SingleDirectionAestheticBet [principle] v1.0.0

Make one bold aesthetic bet per project and commit fully. Two aesthetic directions in a single product create incoherence; zero aesthetic direction creates generic output. The single bet may be wrong, but it is recoverable — incoherence and genericness are harder to fix than a misdirected but committed direction.

Implications

• State the aesthetic bet in one sentence in design.md before writing any CSS.
• Every subsequent decision (font, color, radius, motion) should be a corollary of the bet.
• If a new idea conflicts with the bet, either update the bet explicitly or discard the idea.
• A/B testing different bets across parallel builds is valid — but each individual build has exactly one bet.

SingleDirectionAestheticBet [principle] v1.0.0

Make one bold aesthetic bet per project and commit fully. Two aesthetic directions in a single product create incoherence; zero aesthetic direction creates generic output. The single bet may be wrong, but it is recoverable — incoherence and genericness are harder to fix than a misdirected but committed direction.

Implications

• State the aesthetic bet in one sentence in design.md before writing any CSS.
• Every subsequent decision (font, color, radius, motion) should be a corollary of the bet.
• If a new idea conflicts with the bet, either update the bet explicitly or discard the idea.
• A/B testing different bets across parallel builds is valid — but each individual build has exactly one bet.

Rationale

Projects that try to be both 'clean and minimal' and 'warm and editorial' in different sections communicate neither. Projects with no stated aesthetic direction default to statistical averages. A single explicit aesthetic bet — even an unusual one — creates the internal consistency that makes design recognizable as intentional rather than generated.