Fun Puffin isn't run from a brief or a roadmap — it's a handful of habits I keep coming back to while building it.
Design thinking, for a one-person hobby project, mostly comes down to noticing what feels off and being willing to redo it. The principles below are less a philosophy and more a description of how that actually plays out here.
Small pieces beat a big unfinished vision. Fun Puffin didn't launch with a masterplan — it started as a single landing page, then grew a component library, then a hero section, then auth, one working piece at a time. Each piece ships as soon as it's solid, instead of waiting for some imagined finished version of the whole site.
In practice: the homepage alone has gone through several rounds — an early centered layout, then a two-column hero, then a full navy banner — each one shipped and lived on before the next idea replaced it.
If it's not enjoyable to build or to use, it's probably not worth doing here. This is a hobby project, and that's a feature, not a limitation — it means decisions get made on "does this feel good" as much as "does this make sense."
In practice: the brand palette and puffin mark were picked because they're genuinely fun to look at, not because a brand strategist signed off on them.
Clarity over cleverness, in the design and in the code behind it. A small, well-named set of components (Button, Card, Alert, Modal, and so on) does more good than a large system nobody fully understands, including the person who built it.
In practice: the whole UI kit is documented on one style guide page, and every component is a few dozen lines — easy to read, easy to change.
Nothing here is meant to be final on day one. Things change as they're built, and that's expected, not a sign something went wrong the first time.
In practice: the puffin logo went through a background-transparency fix, and the hero banner got reworked after the bird's navy body blended invisibly into the navy background — both caught by just looking at it and trying again.
Feedback is data, not criticism. Almost everything on this site exists in its current form because an earlier version didn't quite work and got corrected — that loop is the actual process, more than any single decision made up front.
In practice: the style guide used to be linked in the main nav; once it was clear that page was a personal reference rather than something for visitors, it came out of the nav and got marked so search engines skip it too.
This page will keep changing along with the site — new principles when a real one emerges, old ones rewritten once they stop being true. If something here doesn't match how Fun Puffin actually gets built by the time you're reading it, that's a sign it's due for an update.
