The case for restraint in brand design.

Here’s what I tell every junior designer I work with: go crazy first. Add everything. Every effect. Every gradient. Every texture. Get it all out.

Then remove things. One by one. Keep removing until the idea doesn’t work anymore.

Stop there. That’s the design.

Every element that survived? It earned its place. Every element you removed? It was decoration. And decoration is the enemy of design that actually performs.

I learned this the hard way at TapTools. I was working as a product designer, and the team kept wanting to add more features. Not because users asked for them, because competitors had them. They were copying other websites feature by feature, bolting things on without understanding if anyone actually needed them.

I pushed back. I told them we needed to go back to basics. Build our own design system. Base decisions on what real users actually wanted.

They didn’t love that idea.

So I did something slightly insane. I’d already finished their original designs ahead of schedule, so I told them: let me build the alternative on my own time. We’ll A/B test it. No risk to you.

I spent a month working six extra hours after every workday. Redesigned the entire product. Moved everything from XD, which was being discontinued anyway, to Figma. Went through over a hundred one-on-one user interviews I’d conducted. Read every bug report, every Discord complaint, every thread on X. And I built the product around what people actually wanted, not what competitors were doing.

Subtraction won.

Junior designers are usually flashy. Effects, videos, GIFs, animations stacked on top of each other. The eye doesn’t know where to go. It just… scatters. And scattered attention is the same as no attention.

Good design isn’t about having everything in your pantry on the plate. It’s about the small details. Every decision intentional. Every element earning its place.

The best brands in the world are built on restraint. They don’t compete by being the loudest. They compete by being the clearest.

If your design needs a lot of explanation, it’s not done yet. Keep subtracting. Keep going until what remains is inevitable.