Design thinking

Professional design starts not with "is it beautiful?" but with "what will the viewer actually understand?". Aesthetics are subjective — confusion is objective. If a design has to be explained, it has failed.

How to run: grill, don't lecture

This skill is an interview, not a checklist to recite. Grill the user relentlessly through the principles below until you reach a shared understanding of the design:

• Walk the principles in order, before any pixel exists, resolving dependencies between answers one-by-one — an earlier answer reshapes the later questions. Skip principles that genuinely don't apply (no logo work → no brand-voice question).
• Ask one question at a time and wait for the answer. Multiple questions at once are bewildering.
• For every question, give your recommended answer, grounded in the principle you're applying.
• A fact you can find yourself (existing screens, copy, analytics, the codebase) — look it up rather than asking. The decisions are the user's — put each one to them and wait.
• Do not start designing until the user confirms shared understanding.

1. Perception gap

The gap is the distance between what the design is supposed to communicate and what the viewer actually took away. Before evaluating any layout, ask three questions:

• Where does the eye land first?
• What gets noticed second?
• What gets missed entirely?

Test: show the layout for a few seconds and ask the person to describe from memory the sequence of what they saw, not the details. If the first thing named is wrong — the hierarchy failed. If the call to action was missed — the design didn't guide the viewer.

2. The viewer's starting emotional state

Before you begin, answer: what psychological state is the person in when they arrive at the design? A charity website visitor is cautious and looking for trust; someone flipping through a fashion magazine is relaxed and not thinking hard. The design must meet the person where they already are emotionally — otherwise something immediately feels "off".

Account for the physical context too: the real viewer is a tired person on a phone with the brightness turned down, not a designer inspecting kerning. Design for people with no design background.

3. Predictive empathy

Design not for what the viewer feels now, but for what they should feel a few seconds later and carry away with them. Techniques:

• Soften the headline's tone while keeping its strength — don't "grab them by the arm".
• Add breathing room to the composition.
• Insert one emotional signal: a line of reassurance or a trust symbol.
• Steer the palette toward the target emotional state.

Every decision must have a reason, and one of those reasons is the emotion the viewer leaves with.

4. Memory encoding

A design is remembered when the brain is given something to resolve: a conceptual twist, a slight imbalance, a question instead of an answer (vinyl records arranged into a heart; empty clothes on a chair as a figure without a person). The pause for making sense of it is memory formation itself. Anything too safe, clean, and unoriginal evaporates from the mind the moment the scroll continues.

5. Brand voice before visuals (for identity and logos)

A brand lives in captions, landing pages, push notifications, and tweets — don't start with geometry. First, in writing:

1. Five words the brand would never say — these are the boundaries.
2. Five words the brand overuses online — this is the tone (sharp? playful? technical?).
3. One sentence the brand would use to introduce itself to the world in 140 characters.

The voice sets the emotional temperature, and the logo must match it: a bold brand doesn't get a timid mark, a calm one doesn't get aggressive angles.

6. The experience around the work

Perception creates value before the design itself: how the file opens, how the layers are organized and named, how the presentation is structured. The same project sent as a "bare PDF" versus walked through with a clear structure is two different values for the same work. The client pays for confidence, clarity, and the ease of the whole experience, not just the picture.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzQl1Tl_LPM