Design gets better when you have to run it

I design and build, and then I host and maintain the same thing for years. That loop changed my taste more than any design book.

You stop liking anything you cannot debug. The clever hero animation is less appealing once you are the person explaining why it stutters on a mid-range Android. The endless carousel is less appealing once you have seen the analytics.

What survives is fairly plain: clear hierarchy, honest type sizes, layouts that do not fall apart when the client writes twice as much copy as they promised. It looks like restraint. It is mostly memory.