Ian Thompson

Before I worked on the web, I designed buildings. And one thing architecture teaches you very quickly is that consistency isn’t boring — it’s the foundation of good design.

In architecture, you work with grids, material palettes, and proportional systems. A window detail established on the ground floor carries through to the fifth. The handrail in the stairwell matches the one on the balcony. These aren’t arbitrary constraints — they’re what make a building feel coherent, considered, and intentional.

Design systems on the web work the same way. A set of typography scales, colour tokens, spacing units, and component patterns that repeat predictably across an entire site. When done well, they make the design feel solid — like everything belongs together.

The buildings I admired most weren’t the ones with the flashiest materials. They were the ones where every decision felt connected. The same is true of great websites.

Every few months a new framework, tool, or platform emerges promising to change everything. And sometimes they do. But most of the time, the quiet, established tools are the ones that actually ship projects.

WordPress has been around for over twenty years. It powers a staggering percentage of the web. It’s not glamorous. It’s not going to win you points at a tech meetup. But it works, it’s well-understood, and when something goes wrong at 2am, you can find the answer on Stack Overflow in under five minutes.

There’s a Dan McKinley talk called “Choose Boring Technology” that I come back to regularly. His core argument: every team has a limited budget for novelty. Spend it on the things that genuinely matter — your product, your user experience — not on reinventing your deployment pipeline.

I’ve adopted this as a guiding principle. Stable, proven, well-documented. Boring is beautiful.

There’s a gap between designing for the web and understanding how it works. I spent years as an architect drawing buildings I understood inside and out — structure, materials, how gravity and light interact with form. When I moved into web design, I realised I was designing surfaces without understanding the substrate.

That’s not a criticism. Visual builders like Bricks and Webflow have made it possible to produce genuinely good work without writing code. But there’s a difference between using a tool and understanding what it’s doing under the hood.

I’m not suggesting every designer needs to learn JavaScript. But knowing how CSS specificity works, why layout shifts happen, or what a server actually does when someone visits your site — that knowledge changes how you design. It makes you faster, more confident, and harder to mislead by developers who say “that can’t be done.”

The best architects I worked with understood engineering. The best web designers I know understand the web.