← All posts
Design
Oct 6, 2026
5 min read
Designing with the constraints you actually have
A small budget and a short deadline are a brief, not an excuse. Three habits that help.
Tomas Vidal
Most of our work has a ceiling: time, money or a team that will maintain it. Treating that as the real brief produces better work than pretending it is not there.
Pick one thing to be excellent at
A site can have one great page. A product can have one great flow. Choose it early, tell everyone, and let the rest be competent and plain.
Reuse before you invent
Every new component is a promise to maintain it. We start from the pieces a team already has and add new ones only when the old ones cannot do the job.
Ship the boring parts first
Error states, empty states and the 404 are what people see when things go wrong. Finish them before the hero image.
