SingleDirectionAestheticBet [principle] v1.0.0

Make one bold aesthetic bet per project and commit fully. Two aesthetic directions in a single product create incoherence; zero aesthetic direction creates generic output. The single bet may be wrong, but it is recoverable — incoherence and genericness are harder to fix than a misdirected but committed direction.

Meta

• License: Apache-2.0
• License Provenance: package-authorship-claim

Implications

• State the aesthetic bet in one sentence in design.md before writing any CSS.
• Every subsequent decision (font, color, radius, motion) should be a corollary of the bet.
• If a new idea conflicts with the bet, either update the bet explicitly or discard the idea.
• A/B testing different bets across parallel builds is valid — but each individual build has exactly one bet.

SingleDirectionAestheticBet [principle] v1.0.0

Make one bold aesthetic bet per project and commit fully. Two aesthetic directions in a single product create incoherence; zero aesthetic direction creates generic output. The single bet may be wrong, but it is recoverable — incoherence and genericness are harder to fix than a misdirected but committed direction.

Meta

• License: Apache-2.0
• License Provenance: package-authorship-claim

Implications

• State the aesthetic bet in one sentence in design.md before writing any CSS.
• Every subsequent decision (font, color, radius, motion) should be a corollary of the bet.
• If a new idea conflicts with the bet, either update the bet explicitly or discard the idea.
• A/B testing different bets across parallel builds is valid — but each individual build has exactly one bet.

Relations

related: [@community/principle-commit-bold-aesthetic, @impeccable/principle-distinctiveness, @community/method-brand-distinctiveness-test, @community/anti-pattern-ai-slop-aesthetics, @community/example-vercel-hero, @community/example-resend-dashboard, @community/rule-vary-aesthetic-per-generation]

Rationale

Projects that try to be both 'clean and minimal' and 'warm and editorial' in different sections communicate neither. Projects with no stated aesthetic direction default to statistical averages. A single explicit aesthetic bet — even an unusual one — creates the internal consistency that makes design recognizable as intentional rather than generated.