Visual Design Elements

Sensory Architecture: A Journey Through the Senses A client approached us with the vision of creating a wellness retreat that transcended the conventional. As with all our projects, we began with Land Studies, exploring its natural systems and understanding that the users were not the only guests but also the flora, fauna, and ecosystems of the place. This research led us to question: What if architecture did not only adapt to nature but co-created with it? More than a physical space, a wellness retreat is an experience. Designing in harmony with nature means creating a living, responsive architecture that interacts with its surroundings and strengthens the connection between people and the natural world. To achieve this, we studied light, sound, wind, vegetation, temperature, smells, and the metaphysical features of the site, asking key questions like: How can sensory experiences promote healing? Each site visit revealed new aspects, allowing us to map natural rhythms—light movement, wind patterns, biodiversity, influenced by the time of day and the season of the year. Studying the senses can seem overwhelming due to their subjective nature, so it was essential to understand how to measure and quantify the effects of these sensory elements on well-being. •⁠ ⁠Sight and Light: Light, essential for visual perception, influences emotions and biological rhythms. Orange light (582-620 nm) stimulates vitality, while blue light enhances concentration but can disrupt sleep. Based on these effects, one can design lighting strategies that respond to the physical and emotional needs of users at different times of the day. •⁠ ⁠Sound and Frequencies: Sound travels in waves and affects mood. Low frequencies induce relaxation, while high frequencies create alertness. Mapping natural sounds—wind, water, birds—allows us to define zones of tranquility and areas with greater sensory stimulation.  - Touch and Textures: Tactile perception involves pressure, temperature, and texture. Smooth wooden surfaces convey warmth, while rough stone evokes stability. By analyzing local materials, we design spaces that foster relaxation and a connection with nature through touch. •⁠ ⁠Smell: Smell is linked to the limbic system, influencing emotions and memories. We identified natural fragrances—like citrus & wood—to integrate them into architecture and enhance well-being. For example, we aim to design an experience where guests wake up to the invigorating scent of citrus, promoting energy and alertness, and wind down at night with the calming aroma of lavender, encouraging restful sleep. To bring this vision to life, we are working with experts from various disciplines, focusing on ecology, environmental conservation, neuroscience, and the use of local materials and construction techniques. Sensory architecture transforms design into a living organism that breathes, listens, and responds.

🍱 How To Organize Your Design System At Scale (https://lnkd.in/e9343uqv), a fantastic case study on how to set up a design system with 900 shared components and 25 designers — with product-specific domain components and shared ownership between the design system guild and product designers. Written by Jérôme Benoit ↓ Key takeaways: ✅ 1 design system, 8 design libraries, 1 library serves 1 goal. ✅ Each library has owners, editors (edit/publish), users (view-only). ✅ All designers have access to all resources from all files. ✅ Product team has domains, each domain has feature teams. ✅ Foundations + Core components are owned by design system team. ✅ Domain components are product-specific, owned by product designers. ✅ Each feature team has its own frame (not a page!) on a Domain page. ✅ Domain components are structured [Instance name] 💠 [Core name]. ✅ The work by product teams can move up to the Core level, too. In many products, different feature teams often have very different needs, and that’s why secondary design systems emerge. With this set-up, all teams are still working within 1 single design system, pulling and pushing components between levels and having search across all design work in all domains at once — without an organizational overhead! 👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾 Useful resources: How To Organize 1250+ Design Screens in Figma (+ File examples), by Lorenzo Palacios Venin https://lnkd.in/e7X4fKcj Booking.com: Multi-Platform Design System (+ Figma), by Nicole Saidy https://lnkd.in/edueYQPG Frog: Building A Global Design System, by Anthony Nguyen https://lnkd.in/etkiTxfB Doctolib Figma Files Organization Tips, by Jérôme Benoit https://lnkd.in/eK7bhQeS Multi-Brand Design System, by Pavel Kiselev https://lnkd.in/eShgnPnW Design System Structure for Teams, Projects and Files, by Luis Ouriach https://lnkd.in/eFZUjUCU How to Organize Your Figma Files For Design System, by Jules Mahé https://lnkd.in/eeHG2VzU Organizing Design System For Scalability, by Allie Paschal https://lnkd.in/eeAtakGs Design That Scales (Book), by Dan Mall https://lnkd.in/eeFrqFfP And kudos to the wonderful design team at Doctolib and all the wonderful designers above for sharing their insights for everyone to learn from!👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾 #ux #design #designsystems

