There are details in every design that most people will never consciously register – and that's exactly the point. Good design isn't about showing your work; it's about the accumulated weight of a hundred small decisions that make something feel right (and trustworthy). Here's a handful of the things we quietly obsess over.
1. Curly apostrophes
Typographer's quotes, not typewriter leftovers
Straight quote marks are a relic of the typewriter era, when keyboards had one key for both opening and closing marks. A curly apostrophe (') curves toward the letter it belongs to; a straight one (') just sits there looking like a code snippet leaked into your copy. It's one of the fastest ways to tell whether someone has thought about the typography on a page, or simply left it to default.
2. Pipes as separators
The vertical bar that should retire
The pipe character | has exactly one good home: the command line. In navigation menus, footers, and inline lists, it creates visual noise, reads awkwardly with screen readers (JAWS will literally say "vertical bar"), and forces the eye to work harder than it needs to. Space does this job more cleanly, more accessibly, and more elegantly. We remove pipes on sight.
3. Orphan text
That lonely word at the end of a paragraph
An orphan is a single word sitting alone on the last line of a paragraph. Technically harmless; aesthetically a splinter. It creates an uneven rag on the right side of a text block and introduces an awkward pause in the reading rhythm. A quick text tweak or a non-breaking space between the last two words is all it takes – and once you start noticing orphans, you cannot stop.
4. Spacing from the design system
Not "roughly 16px" – exactly 16px
When spacing values come from a consistent scale (4px, 8px, 16px, 24px, 32px...), the layout hums. When they're arbitrary – 14px here, 19px there, 23px somewhere else – it may look fine at first glance, but it introduces a subtle visual restlessness that accumulates across a product. A spacing system isn't a constraint; it's a common language that keeps everything in agreement.
5. Intentional italics
Not just slanted – actually designed
A lot of sans-serif fonts don't have a true italic cut – they just have an oblique, which is the upright letterform sheared sideways by the software. A real italic has redrawn letterforms, different character shapes, more elegance. When italics are used without intention – for vague emphasis, or with a typeface that's just producing a mechanical tilt – it flattens the typographic voice of the whole design. We always ask why before we reach for it.
6. Optical alignment
The math is wrong, but the eye is right
Centering an icon inside a circle by coordinates often looks off. That's because our eyes don't read coordinates – they read visual weight. A play button needs to be nudged slightly right of mathematical center to actually look centered. A triangle sitting exactly on the grid midpoint will look like it's sagging. Optical alignment is the practice of trusting what looks right over what measures right, and it's one of the most distinctly human parts of this work.
7. Line length
The invisible fence around your body copy
Text that stretches full-width across a large screen might look open and modern, but it forces the reader's eye to travel further with each line, making it hard to track back to the start of the next one. The sweet spot for comfortable reading is roughly 60–75 characters per line. It's a rule almost no one outside of design knows exists – and one we will always, quietly, enforce.
8. Tracking on all-caps
A little breathing room, please
Capital letters are designed to sit next to lowercase letters. When you set a word in all caps, the spacing suddenly feels compressed – because it is. Adding 5–12% extra letter-spacing to all-caps text restores the visual rhythm that the type designer assumed you'd have. Tight all-caps labels look like an afterthought. Tracked-out all-caps look considered. The difference is often just a few units in Figma.
