Towards a minimal but effective design system

• design
• ramble

#ramble #design 2024-05-10

Starting with a few observations:

• I usually have limited time to build things
• I care about good design
• I want control over my designs, so templates won’t do
• When I think of building something, I always want the end product to be close to perfect, and I wouldn’t start until I have a clear plan for achieving perfection—all or nothing, in some sense
• This is perhaps counter-productive

  Destructive Optimisation

  #productivity When we spend too much time trying to figure out the best way to do something, it often happens...

  2/20/2025

Sometimes this just blocks my project, and so hopefully it helps to be in the process of figuring something out.

One issue that comes to mind is just how complicated making a good design can be—all those design systems out there with fancy colour palettes, a whole component library, icon systems, etc. make it overwhelming to think about¹.

Or… is it?

As someone who wants good design for websites to display text

• A minimal colour palette
• Fonts
• Spacing

In most cases, playing around with these three things is my entire design process, yet these three things are also surprisingly hard to get right…

Anyway, still trying to figure this out, but hopefully it’ll come with time (T.T.T.)