This chart shows up in my feed every week. It's clean, it's confident, and it gives you the basic idea of what colors make us feel. Red means energy. Blue means trust. Pick the feeling, pick the color, done. But in branding, there's a lot more to it than that. Context, positioning, culture, history, audience perception, product category, and years of brand exposure matter more. Look at the chart's own examples. Red is supposed to mean romance. There is nothing romantic about Target, H&M, or a clearance sticker. The same red does completely different work depending on what sits around it. Color borrows its meaning. It borrows from the category, from the shapes next to it, and from whatever the competition already owns. Blue reads "trust" on a bank because banks spent decades training us to expect it, not because blue arrived with trust built in. Put that same blue on a fast food sign and it reads wrong. So when a client asks for a "trustworthy blue" or an "energetic red," the color is the easy part. The real work is figuring out what the color has to overcome, what it has to signal against the competition, and what the rest of the system is doing around it. Color is the part everyone sees. The thinking behind it is the part they don't. #Branding #ColorTheory #GraphicDesign #Marketing #ColorPsychology

Strategy is useless to AI until you turn it into instructions it can actually read. (Part 3 of my series on rebuilding our website with Claude Code.) This is how we scaled, and how we made AI useful without drowning in rework. Here is what we learned fast: if your strategy lives in your head, or in a doc nobody opens outside of your environment, your AI is working blind. It guesses, you correct, it guesses again. Writing the guidelines down is what broke that loop. So we didn't write one giant prompt. We wrote guidelines, the way you would onboard three human specialists, and committed them to GitHub so Claude reads them automatically at every step of the build. For us, that was three sets of instructions. SEO and Content. We started with how we talk about our product: what we do, what resonates, how we want to be positioned. Then we turned our research, competitive analysis and customer feedback, into rules Claude could apply on every page, plus a set of tests it runs against each one. We concentrated on technical SEO a lot here and made sure we were specific, and everything was testable. Design. This was huge for consistency. We built a style guide Claude has to read before it writes a single line: our colors as variables, our typography, our buttons, our components. Strict on purpose. Never invent class names. Never hardcode a color. When we made a new component, we decided what stayed and folded it into the guide, so Claude kept reusing what we already had. Every correction got written down so it never happened twice. One example: I kept deleting little uppercase labels above our headings, so it became a rule, and Claude never added one again. And because Claude is weak at UX on its own (more on that later), we spelled out how we wanted things laid out and to function. Development. The dev guidelines covered how to build a feature, how to handle errors, and what "done" means: requirements met, conditions checked, tests passing before anything ships. It writes its own tests for the APIs and other moving parts, then reruns them before every deployment, so something that worked last week doesn't quietly break this week. Here is why this mattered. Because it all lives in the codebase, any agent working in there picks up the rules, and the work that came before, automatically. Nobody has to remember to paste in context. It is just there. Claude rated our setup in the top 1 to 2% of its users for how thoroughly the rules, plans, and memory were documented. These are the same things I have been working with companies to implement through Product Operations that also make human teams work: write down how you do things, keep it where people can see it, and improve it every time you learn something. Give your AI the same guardrails you would give a new hire, and put them where the work actually happens. Next up: a closer look under the hood, how we run AI coding agents like an engineering team instead of a chat window.

