When Will and I started working on Luna (an app that matches you a la tinder with rescue dogs), one of the decisions we made was to focus on content and let it drive the design. All of our use-cases revolve around putting the focus on rescue pups, and having a bunch of distracting UI (even if it’s beautiful) would only increase the visual noise. Going with a minimal design makes every design decision intentional and rooted in functionality.

To do this, I built out a simple design language and asset library. All the standard things like fonts, colors, layouts, etc as well a few things I’ve found useful like color distribution and how they fit within the UX of the app. It also simplifies the development process by centralizing assets and styles in a easily referenced doc that can be printed as a PDF, written on, and then revised.