this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Programming

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Mostly agree.

But I think their advice falls prey to the “only a Sith deals in absolutes” problem, when they start contrasting “concrete advice” vs “generic advice”. They are offering “generic advice” with this post, aren’t they?

They hedge against that hypocrisy by offering some special carve-outs where generic advice is still “allowable”, but Idk. I think this post could’ve stuck to the 60% of the topic that was a slam-dunk instead of trying to take on the entire topic of design principles.

After all, I think you could argue that when experienced designers appear to contradict design principles, it’s because they understand the underlying logic of the principles and are recontextualizing them for this specific problem. That argument prioritizes concreteness but also doesn’t paint design principles as unimportant.

As Picasso or someone once said: first you must learn the rules, and then you must break them.