"Your design system is now the instruction manual for a machine." I got a lot of responses to that line. So here is the practical version: We are not there yet. But we are clearly heading there. And preparing for it does not mean learning a new tool or rebuilding everything from scratch. It means doing the things we always knew we should be doing. Here is an honest recap of what matters and why, the good old basics (detailed rundown in the article below): 1. Variables with a semantic layer. A colour palette is not enough. The agent needs to know what a colour means, not just what it is. 2. Component names and properties that match code exactly. Same spelling, same capitalisation. One character off and the mapping breaks. 3. Every state is designed. Hover, disabled, error, empty, loading. If it is not in Figma, the agent does not know it exists. 4. Slots. Figma just shipped them. Named drop zones inside a component tell the agent exactly what goes where. A detached frame tells it nothing. 5. Auto layout on everything. The Figma MCP reads it and converts it to CSS. A manually placed frame is a picture. Auto layout is a description. 6. Code Connect. You do not set this up yourself but without it the agent knows your Button exists in Figma and has no idea it is the same Button your developer already built. One honest caveat: variables travel cleanly to code. Styles don't. Typography and gradient styles have no automatic counterpart on the other side. That gap is still manual. And a bigger one: every working implementation of this I have seen is enterprise. The tooling is real but it is not simple, not cheap, and not yet designed for a team of three trying to ship by Friday. That will change, and it will change fast. When it does, the designers and teams who understood the landscape and built clean files will have a head start that matters. That is the whole argument for doing this now. A clean file is not a complete pipeline. It is just a much better starting point than the alternative. 👇 Full breakdown, open questions, and the stuff that still has no good answer in the article: https://lnkd.in/eNXsZH6C 🎓 If you want to go deeper, check out my courses (agentic design system and Figma in the making) https://lnkd.in/e_mJQCCJ 📬 And if you want to know on a weekly basis: https://lnkd.in/dsa_WdZC And for the spontaneous ones, I am running a free 30 min session on how to set up scalable Figma Files today, 7th of April on Maven, join me, starting in 3h! 🎟️ Sign up here for free: https://lnkd.in/e4gJJuTa

Catch Eyes, Capture Hearts. Contrast is one of design's oldest tools and still one of its sharpest. It shapes how we see, what we register and where our attention goes. Without it, design loses energy and definition. You see it clearly in a black and white photograph. The tension between light and dark gives it depth and emotion. The same instinct drives architecture, branding and packaging because difference creates meaning. A glass tower beside old brickwork tells a layered story about time and progress, each element gaining strength because the other exists. Branding works the same way. Contrast is often the reason a product stops you mid‑scroll or makes you reach for the shelf. A hit of vivid colour against calm neutrals, a matte surface cutting through shine, a rigid form eased by curve. These cues signal that something deserves attention. Designers are pushing this further through hyper‑contrast packaging. Patterns, stripes and grids meet bold colour and tactile layers, turning shape and finish into instant attention magnets. Swiss structure meets fragrance storytelling in this design by Ard. Precise geometry, bold typography and intricate detail work together to build a visual rhythm that echoes the scent inside. The whole pack runs on that tension. 📷ARD

Timeless inspiration to boost modern designs! In an age where AI, the metaverse, and augmented reality dominate design landscapes, vintage fragrance advertisements from the 1960s through the 1980s remind us of the enduring power of timeless creativity. >1. CANVAS COMPOSITION: The Foundation of Impact The strongest vintage designs thrived on impeccable composition, borrowing techniques from photography to draw the viewer in. +Dynamic diagonals to lead the eye. +Focal points to anchor attention. +Rhythms and patterns for flow and movement. The lesson? Strong compositional choices are not only visually arresting but also reinforce brand values. Every element on your canvas should work in harmony to captivate the audience. >2. COLLAGE: Layered Creativity. Vintage advertisements often integrated mixed media, combining photography, drawing, painting, and collage techniques. These limitations spurred creative innovation, resulting in visuals that felt rich and multi-dimensional. +What to take away: Experiment with layering textures, imagery, and formats to add depth to your designs, evoking that iconic handcrafted allure. >3. CHIAROSCURO AND EXPLOSIVITY: The Drama of Contrast. The dramatic interplay of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) was a hallmark of these posters. Flat, bold inks heightened visual drama, emphasizing contrasts and creating powerful compositions. +Modern application: Use contrasts thoughtfully to evoke mood and intensity, ensuring your design stands out even from afar. >4. THE HUMAN HAND: Authenticity in the Artist’s Touch. Hand-painted posters revealed the artist’s personality, with visible brushstrokes and imperfections adding character. This personal touch offered an authenticity and uniqueness, elevating the perceived value of the product. +Today’s relevance: Even in a digital world, integrating hand-drawn elements or imperfections can evoke the same sense of craftsmanship, particularly for luxury or bespoke brands. Final thought. Vintage advertising shows us that creativity thrives within constraints. By revisiting these analog approaches, we can create distinctive, memorable designs that stand apart in the AI-driven design landscape. Technology is a tool, not the driver of creativity, use it to amplify, not replace, the timeless principles of art and design. Get inspired by my curated selection of visuals and craft your next Hit! #beauty #beautybusiness #beautydesign #fragrancedesign #fragrancesbusiness

