Design Review

Design Review: the senior product designer's eye

Evaluate a screen the way a senior product designer does, then apply the highest-leverage fixes. The goal is never decoration. It is to make the screen's one job unmistakable, through hierarchy, whitespace, legibility, and restraint. A good pass usually removes and quiets more than it adds.

"Less, but better." (Dieter Rams) · "Above all else show the data." (Edward Tufte)

The one move: emphasize by de-emphasizing

The single most valuable senior instinct: when the important thing doesn't stand out, don't pile on more emphasis; quiet the things competing with it, or remove them. A UI that feels "clunky", "packed", or "busy" is almost always too many equal-weight signals. The fix is remove → demote → quiet, and only rarely add. Emphasis is a fixed budget you allocate, not a property you sprinkle: if everything is bold, nothing is.

First, respect the design system

Before touching a single style, find the project's design language and work inside it:

• A brand / design-system doc (brand.md, design-system.md, a Figma/tokens export).
• Design tokens (a Tailwind theme, CSS variables, a spacing/type/color scale).
• Existing components (a ui/ folder, shared primitives).

Pull type sizes, spacing, color, radii, and shadows from those defined scales, never invent a one-off spacing value, a bespoke grey, or a novel button for a single screen. Per-screen invention is how design systems rot (Vignelli's discipline; Nielsen's consistency & standards). If a needed pattern genuinely isn't defined, derive it from the system's north-star, write it into the system first, then build it. If no system exists, establish the minimal one (a spacing scale, a type scale, ~2-3 text weights, one accent) before styling screens.

The system coverage inventory (mandatory, before any lens)

Reading the system for tokens is not the same as reading it as a checklist. Before diagnosing, enumerate every visual group on the screen(s) — header, each form cluster, each card, each list, each footer strip — and for each one, name the system recipe it instantiates. Two outcomes are findings, automatically ranked top-3:

• A group with no recipe is undesigned UI: either design it into the system first, or it's the reason the screen "feels thrown together" (a bare form floating outside the card language is the classic case).
• A declared pattern with zero instances is unused budget: if the system defines personality devices (a mascot, hand-scrawl asides, rotation, illustrations) and the screen has none, the brand is silently off. Ask where the personality should live on this screen.

This inventory exists because the squint test below only catches excess (what stands out that shouldn't); it is structurally blind to omission (what was never designed, dead space, missing personality). You need both instruments.

Workflow: diagnose, then apply

1. Diagnose, a prioritized critique, not nitpicks

Review the whole surface, never the diff. Walk the screen the way a visitor does — every state (empty, partial, full, error), top to bottom — not the way its author does (only the elements recent work touched). Scoping the critique to what you just built is confirmation bias wearing a design hat; the stale header nobody has looked at in weeks is exactly where the findings hide.

Start from the job, not the pixels:

1. Name the ONE job of the screen in a sentence, and the user's priority order for the content/actions.
2. Run the system coverage inventory (above): every visual group named to a recipe, every declared personality device accounted for. Unmapped groups and unspent personality are findings.
3. Squint test. Blur the screen (mentally, or literally zoom out / blur a screenshot). Whatever still stands out is what the user sees first. Does it match the priority order? If not, hierarchy is the #1 fix, before anything else.
4. The subtraction question: for each element, does this serve the one job? If not: remove, then demote to a caption, then (last resort) keep-but-quiet.
5. Run the lenses below, plus a quick pass of Nielsen's 10 heuristics (see references/critique-and-anti-patterns.md). Do it in 2-3 passes, a single pass misses things.

Then deliver the critique ranked by leverage: the 1-3 changes that most improve the screen's ability to do its job (usually: fix hierarchy, cut clutter, fix contrast), then everything else as "polish." Tie every note to a principle or the user's goal ("this competes with the primary action", not "I'd make it blue"). Frame it constructively: what works · what's hurting · what to try.

2. Apply

Fix the levers in this order (later ones depend on earlier ones being right): hierarchy → subtract/de-clutter → whitespace & rhythm → legibility → alignment → tokens/consistency. Apply the changes to the code, and explain the why (name the principle) as you go, so the user gains the eye, not just a diff. If the input is a screenshot, translate the fixes into code against the real design system; then re-screenshot and re-run the squint test to verify.

Beware the timid fix. When the finding is "this feels flat / without personality / poorly used space," rearranging the existing elements is not a fix — it's the same screen in a different order. That class of finding demands design work from references: benchmark 2-3 named products whose personality the brand admires (the system doc usually names a north star — PostHog, Duolingo, Gumroad, Mailchimp — products that spend real illustration, mascot, and copy budget on their surfaces), study how they fill the equivalent zone, then design the project's own version inside its system and write the new pattern into the system doc. Restraint (Rams) governs data surfaces; declared-personality zones (heroes, headers, empty states, celebrations) are where the brand is supposed to spend — quieting them is malpractice in the other direction.

The lenses (condensed, depth in references/)

• Hierarchy. One clear primary action; everything else visibly secondary. Encode importance with size + weight + color, not size alone, a lighter weight or muted color says "secondary" more elegantly than shrinking. ~2-3 text colors and ~2-3 weights per surface; never below weight 400 in UI. Fold labels into values ("$19/mo", not "Price: $19"). Emphasize by de-emphasizing.
• Whitespace & rhythm. Start with too much, then remove. Snap every gap to one spacing scale (4/8-based, e.g. 4 8 12 16 24 32 48 64 96), never arbitrary px. More space between groups than within them (proximity = grouping). "Packed" reads as cheap; deliberate space reads as premium.
• Legibility (hard gates). Body contrast ≥ 4.5:1 (large text ≥ 3:1); body around 16px; measure ~50-75 characters per line; body line-height ~1.5, headings tighter. Never grey text on a colored background, use a lighter, re-tinted shade of the background's hue instead.
• Alignment. Fewest strong edges; left-align text and fields to a shared rail; right-align numerics with tabular figures; optically center irregular shapes (icons/arrows), don't trust math.
• Data & tables (Tufte). Maximize data-ink: kill heavy cell borders, gridlines, and decoration. Right-align numbers; emphasize the primary column and demote the rest; fewer columns (fold meta into a caption line); light chips in dense rows; give rows room.
• Restraint (Rams / Vignelli). As little design as possible, every element earns its ink. Limit typefaces, weights, and accent colors. Prefer durable convention over trend.

References, read the relevant one when you need depth

• references/principles.md, the named canon (Rams' Ten Principles, Tufte, the Gestalt laws, the Vignelli Canon, Norman, Nielsen's heuristics) with each principle's UI application. Read this to ground and cite a critique in real design theory.
• references/tactics.md, the Refactoring UI playbook (Wathan & Schoger): hierarchy, spacing, type, color, depth, tables, forms, plus the canonical numbers (scales, measure, contrast, shadows). Read this for the concrete how.
• references/critique-and-anti-patterns.md, the structured critique process (heuristic evaluation, prioritization) and the senior-flag anti-patterns with their de-cluttering fixes (the precise "this feels clunky" recipe). Read this when auditing or when a screen feels off but you can't name why.