Working notes · MoonFox Studio
Short posts about interface work — mostly things we had to look up twice.
18 July 2026
Centering an icon inside a circular button by its bounding box is almost always wrong. Triangles, chevrons and anything with a diagonal edge read as off-centre even when the numbers say otherwise. We nudge by eye and record the offset as a token so it survives the next redesign.
2 July 2026
We ran an informal test with eleven people on the same flow at 150, 240 and 400 milliseconds. Nobody described the 400ms build as "smooth" — the words were "laggy" and "heavy". Anything the user initiated should be done in under a quarter of a second.
14 June 2026
--color-danger survives a rebrand. --color-red-600 does not. We learned this the expensive way on a design system that shipped with 40 value-named tokens and needed all of them renamed nine months later.
30 May 2026
The screen a user sees on day one is usually designed on the last day of the project. We now sketch empty states in the same pass as the populated ones — it tends to expose missing onboarding steps early.