I finally understood why my mockups felt off after a senior designer told me 'your grid is fighting your content' in a portfolio review last quarter.

Now I always sketch the content flow first on paper, then build the grid to support it, not the other way around, and my layouts are way more intuitive. Anyone else have a simple rule that fixed a core design habit?

3 comments

3 Comments

ryan_smith371mo ago

Sounds like you were building a beautiful cage and then wondering why the bird looked so unhappy inside it. That "grid fighting your content" line is the kind of painfully obvious feedback that stings for a week but fixes your work for years. My version was a dev telling me my perfect button was "too clever for its own good" because the hover state needed a physics degree to code. Now if an interaction takes more than two sentences to explain, I just kill it.

brown.susan1mo ago

Wait a physics degree for a BUTTON hover? That's actually insane.

wyatt10727d ago

Hold up, sometimes a rigid grid is the only thing saving us from total chaos. @brown.susan might get that physics degree just to prove a point.