Learning to Notice Subtle Design Elements

UI Principles Mini-Series, 2 of 5: The Law of Similarity Why do some interfaces feel instantly organised? Because our brains group things that look alike. When elements are visually similar, we perceive them as related. Use similarity on purpose:

 🔹Colour is the strongest cue. Reserve your highlight colour for interactive elements like links and buttons, not for decorative headlines.
 🔹Size signals hierarchy and relatedness. Keep comparable items the same size, and differentiate intentionally.
 🔹Shape creates family ties. A consistent button shape reads as one group and sets the expectation of clickability.
 🔹You can combine cues. Orientation, behaviour, and movement also reinforce grouping. Aligned items, shared hover states, or matching micro-interactions feel like one set. Build it into your system:
 Create a clear style guide. Define a colour palette with neutrals, highlight, and action colours. Set type styles for headings, body, links, buttons etc. Apply the same tokens and rules inside components so users get consistent signals.

 Watch out for traps:
 If everything looks clickable, nothing is clear. Do not rely on colour alone for meaning. Pair colour with size, shape, labels, or underlines. Check contrast and test with real users so visual polish does not mask usability issues. 💡 Takeaways
 • Visually similar items are perceived as related
 • Start with a system: colour roles, type scales, and component rules
 • Use similarity to guide, not to decorate
 • Pair colour with size and shape for clarity and accessibility
 • Validate with testing so appearance does not overrule reality
 In short: make related things look related, and make interactive things look interactive.
 Next up in the series: another favourite principle to sharpen your design eye. Make sure to follow. 📚 → Full UI Principles course: https://lnkd.in/dyAHJdU3
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Recently, I reviewed several portfolios from Egyptian designers and I noticed a huge gap in visual design fundamentals. If you’re a junior, mid-level or even senior, mastering visual design skills will instantly elevate the quality of your work. Below are resources I often recommend to designers who want to improve their eye for design and build stronger skills: Skip the UI books & kits for now and go back to the fundamentals. Learn these 3 things first: • Typography foundations • Layout systems & grids • Color & composition Must-read books (non-negotiable) these books will train your eyes and your brain to see like a designer: • Thinking with Type: Ellen Lupton • Grid Systems in Graphic Design: Josef Müller-Brockmann • Making & Breaking the Grid: Timothy Samara • Designing Type: Karen Cheng (bonus if you’re curious about type construction) • Interaction of Color: Josef Albers Train your eye with games, play once a day & you’ll start seeing details differently • http://cantunsee.space micro UI spotting • http://type.method.ac kerning challenge Study real-world web layouts, forget Dribbble & Behance. Study how space, type, and grids are used. • http://typewolf.com type in the wild • http://godly.website bold & modern layouts • http://hoverstat.es editorial inspiration • http://awwwards.com top and creative websites • http://mobbin.com collection of real life products Don’t just scroll them and take screenshots, recreate the layouts by hand. Break them down. Rebuild them. Study them. That’s how your brain memorizes structure, spacing, and flow. You’ll see better and design faster. This is how you build taste & skill, not by chasing trends, but by mastering how to do and spot a good design with intention. Save this for later. Revisit it often.

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN: a product lives or dies at the seam ——— Run a thumb across anything well made until you hit the spot where one material hands off to another and you’ll see if someone truly cared about it. Where soft fabric gives way to a hard shell, or two panels meet. That handoff can make or break the product. Choosing a beautiful material is easy. Holding the border is the hard part. Where a coating lifts after a month. Or two colors that looked fine together on a screen suddenly clash in real daylight. That edge has to survive the factory and years of restless thumbs and still look like somebody meant it. One junction handles tolerances, assembly, wear, and touch at once and still looks intentional. Getting it right takes decisions a hand feels before the eye catches them. A good transition disappears. You run a thumb across it and feel one object, not materials fighting over the edge. Good industrial design does not hide complexity everywhere. It concentrates attention on the few places where the user will notice it most. ——— Follow Blair Hasty for more on Industrial Design

The Guiding Hand of Level Design: Light Here’s something I love about level design. 

 Players often don’t realize just how much light is teaching them. 
We usually think of light as purely visual flair, but it’s so much more than that. It is one of the strongest tools we have.
 Light tells players where to go, what to look at, and even how to feel, all without a single pop-up or tutorial message.
 Think of it like this. 

 A lamp beside a door is not just decoration; it is a quiet hint that says this is the way out. 

 A spotlight on an enemy instantly pulls your eyes toward it, framing the threat before you consciously react. 

 Glowing collectibles are not only rewards, they are breadcrumbs that say Come this way. 

