Restraint is a feature

The fastest way to make an interface feel incoherent is to give yourself too many choices. Twelve shades of grey, six type sizes, four border radii — every one of them defensible in isolation, and collectively a guarantee that no two pages will look like they came from the same place.

Fewer decisions, made once

This site’s palette has seven values. Two text colours, two surfaces, one hairline, one accent, and a soft tint of that accent for selection. When I need a colour, there is rarely a decision to make; the constraint has already made it.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. — attributed to Orson Welles, probably apocryphally, still true

Type works the same way. Eight sizes on a modular scale sounds restrictive until you notice that a long-form article only ever uses four of them.

What restraint is not

It is not minimalism as an aesthetic — thin fonts, vast empty space, and a hamburger menu hiding navigation the user actually needs. That is a style, and often a hostile one.

Restraint is about the number of independent decisions in a system. A page can be dense and still restrained, as long as its density comes from a small vocabulary applied consistently. A page can be sparse and still chaotic.

The test I use: if I add a new page tomorrow, can I build it without inventing anything? If the answer is yes, the system is doing its job.