Walk into a well-designed restaurant and you feel something before you notice anything. The lighting is warm but not dim. The tables are spaced with enough breathing room. The music is present but not competing. The menu feels good in your hands - the right weight, the right texture, the right typeface. None of these things register as individual decisions. They register as a feeling. The feeling is: someone cared about this space. Someone thought about what it would be like to be here.
Now open most websites. The feeling is: nobody thought about this at all. Or worse, someone thought about it but only in terms of conversion rates and click-through metrics. The digital equivalent of a restaurant designed entirely around table turnover - efficient, optimised, and completely devoid of atmosphere.
Websites need interior design. Not decoration - design. The same thoughtful, holistic consideration of how a space feels that good architects and interior designers bring to physical environments. And almost nobody is doing it.
The elements of digital space
In physical interior design, there are fundamental elements: lighting, colour, texture, furniture, layout, proportion, and atmosphere. Each one contributes to how you feel in a space. Each one is a decision that communicates something, whether the designer intended it to or not. A bright fluorescent light communicates something very different from a warm table lamp, even if both provide adequate illumination.
Digital spaces have their own versions of these elements. Colour is lighting. The background colour of a website sets the mood the same way lighting sets the mood of a room. A warm off-white background (like the one you're reading now) creates a different atmosphere from a stark white one, which creates a different atmosphere from a dark grey one. The difference is subtle - a few degrees of warmth, a slight shift in saturation - but the cumulative effect on how the space feels is enormous.
Typography is furniture. The typeface you choose is the biggest character decision you make for a digital space. A serif font feels different from a sans-serif. A monospaced font feels different from both. The weight, the size, the line height, the letter spacing - each one adjusts the feel of the room. I use DM Serif Display for headlines because it has personality without pretension. I use Inter for body text because it's clean and readable. I use Space Mono for labels and metadata because it creates a quiet technical texture. Together, they define the character of the space, the way a carefully chosen sofa, dining table, and bookshelf define the character of a living room.
Layout is architecture. Where things are positioned, how much space is between them, what the eye encounters first and second and third - this is spatial design. A narrow, centred column of text creates intimacy and focus. A wide, multi-column layout creates energy and variety. White space isn't empty space - it is breathing room. It's the digital equivalent of ceiling height. Too little and the space feels cramped. Too much and it feels cold.
Atmosphere is everything
The thing that separates a well-designed space from a merely functional one - in both physical and digital environments - is atmosphere. Atmosphere is the cumulative effect of every design decision working together to create a feeling. It isn't any single element. It's the harmony between all of them.
Think about the difference between Monocle's website and a typical news website. Both publish stories. Both share information. But Monocle feels like a design studio. It has presence, confidence, and personality. The grid is purposeful. The colour choices are restrained but confident. The typography has character. You feel like you're in a space that was designed by people who care deeply about craft. A typical news website, by contrast, feels like a warehouse: functional, impersonal, and slightly anxious about seeming too editorial.
That difference isn't about budget. It is about intention. Monocle decided that their digital space would have atmosphere. That it would feel like somewhere, not just function as something. That's the interior design decision. Everything else - the specific colours, fonts, animations - follows from that intention.
Why most websites feel the same
The internet has a sameness problem. Most websites use the same templates, the same layout patterns, the same handful of typefaces, the same pastel colour palettes. They're the digital equivalent of an identically furnished Airbnb - technically adequate, Instagram-friendly, and completely devoid of soul. You could swap the logo and content of a hundred SaaS landing pages and nobody would notice the difference.
This happened because we optimised for the wrong things. We optimised for conversion, not character. For usability, not atmosphere. For best practices, not personality. These aren't bad things to optimise for - usability matters, conversion matters. But when they're the only things you optimise for, you end up with spaces that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
Interior designers know better. They know that a room can be perfectly functional and still feel terrible. They know that the most important thing about a space isn't whether it works but whether it has character. A room with character can have minor inconveniences and still be beloved. A room without character can be perfectly optimised and still be forgettable.
How I think about my spaces
When I build a product, I think about it as a space, not a tool. What does it feel like to be here? Not just: what can you do here? The distinction matters because feeling drives behaviour in ways that features don't. People return to spaces that feel good. They linger in spaces that have atmosphere. They recommend spaces that have personality.
CultureTerminal feels like a design-forward newsroom. Clean, structured, but with enough visual warmth that you want to scroll. The London Pub Guide feels like a well-designed independent magazine - editorial, opinionated, with breathing room between the recommendations. Modern Retro feels like a gallery - images first, navigation minimal, the work speaking for itself. Each product has its own atmosphere because each product is its own space.
This isn't about making things pretty. Pretty is decoration. Atmosphere is design. Decoration sits on top of a space. Design is embedded in the structure of it. You can't separate the design from the product any more than you can separate the architecture from the building. The font size IS the design. The padding IS the design. The loading speed IS the design. Every decision contributes to or detracts from the atmosphere of the space.
The magazine lesson
I keep coming back to magazines because they understood this intuitively. The best magazines - The Face, i-D, Wallpaper* - were designed as spaces. Opening one was like walking into a room that had been curated for you. The paper stock was a decision. The font choices were a decision. The amount of white space on a page was a decision. The pacing of a feature - image, text, image, pull quote, image - was a spatial design decision, as much about rhythm and flow as any piece of architecture.
The internet lost this understanding somewhere along the way. We got so focused on making things that work that we forgot to make things that feel. And feeling is what brings people back. Feeling is what makes a website memorable. Feeling is what transforms a tool into a place.
Every website is a room. The question is whether you designed the room or just filled it with furniture.
