Design Principles
Creating Design Principles
A collaborative process for discovering principles grounded in real work
Key Insight
Principles are discovered, not invented. Look at your best existing work and ask what made it right—the principles are already there. Creating them collaboratively (designers, developers, PMs) builds buy-in. Process: audit good work → extract implicit rules → draft principles → test against real decisions → refine.
Key Points
- •Start from existing good work, not blank-sheet ideation
- •Involve diverse perspectives: design, engineering, product, content
- •Draft more than you need, then consolidate to the strongest 3–7
- •Test each candidate against a real recent design decision
- •Principles need to be used—make them part of critiques and reviews
Guidelines
- ✓Run collaborative workshops rather than top-down declarations
- ✓Use real decisions as test cases, not hypothetical ones
- ✓Give principles time in use before finalizing—they improve with feedback
- ✓Reference principles explicitly in design reviews to build team habit
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