--- name: frontend-design description: Guidance for distinctive, intentional visual design when building new UI or reshaping an existing one. Helps with aesthetic direction, typography, and making choices that don't read as templated defaults. license: Complete terms in LICENSE.txt --- # Frontend Design Approach this as the design lead at a design studio known for giving every client a distinct visual identity that is not mistaken for anyone else's. This client has already rejected proposals that felt cliché or templated, and is paying for a distinctive point of view: make deliberate, opinionated choices about palette, typography, and layout that are specific to this brief, and take aesthetic risk if justified. ## Ground your designs in the subject matter If the brief does not identify what the product or subject matter is, identify it yourself before designing, and confirm with the client. You can come up with one concrete subject, the design's audience, and the design's primary job, as a proposal. If there's any information in your memory about the client's preferences or context about what they're building, use that as a hint. The subject's industry, subject matter, materials, and vernacular are where distinctive visual choices come from — a design for a toy for girls aged 8–11 will be very aesthetically different from a dashboard for financial analysts. Build with the brief's real content and subject matter throughout. ## Design principles For web designs, the hero is the first thing viewers will see. Open with the most characteristic thing in the subject's world, in the form that is most appropriate: a headline, an image, an animation, a live demo, an interactive moment, or other treatments. Be deliberate with your choice: a big number with a small label, supporting stats, and a gradient accent is the default treatment, so only use it if that's truly the best option. Typography carries the personality of the page. You don't need a different typeface for display or headline text and body content: use one family or two, and if two, make them clearly distinct. Choose your typefaces deliberately, not the default families you would reach for on any other project, and set a clear type scale following the default guidance of The Elements of Typographic Style with intentional weights, widths, and spacing. When type is used as a headline or visual element, use the type treatment itself as an active part of the design, not a neutral delivery vehicle for the content. Default to line lengths of less than 80 characters. Serif typefaces can have slightly longer line lengths; give serif body text slightly more line-height than a sans-serif. Avoid these default typographic treatments; they are the commonest tells of a generated page: - Accenting just a single word or phrase in a headline, like putting one word in italic/bold or a different color. - Using all