A New Page About How I Design

I have added a new page to this site where I write about how I think about design. It gathers a handful of ideas that came from things I made and later had to reconsider. I wanted to explain why it exists, since the story behind it is shorter and more ordinary than the page might suggest.

I came to design through engineering. For a long time I treated it as the part of a project that only needed to be acceptable before I could move on to the work I considered more important, and I suspect many people who write software have had a similar relationship with it. Over the last year that changed, and I began learning it properly, mostly by making interfaces, placing them next to work I admired, and rebuilding whatever did not hold up.

Apple has been the clearest influence. I use a lot of its products, and using them every day taught me a good deal simply through observation: how consistently small interactions behave, how little of the design asks for attention, and how much of it is decided before anything is drawn. Steve Jobs said that design is how it works, and Apple later made a short film around that line, which changed how I thought about my own work. I realised that much of what I had been calling design was decoration, applied after the decisions about how something behaves had already been made somewhere else. Once I started looking at my own work that way, a good number of things I had considered finished turned out to be surface, and most of the page follows from what I noticed after that.

Vercel was another influence, although a different kind. Its products showed me that something built for developers can be restrained and plain while still feeling carefully made, and that the care is usually visible in the decisions rather than the ornament. That has stayed with me more than I expected, and it explains a good deal about how the page looks.

The design of the page itself comes from the same thought. A page about design carries a certain expectation, which is that it should be the most polished thing on the site, with every detail worked over until the effort becomes visible. I understand the reasoning, but I am not convinced that effort is what makes a design persuasive. A page that describes how something should work is more convincing when it works that way itself, and that seemed more worthwhile than impressing anyone. So I kept it deliberately restrained: the writing carries the page, the structure is simple enough to follow without explanation, and I removed things that were only there because I had the ability to add them. Whether I judged each of those choices correctly is for readers to decide, but the aim was a page that behaves like the ideas written on it.

I should clarify one thing, because the page might suggest otherwise. It is drawn almost entirely in black and white, and so are many of the examples on it, which could give the impression that monochrome is the only language I can work in. That is not the case. It is my favourite, and I return to it often, but I have worked across a considerably wider range than this page shows, and I hope to share more of that soon.

I also think design reaches well beyond interfaces. Once you start paying attention to why something works, that habit of looking does not stay confined to screens, and it has begun to change how I approach photography, where the same questions about what to include, what to leave out, and what a frame is actually saying apply just as much. I am still learning to see more carefully and developing my own taste, and I intend to share more of my photographs as that progresses. You can already see some of them at photography.omrajguru.com.

Alongside the design page, I have also redesigned the homepage, which follows the same thinking and is worth a look if you would like to see these ideas applied somewhere more everyday. You can read more about it here.

That is also why I would like to write here more regularly. I have a number of experiments and interfaces that taught me something specific, and until now most of them have stayed in my own notes. I would like to put them in front of other people along with the reasoning behind them, including the parts I got wrong the first time. The new page is a reasonable place to begin, and this blog is where I intend to continue.