On restraint

Every critique I've sat through where a screen felt "unfinished" turned out, on closer look, to be a screen that was actually just quiet. Quiet gets mistaken for incomplete constantly, and the fix people reach for is always the same: add a badge, add a gradient, add a card around the thing that was already fine on its own.

The restraint isn't the absence of a decision. It's a decision, made early, to spend the page's attention on one thing instead of six. You can tell within the first five minutes of a review whether a team made that decision on purpose or arrived at it by running out of time.

What is this competing with? If the honest answer is "the thing I actually want someone to look at," it doesn't go in.