 Sunlight breaking through into a courtyard can reveal the correct path before your brain has even processed the layout. 

 Even a moving torch or shifting shadow can act as a living waypoint that feels organic to the world.
 None of these things happens by accident. Designers carefully place and shape light to guide players subconsciously.
 So how do you apply this in a project? • Direct the player’s path. Place warm light sources at doors, exits, or climbable areas so they feel like natural destinations.

 • Frame encounters. Use stronger, focused light to reveal threats, bosses, or hazards — players will look where the light goes.

 • Reward exploration. Glow or sparkle effects are great for collectibles, ammo caches, or story notes hidden in darker areas.

 • Shape atmosphere. Play with color temperature: warm tones suggest safety or home, while cold tones suggest mystery or danger.

 • Think dynamically. Moving lights — like flickering lamps, torch-bearing NPCs, or shifting shadows — keep players engaged and subtly guide them forward.

 • Teach early. Introduce your “light language” in the first few minutes of a game, and players will understand it everywhere else without words.
 A simple rule of thumb I use is this: if something is important to the player, it should be lit.
 Light is one of the best silent teachers in level design. Next time you are playing a game, pause for a moment and look at how the lighting is shaping your decisions. Once you start noticing it, you cannot unsee it.
 #LevelDesign #GameDesign #SpatialCommunication #UXDesign #EnvironmentArt #Gamedev

“Wait, the information was there? I just couldn’t find it.” This is one of the common moments in UX research. A user fails to complete a task, but when we review the product, the content technically exists. The help article is there. The policy is there. The product detail is there. The answer is somewhere in the system. So why did the user miss it? Information foraging models have a useful explanation for this: users do not navigate toward information itself. They navigate toward cues that seem to promise information. Links, labels, headings, categories, snippets, and menu items all act as signals. If those signals suggest that the answer is nearby, users keep going. If the signals are weak, vague, or misleading, users backtrack, switch strategies, search, or leave. Findability is not just about whether the content exists. A page can contain the right answer and still fail if the path to that page does not “smell” right. In Information Foraging Theory, users are treated as adaptive information seekers. Like animals foraging for food, they balance expected value against effort. They are constantly making small judgments: Does this label sound relevant? Is this category worth exploring? Is it worth continuing here, or would another path be better? The key concept is information scent. A link or label has strong scent when it helps users infer that they are moving closer to their goal. Weak scent explains why users ignore the correct path even when it is visible. Misleading scent explains why users confidently follow the wrong path. High path cost explains why users abandon before reaching the answer, even when each individual step seems defensible from a design perspective. SNIF-ACT makes this even more useful for UX research because it models navigation as a sequence of cognitive decisions. It helps explain which link users are likely to select, how long they evaluate a page, when they backtrack, when they switch strategies, and when they abandon the path. In other words, it gives us a way to explain failure as a breakdown in cue evaluation, scent accumulation, or threshold crossing. This lens is useful for information architecture, taxonomy testing, menu labels, help centers, support portals, knowledge bases, e-commerce discovery, and enterprise systems where people need to locate policy or procedural information. So when users say, “I couldn’t find it,” and the team says, “But it was there,” the question is not just whether the content existed. But : Did the path smell like the answer?

Does packaging that lives in a deck look different in real life? Teamed up with eye-tracking specialist Richard Moniz 👀 for a trade: A free audit for a few brands, and in return we get to share the results with our community The goal? To pair data with design insight so we can all learn and grow together --- In our audit of Bake Me Healthy’s Lemon Blueberry cookies, we looked at 3 key metrics to see if the packaging was doing its job: 🍪 Percent Noticed: This is the % of people who actually saw a specific element While 95% of people noticed the brand name, only 23% noticed the "Top 9 Allergen" claim      For a niche brand built on safety, this is a big insight If consumers miss that claim, they might miss the reason to buy 🍪 Time to Notice:  This measures how FAST a shopper’s eyes land on an item We saw an ideal initial pattern where people looked at the brand, then the cookie Image, then the flavor However, it took a lot longer for people to find the nutritional benefits on the right side of the pack even though they’re big 🍪 Time of Attention: This is how long someone lingers on an element We found that the lemon image in the top-left actually created chaos in the gaze pattern It distracted shoppers from moving smoothly through the key benefits like protein and fiber --- We learned that Bake Me Healthy has a great flavor-forward design but the benefit callouts were weak with only 1/3 of shoppers noticing them within the first 3 seconds To fix this, we suggested shifting the text to align with the natural gaze path and reducing the number of benefit callouts from three to two to increase their impact When you give the eye too much to do, it often ends up doing less --- What do you think about what you’re seeing here? Anything from the data surprise you?

