Work / Design Observatory
Design Observatory
A research lab for design quality, and the app and web foundations built from what it learns: versioned design experiments, recipes, and generated foundations reviewed against the same rules.
What it does
Design work is stored as versioned experiments, and the app only projects that store. Each version climbs a ladder from candidate to exemplar, so weak work cannot quietly set the bar. Every exemplar carries a design recipe covering type, colour, composition, motion, performance and accessibility, plus what it deliberately excludes. The gallery reports which design problems it still cannot answer, and any two designs can be compared side by side.
- Study reference designs and store each attempt as a versioned experiment
- Critique rules flag what makes an interface look generated
- Strong versions climb to exemplar, each with a recipe of what it excludes
- Generate a web or app foundation from the estate templates
- Review the generated foundation against the same design rules
- What fails feeds back into the rules and the templates
How it works
The store holds 35 experiment versions. Only exemplars reach the front page, and today there are 4 of them, covering 4 of 10 design archetypes; the gallery names the missing ones instead of hiding them. Critique rules flag the patterns that make an interface look generated, and a flagged design feeds a repair flow. Tests check that a recipe's exclusions actually fail a transfer that reintroduces them. Its instruments were used on this portfolio: the first layout measured too close to an existing house style and was redesigned. The estate’s web and app templates join the same loop: the Foundations view runs either generator into a scratch folder and checks the result against the shared design rules, read live.
Skills shown
- Data engineering
- A versioned experiment store whose promotion ladder decides what the gallery shows.
- Testing & QA
- Playwright and node:test, including checks that a recipe’s exclusions really fail when reintroduced.
- Frontend, 3D & graphics
- Generates React + Vite and Expo foundations and reviews them against shared design rules.
Worth knowing
- A promotion ladder (candidate, qualified, exemplar, featured, archived, superseded) decides what the gallery shows.
- Each design recipe lists what it excludes, so a transfer that brings back an excluded pattern fails.
- Its Foundations view generates the estate’s web and app templates in a scratch folder and reviews them against the same design rules.
- Coverage is reported against a fixed set of design problems, including the ones with no good example yet.
- Its measurements caught this portfolio’s first layout sitting too close to an existing house style.