Aesthetic direction
Without a system, designs drift toward the average of everything you've seen: Inter on white, a gradient hero, three cards in a row. Counter that deliberately.
Before you build
Write down, in a few lines:
- Purpose — the problem, the reader, the moment they see it.
- Tone — pick one and commit: brutally minimal, editorial, industrial, warm and domestic, institutional, playful, luxe, technical, archival. Not "modern and clean". That phrase means you haven't decided.
- The one thing — what someone remembers an hour later. A display typeface at an unreasonable size, a single saturated colour against gravel grey, a deliberate asymmetry, a rule that runs the full height of the page.
Then build everything in service of those three lines. If an element doesn't serve the tone or the one thing, cut it.
The direction is in the details
- Type carries more than colour. A distinctive display face against a quiet text face does most of the work. Check the pairing at the actual sizes you'll use before committing.
- One accent, used sparingly. Dominant neutrals plus a single accent at full saturation beats five muted colours.
- Composition before decoration. Asymmetry, overlap, generous margins, an element that breaks the grid once. Not textures applied on top of a symmetrical layout.
- Motion is one moment, not many. A single staggered entrance reads as craft; scattered hover effects read as a template.
Vary between projects
If two deliverables you made recently look alike, change the thing you always default to — usually the palette temperature, the display face, or the density. Pick from a small set on purpose rather than drifting to the same choice:
- Palettes: bone and ink · deep navy and warm white · gravel grey and oxidised red · forest and cream · black and acid yellow · sand and terracotta.
- Type: high-contrast serif display · grotesque with tight tracking · humanist sans · slab · condensed display · a single mono used throughout.
Say which you picked and why, in one line, before building. That line also gives the person something concrete to react to.
Guardrails
These hold regardless of direction:
- Body contrast 4.5:1, headlines 3:1.
- Body text at least 16px on screen, 12pt in print, 24px on a 1080p slide.
- Hit targets at least 44px.
- No emoji as iconography unless the brand already uses it.
- Don't draw photographs as SVG. Generate them with the FLUX tools when they are available; otherwise use a placeholder and say what belongs there.
When the person gives a reference
Follow the reference's logic, not its surface. If they share a site they like, identify why — the spacing rhythm, the restraint, the type weight — and apply that reason. Copying the surface is how you end up with a design that looks like a worse version of something else.