A design should be a unified and aesthetized — that is, organic — response to a prioritized list of user needs.

Engaging OS imposes some design constraints in that apart from publicly-accessible screens, there are only two main types of screens: 1) role dashboards, comprising sets of centered consoles each displaying a table; and 2) ports, being mostly forms. Within these constraints, we express and build on your brand, striving for elegance.

We often utilize the Golden Ratio in order to balance perfect 50/50 symmetries with the less obvious 62/38 and 85/100. We aim for clarity and obviousness, so are grateful for conventions and fashion. Novelty might emerge in the fulfilling of a unique combination of requirements.

One checklist we're mindful of is Dieter Rams’s rules for interaction design, where good design:

1. Is innovative
2. Makes a product useful
3. Is aesthetic
4. Makes a product understandable
5. Is unobtrusive
6. Is honest
7. Is long-lasting
8. Is thorough down to the last detail
9. Is environmentally friendly
10. Involves as little design as possible

Rams places innovation as rule #1, but at least for now, we feel that merely implementing an elegant tailored system and thereby meeting rules #2–7 is innovation enough; we take rule #10 to do "as little design as possible" as not the last and least rule but more the epitaph for all the rest.

We view rule #8 about thoroughness in the context of Frank Lloyd Wright’s dictum that organic architecture is an architecture from within outward, so avoiding the common situation of a fancy splash page degenerating into unnerving design chaos within. Instead, the homepage comes last, emerging as much as possible from design choices already made during the development of component parts — so much so that we might almost restate rule #8 as being thorough not “down to” but “up from” the last detail.

Contributing to Rams’s rule #4 on making a product understandable, in a technique we call semantic typography we reduce cognitive load on the user by always displaying each type of item in its own unique font. The user unconsciously learns to recognize what they’re looking at before even reading it, so expends less effort building a mental map of each screen and even of the information architecture. This amount of typographic variety often requires three typefaces, which is at least one more typeface than is generally considered elegant, so to help avoid visual chaos we limit our typeface palette to those from a single font foundry, preferably the renowned Hoefler & Co.

We value consistency not only in typography but consistently. Luckily for our medium, consistency makes a software system not only easier to use but also easier to produce. Moreover, by enabling the re-rendering of the same things repeatedly, consistency can also improve speed.

We hope that this all culminates in personality, which can emerge with consistent use of a critical mass of design patterns.