An important dimension of learning design is communication through the elements on the slide, screen, and page—the images, text, and graphic space. The arrangement of these elements transmits a secondary message through its visual hierarchy. A visual hierarchy establishes the relative importance of each object on display. It controls where a viewer looks first, second, and third. Step back and determine what is most important for the learner or viewer to see first, second, and third. Then use one or more of these strategies to establish a visual hierarchy. 1) Use size to emphasize the most important element first. Larger sized elements draw attention. Save the smaller elements for lower levels of the hierarchy. 2) Use bright and vivid colors at the top of the visual hierarchy and more muted colors for the second and third levels. 3) Position on the screen affects hierarchy. People who read from left to right enter a screen or page at the upper left, making it prime real estate. 4) Users typically follow a Z-shaped reading pattern (for simpler layouts) or F-shaped pattern (for text-heavy pages), so place key elements along one of these paths to maximize visual impact. 5) Use high-contrast colors, shapes, or textures to grab attention and create a focal point at the top of the hierarchy. 6) Use white space to isolate and highlight important elements to create a visual hierarchy. 7) Use leading lines and arrows to guide the viewer's eye to key visual elements. Tomorrow: Establishing a Typographical Hierarchy

Hi ! When it comes to design, the smallest details often make the biggest impact. This image perfectly illustrates how designers of different skill levels handle spacing between objects. • Bad Designer: Equal spacing is applied rigidly without considering the visual balance of each shape. • Average Designer: Starts adjusting for visual balance, but may lack precision in aligning different shapes. • Good Designer: Strikes a perfect harmony, using subtle adjustments to achieve consistent and visually pleasing spacing. Good design is more than just symmetry; it’s about mastering the perception of balance.

The designer thought the fund deck looked great. The investment manager was happy that it was now "finally finished" and "in great shape". Except that it wasn't. When I did a Deck Review, I saw them heading straight for a cliff - and I'm glad I could pull them back from the edge. What happened? When my eyes landed on the deck, they almost fell off. Sure, each slide on its own was well done. Except that each slide had a different background photo and color. And so the deck violated a key principle: When Pitching or Presenting, never ever confuse the subconscious mind. Sure, each photo corresponded in some way to the slide's theme, and the colors were tasteful - blues, grays, and whites that individually looked professional. But switching background colors from slide to slide creates a subtle yet significant cognitive load for your audience. Here's why this matters: When institutional investors review your deck, their brains will process both your content AND your design. Each time the background color changes, their subconscious mind has to adjust and recalibrate - even if they're not consciously aware of it. This creates micro-distractions that pull attention away from your message. Worst case, the investor may start feeling an undefined unrest which could even turn into reduced receptivity and aversion to your message, because of this unexpected and unusual subtle overload. Think of it like trying to read a book where each page has a different tint and font. Even if each page looks fine on its own, the constant shifting makes it harder for your brain to focus on the content. The same principle applies to your pitch deck. Remember: Institutional investors review countless decks per week, and one of their main filters will be looking for reasons to say "no." And so, any element that makes your deck harder to process - even subconsciously - works against you. Therefore, consistency in design isn't just about aesthetics; it's about making your message as effortless to absorb as possible. Users of the Fundmanager.tools Pitch & Close Bootcamp know all about how to do this, having access to our Guerrilla Tactic # 39 of the course: 'How and why to create a “flow experience” in your slide deck'. That's what you want. And that's also why the world's top investment firms maintain rigid consistency in their presentations. They understand that design stability creates mental clarity, allowing investors to focus entirely on what matters: your strategy, performance, and value proposition. Want to know if your deck passes the subconscious test? You know where to reach me… Schedule a professional Deck Review today. Together, we can identify quick wins and set a strong foundation for long-term success. That's my commitment and promise to you. #fundraising #pitchdeck #DigitalMasterClassAssetRaising #hedgefund

Some design choices seem minor, but they influence how we interact with products more than we realize. Fonts, for example, can subtly affect whether we feel drawn to something or hesitate before picking it up. Research suggests that handwritten fonts create warmth and familiarity, making “safe” products feel more inviting. But when a product carries some level of risk, a clean and professional font can signal trust and reliability. These small cues shape how we perceive, touch, and even decide to buy a product. Would you trust a handwritten label on a bottle of hot sauce? I’ll leave the link to the study in the comments. #consumerpsychology #consumerinsights #packagingdesign #consumerbehavior #packagingideas #neuropackaging #FontPsychology