01 · The Design Stack
Design is not Figma.
STACK 1 · Perception
How the human visual system parses a screen in the first 50ms. Pre-attentive attributes, Gestalt principles, grouping by proximity, closure, and similarity. Why "clean" doesn't mean "minimal."
STACK 2 · Cognition
Mental models, learned affordances, and schema activation. Why the back button works. Why hamburger menus fail. How working memory constraints drive information architecture decisions.