Interface
studies
Quiet layout systems, restraint as a feature, and the choices that shape a screen before any pixel is drawn.
Focus
Quiet layout systems, restraint as a feature, and the choices that shape a screen before any pixel is drawn.
Medium
Figma, web
Duration
Ongoing
Last updated
May 2026
An ongoing notebook of layout sketches, type pairings, and quiet interface details. Most of them never become products. They exist to keep the muscle of looking and noticing alive.
I treat these as exercises: what happens if I remove a column, change the rhythm, push the type one size smaller. The interesting answers tend to be the boring-looking ones.
What I am looking
for.
Most product screens are noisier than they need to be. I am looking for the version that earns each element, where every line of type, divider, and label is doing real work.
When I cannot defend a thing on the screen out loud in one short sentence, that is usually a sign it does not belong yet.
How it informs client
work.
The studies are where I rehearse decisions before they get expensive. By the time a problem arrives in a real product, I have usually already sketched a version of it here.
It also keeps me honest. It is much harder to defend a busy layout in client work if I cannot make a quiet one work in a study.
Plates.
Open
questions.
- When does restraint stop being restraint and become emptiness?
- How do you keep a quiet layout from feeling cold?
- Which conventions are worth keeping, and which are habit dressed as standard?