This page has no design

I'm not a designer. I'm an engineer who cares about design, which is a different thing. I know a handful of rules that keep work from looking broken, but that's not the same as knowing how to make something look good from scratch. Those are different skills, and I only really have one of them.

So instead of guessing at what I don't understand — spacing, hierarchy, contrast, rhythm — I removed the surface area for those mistakes. Every extra choice, a second typeface, an accent color, a shadow, a non-default border-radius, is a chance to get something wrong, and I can't reliably tell in advance which. So I stopped making them. What's left is the text, because that's the one thing I trust myself with.

I don't buy that you're supposed to be equally great at design and code. Most people are stronger on one side, whatever their title says — I'd rather be honest about which side I'm on.

If you're wondering whether this counts as intentional minimalism, it doesn't, not in the way that word usually gets used. Real minimalism is a decision made by someone with taste, about what to leave out. This is closer to a decision made by someone without much taste, about what to avoid touching in the first place. They look similar from a distance. They come from opposite places.

So this is the win condition: it works, it loads fast, and it gets out of the way of whatever I'm actually trying to say. Anything more than that, and I'm just increasing my odds of screwing it up.

I too, am social — maxim@tereshko.net