a design book for non-designers, recommended by the Stripe design team
While AI can generate endless “perfect” outputs, the crucial design decisions are innately human: which questions to ask, guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and aligning execution against context and strategy. AI might generate hundreds of landing page variants, but it takes design sensibility to know which will genuinely... See more
The Vignelli Canon outlines fundamental design principles, emphasizing semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics, along with the importance of discipline, appropriateness, and visual power for effective and timeless design practices.
Design Principles – Design for scanning, not reading! Take advantage of conventions. Create effective visual hierarchies Break pages up into clearly defined areas. Make it obvious what’s clickable. Eliminate distractions. Format content to support scanning . Keep paragraphs short. Use bulleted lists. Highlight key terms.
We learned the hard way that new products are hard enough to figure out, and we should make as many things as familiar as possible. Again, life and new products are hard enough. When you can use a familiar term instead of being original, do so. Never opt for a solution that is more creative but less effective.