The principles you learned first will outlast everything else you pick up along the way. Design thinking, design principles, and psychology of design operate beneath the surface of trends, tools, and platforms. When you understand them at their deepest level, they become more valuable than any new framework or fashionable pattern.
As a new year begins, this is a good opportunity to return to these foundational concepts. Not to review them casually, but to rebuild your understanding with deliberate intention and a clearer sense of purpose.
These concepts won’t tell you what to design, but they eliminate scattered decision-making before the design process even starts. They function as filters that narrow your decision space, help you identify fragile approaches early, and create a common language that teams can use when evaluating quality and making choices together.
When products feel confusing or unnecessarily demanding to users, the problem is that these foundations were ignored. More commonly, they were applied superficially, treated as checkboxes rather than frameworks for thinking. A team might reference “cognitive load” while designing a dashboard crammed with seventeen metrics, or cite “consistency” while using three different button styles across the same flow.
Design thinking shapes how you frame problems before solutions appear. Design principles determine which decisions create coherent, trustworthy experiences. Psychology of design reveals why certain patterns work by connecting to how people perceive, remember, decide, and expend cognitive effort.
These three areas don’t exist as isolated concepts to check off a list. They integrate into a single system that shapes how you approach design problems from the very beginning. They provide a framework for understanding problems before any solutions take shape. They make your reasoning process visible and explainable, so you can articulate why you made specific decisions.
When you understand these forces at a deeper level, clarity stops being something you chase and starts emerging naturally from your decisions. Beauty still matters, and it will appear in your work, but it transforms from a primary goal into a natural consequence of thoughtful choices made with clear reasoning.
Strong constraints don’t diminish creative work or make it less innovative. Instead, they bring focus and direction to the creative process.
By filtering out noise and unnecessary options, constraints make the real trade-offs in your work become visible and tangible. They don’t make your decisions easier to execute, but they do make the consequences of those decisions much clearer.
When you work from that place of clarity, you gain genuine freedom. You can adapt your approach thoughtfully, explore alternative solutions with confidence, and occasionally break established patterns when you have clear intent rather than acting on impulse or following trends blindly.
Revisiting these foundations isn’t an exercise in memorizing textbook definitions or reciting standard practices. It’s about critically examining the decisions you make.
Start paying closer attention to how attention gets directed in actual products that people use daily. Notice the subtle ways that small inconsistencies gradually erode user trust over time. Understand how to help users accomplish their goals easily, and disclose important details that people need to make informed decisions.
This approach to learning builds the structure behind the library on 1984.design. The content is organized into three interconnected areas: Design Thinking provides frameworks for understanding and framing problems clearly, Design Principles offers guidance for making consistent decisions throughout your work, and Psychology of Design explains the underlying reasons why certain decisions create better user experiences.
These aren’t concepts you master once and then move beyond as your career advances. They’re ideas you continuously grow into, understanding them more deeply each time you return to them.
The library is now completely free and accessible to anyone. There are no paywalls blocking access, no premium tiers hiding key insights. The website offers a growing collection of design concepts, mental models, and detailed explanations that you can return to whenever sound judgment matters more than knowing the latest tools.
It is a shared knowledge base built for product designers and makers who want to understand the reasons behind effective design. Everything is written to remain relevant and reusable over time, not to chase what’s currently trending.
Keep learning, keep growing.
— B