Start with the decision

Most design work fails long before anyone opens a canvas. It fails in a meeting where five people each hold a slightly different idea of what the product is supposed to do, nobody says it out loud, and everyone leaves agreeing to “explore some directions.” The directions look different because the people were never deciding the same thing.

So before I draw anything, I write the decision down – in a single sentence a stranger could read. Who is this for, what changes for them, and what are we trading away to make that happen? If I can’t write it cleanly, that’s the work; the design won’t paper over a decision the team hasn’t actually made.

Once the decision is sharp, the screens get easier in a way that feels almost unfair. Constraints that were invisible become obvious. Whole branches of the UI fall away because they were only ever there to hedge a choice no one wanted to commit to. The layout stops being a matter of taste and starts being a consequence.

This is also why I push decisions up, not down. A designer who only owns the pixels inherits every unresolved argument as a layout problem. A designer who helps make the decision gets to solve the right problem once, instead of redrawing the wrong one forever.