In lighting design, layering is essential - not just for illumination, but for creating a functional and visually appealing space. By combining different layers of light, we can enhance both the atmosphere and usability of a room. 🔹Ambient Lighting The foundational layer. It provides general, overall illumination that allows us to navigate a space. Think ceiling fixtures, soft wall sconces, or indirect lighting that sets a comfortable baseline. 🔹Task Lighting Focused and practical. This is lighting meant to support activities—reading, cooking, working. Under-cabinet lighting, desk lamps, and pendants above counters all fall into this category. 🔹Accent Lighting Accent lighting adds depth by highlighting specific features like artwork or architectural details. It creates contrast and draws attention to focal points. 🔹Decorative Lighting The jewelry of a space. Chandeliers, sculptural pendants, and unique wall lights can make a visual statement while also serving functional roles. A well-placed decorative pendant, for example, might double as task lighting over a dining table or a kitchen island. Why Use Lighting Layers? Lighting layers are important because they create a balanced, adaptable space. They not only improve the functionality of a room, making sure it’s lit properly for various tasks, but also prevent spaces from feeling flat or monotonous. By layering different types of lighting, you can add dimension, emphasize key design features, and enhance the overall user experience. This approach makes design more flexible and visually dynamic. #Lighting #LightingDesign #LightingLayers

Last week, I visited a friend’s home for Ganpati. The moment I stepped in, I noticed the warm golden glow from their pendant lights. Instantly, the space felt cozy, intimate it almost invited conversation. Contrast that with walking into a brightly lit office at 9am suddenly, you’re alert, focused, and in “work mode.” Same person, different lighting, completely different mindset. Lighting isn’t just about visibility it shapes how we feel and how we behave. Dynamic lighting design is transforming the way we experience interiors. From boosting productivity to creating calm, light directly influences our mood, perception, and wellbeing. Research in human-centric lighting design shows: • Warm tones encourage relaxation and social connection • Bright, cool light improves focus and alertness • Shifts in light intensity can change how we perceive space , making rooms feel larger, cozier, or more dynamic Lighting is no longer just a technical layer of design , it’s a psychological tool. A simple change you can try at home: swap your bedroom lamp bulbs for warmer-toned lighting. The effect? You’ll likely find yourself winding down faster at night , reading feels calmer, sleep comes easier, and your body naturally starts syncing with its circadian rhythm. It’s a small shift, but it shows how light influences not just our mood, but our overall wellbeing. #LightingDesign #InteriorDesign #Architecture #HumanCentricDesign #SpatialExperience #DesignInnovation #WellbeingThroughDesign #DynamicLighting

We tend to rely on LRV to guide colour decisions. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. In a lot of projects, once reflectance targets are met, colour is often considered “resolved”. But in practice, spaces don’t always behave as expected. Two schemes can meet the same LRV guidance and still feel completely different to be in — one easy to read and settle into, the other harder to navigate or more visually demanding over time. What often sits underneath that difference is chroma. It’s something we talk about less, but it plays a big role in how colour is actually perceived — particularly in shared environments where people experience space differently. In the latest edition of The Colour Code, I’ve broken this down using a simple way of thinking about colour as three dials: • hue • LRV • chroma …and how small shifts between them can change how a space performs once it’s in use. I’ve also included a few visual examples showing how the same hue and LRV can behave very differently depending on chroma. You can read the full article below. ❓How are you approaching colour balance in your projects — particularly where guidance and real-world use don’t quite align?