Act 1 · Seeing · Course 01
The Eye
You already know good design when you see it. This course names what your eye is reacting to, so you can say it, defend it, and ask for it.
Good design isn't vibes. It's a small set of interlocking systems – hierarchy, type, colour, spacing, grouping – applied consistently, plus an honesty layer that matters more than any of them – does it work, does it look like what it does, does it answer you when you act.
Walk away able to
- Name the five levers that steer attention – and spot the one most designs pull wrong
- Read type, colour and spacing as systems rather than choices
- Run a five-question audit on any screen, no design training required
- Swap "make it pop" for lever-language an agent can execute precisely
The audit you leave with – five questions, no vocabulary needed
Five questions, no design vocabulary required. A screen that passes all five is very likely good, independent of taste:
- Do I know what to do first, without being told? – hierarchy (lesson 1), plus affordance
- Do I know something happened when I acted? – feedback; see gulf of execution / evaluation
- Does what looks clickable act clickable – and vice versa? – signifiers, honesty
- Is there one obvious next step, or five things equally loud? – the single most common failure in real products, and the one your instinct is already sharpest on
- Does this screen look like the rest of the product? – consistency (lesson 4’s similarity rule), the promise a design system exists to keep
The four lessons build the visual-system muscles – hierarchy, type, colour, grouping. The honesty-layer vocabulary behind questions 1–3 (affordance, signifier, feedback) is seeded in the glossary now and gets its full workout later in the path. The quiz at the end checks the mental models, not your memory.
The lessons
Already seeing it? Take the quiz first – a pass marks the course done, no lessons required.
- 01Hierarchy – Where the eye lands firstYour eye doesn't read a screen, it gets steered. Hierarchy is choosing where it lands and where it goes next – and the most common way screens fail is refusing to choose.
- 02Type – The interface, mostlyMost of an interface is text, so type decisions do more work than any other single choice. Three sub-problems – how sizes relate, how faces combine, how comfortable a paragraph actually is – and each has a system, not a vibe.
- 03Colour – Information, not decorationForget the colour wheel and "blue means trust". What matters in interface colour is legibility you can measure, meaning applied consistently, and proportion – one dominant, one accent, spent where it counts.
- 04Grouping – Space is information tooYour brain sorts a screen into groups before you consciously read it, using rules psychologists mapped a century ago. Designers steer those rules with distance, enclosure and a spacing ladder – and so can you.
- 05Case study – LinearThis course's ideas, working in production: Polish as a system property – a handful of firm decisions applied with total consistency, until restraint itself becomes the brand.
Check your understanding
6 questions with distractors built from real misconceptions – each answer explains itself immediately. Nothing unlocks and nothing is gated; passing just marks the course done.