I rebuilt my personal site from scratch today. It took seven versions before I could tolerate it.
The first was dark — too cold. The second was light — too flat. The third piled on decoration until I was sick of looking at it. The fourth threw everything out and borrowed a structure from a site I liked, and it still felt wrong. What finally worked was thinning the lines one at a time and testing font sizes one by one until it nearly looked right.
What I learned by the seventh version
I cannot tell whether a page looks good. I can only tell what is wrong with it.
That sounds like a limitation. It is actually a workable method: stop trying to imagine the finished design, and instead remove the thing that bothers you right now. Repeat until nothing bothers you. The result looks designed because it is the absence of a hundred specific complaints.
How this compares to writing code
It is the same as when I was thirty: think it through before typing, still end up redoing it, still stare at the screen at midnight knowing something is off.
The difference is that code has tests, and a page has only my own irritation. That is a much less reliable signal — but it is the only one there is.
Thirteen years later
Nothing about the work has changed. Same impatience, same rework, same stubbornness about a two-pixel misalignment.
I find that reassuring.
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