Catalogue
Patterns
Named, reusable shapes I'm collecting as I work. Each is a small, opinionated answer to a recurring question.
Calm Defaults
A pattern for restraint — shipping software with a quiet first impression, restrained feature scope, and the highest number of users who never notice the product exists.
Token-as-Grammar
A finite set of choices that constrains composition the way grammar constrains a sentence. The strong version of this pattern asks you to remove tokens, not add them.
Provenance Stamps
A small piece of metadata — when something was written, who signed off, how long ago it was reviewed — does the work of an entire audit trail. Readers need stamps, not trails.
Progressive Sharpening
Features start optional, become ergonomic for the curious, then essential to the power user — the progression runs uphill, never the reverse.
Failure Surfaces
Designing the failure path first so the happy path has somewhere to land when something goes wrong. Most products get this order backwards.
Soft Handoffs
Passing work between people without losing intent, context, or the original argument — the silent muscle of long-lived teams.
Quiet Power-User Modes
Keyboard shortcuts, command palettes, and command surfaces that exist without ever drawing attention to themselves. The private language between a user and their tool.
Friction Budgets
An explicit, named allowance for cognitive load on a single screen — every addition costs budget. The number is a constraint, not a target.
Borrowed Type
Using the visual conventions of another medium — books, paper, handwriting — to lower the read-cost of long-form digital content. The medium informs the expectation.
Editorial Hierarchies
Heading hierarchy carried by weight and colour, not by explosion of size — same 24px, different voice. A page that respects its reader.
Witnessed Drafts
Exposing unfinished work publicly to lower the activation energy to ship — and to reward the early readers who showed up while it was still rough.
Quiet APIs
Function and method names that don't compete for attention — small, predictable, and aligned with the rest of the surface. Names look like they were always there.