as the product itself.
I think about this constantly. Every time I build something, every time I open a new HTML file, I'm thinking about that first millisecond. The moment before comprehension. The moment where someone either feels like they're in good hands or feels like something is slightly off. That moment is everything, and it's almost entirely determined by design.
Typography speaks before words do
Across my projects, I keep coming back to three fonts: DM Serif Display, Inter, and Space Mono. They aren't arbitrary choices. Each one carries meaning before a single word is read.
The serif - DM Serif Display - brings personality. It says this was made by someone with taste, someone who cares about the difference between a generic heading and one with character. When you see a serif on a digital product, it signals intention. It says: I didn't just pick the default.
Inter is the workhorse. Clean, legible, invisible in the best way. The body text of my projects uses Inter because clarity is kindness. Your sans-serif font should never draw attention to itself. It should let the words do their work while providing a reading experience so smooth you forget you're reading on a screen.
Space Mono is the technical anchor. It says: there's rigour behind the aesthetics. When I use it for labels, metadata, navigation - it creates a subtle signal that this was built with care, not just designed with flair.
Most people will never consciously register these choices. They'll never think "ah, a serif paired with a geometric sans and a monospace for functional elements." But they'll feel the coherence. They'll feel that something about this experience is considered. That's typography doing its job - communicating before the words even begin.
The hover state obsession
I spend an unreasonable amount of time on hover states. I know this. I don't care. Or rather, I care deeply, which is why I spend the time.
A button with a 0.3s ease-in-out transition is invisible. You hover, it responds, and you never think about it. A button with a 0s snap - an instant change with no transition - is jarring. You might not be able to articulate why, but something felt wrong. Something felt cheap. That gap between invisible and jarring is where craft lives.
On my portfolio, every link has a subtle underline animation that slides in from the left on hover. It takes 0.35 seconds with a cubic-bezier easing curve. Nobody has ever commented on it. Nobody has ever said "I love the way your nav links animate." But if I removed it, if I replaced it with a simple colour change, the entire site would feel less considered. Less cared-for.
This is what people outside of design don't understand. These details aren't vanity. They're communication. Every micro-interaction is saying: someone thought about this. Someone cared about your experience at a level most people would consider unnecessary. And that cumulative feeling - of being in a space where every detail has been considered - is what separates products people tolerate from products people love.
I once spent forty-five minutes adjusting the timing curve on a card hover animation for CultureTerminal. Forty-five minutes on something that takes 0.3 seconds to see. Was that efficient? No. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Because now, when someone hovers over a card, it lifts with exactly the right weight. Not too fast, not too floaty. It feels real. It feels like it has mass. And that feeling makes the entire experience better.
Design heroes
Monocle, Bloomberg Businessweek, It's Nice That, The Face. These are my reference points, the publications I return to when I need to recalibrate my sense of what good looks like.
What they share isn't a visual style. Monocle is all grid precision and quiet confidence. Bloomberg Businessweek is bold and conceptual. It's Nice That is playful and generous. The Face was raw and defining. They look nothing alike. But they share something more important than aesthetics: an obsessive attention to detail and a fundamental respect for the reader's intelligence.
None of these publications talk down to you. None of them assume you're stupid. They present complexity with grace. They make dense subjects feel accessible without being simplistic. That's the hardest thing in editorial design - not making something look good, but making something complex feel effortless.
These publications also prove something that I believe deeply: beautiful and functional are the same thing. The old argument that you can have one or the other is nonsense. Design isn't a skin you apply after the content is done. When Bloomberg's data visualisation is beautiful, it's also more legible. When Monocle's layout is elegant, it's also more navigable. The beauty and the function are inseparable. The design IS the moat.
Every pixel is a decision
Let me be specific about what obsessing over design actually means in practice. It means the difference between 24px and 28px of padding. It means choosing #555 over #666 for body text colour because one feels slightly warmer, slightly more inviting. It means deciding between a 12px and 16px border radius because one says "sharp and modern" and the other says "friendly and approachable."
These seem trivial. I promise you they aren't. Individually, each of these decisions is almost imperceptible. But collectively, they're the difference between something that feels considered and something that feels thrown together. Between something that feels like it was made by someone with taste and something that feels like it was made by someone following a template.
When I built Modern Retro, the colour palette wasn't chosen from a generator. The background colour, the accent tones, the way text sits against the gradients - each was tested, adjusted, tested again. The final result looks effortless. That effortlessness took hours.
When I built Trove, the spacing between elements went through multiple iterations. Not because the first version was broken, but because the rhythm was wrong. There's a rhythm to good design, a visual cadence that guides your eye from one element to the next. When that rhythm is off, nothing looks broken. But nothing feels right either. It's like a song with slightly wrong timing - technically correct, emotionally flat.
I know what some people are thinking. This is a non-coder building projects with AI tools. Why does he care about border radius values? Because the design is the product. The code is invisible. The infrastructure is invisible. The deployment pipeline is invisible. What people see, what people feel, what makes them say "wait, YOU built this?" - that is the design. Every pixel of it.
Design isn't what you add after the product works. Design isn't the paint on the wall. Design is the wall. It's the architecture, the structure, the atmosphere. It's the reason someone stays or leaves, trusts or doubts, remembers or forgets. When someone looks at something I've built and they feel surprised - surprised that a non-coder made it, surprised that it feels this polished, surprised that it doesn't look like a template - that surprise is the design working. That's the first impression. And it never leaves.
