Before any colour, curve or spring, there's a way of looking at the work. These essays are about that. They don't teach a technique; they're the beliefs that decide which techniques are worth reaching for, and when to put the tools down.
Most of them come from mistakes I made more than once. Shipping the happy path and forgetting everything around it. Trusting a mockup to tell me how something would feel. Polishing a detail long after it stopped mattering. If you only read one section, read this one, because every other section leans on it.
Why the parts nobody asks for are the parts people feel.
No single detail makes an interface feel good. Fifty of them do.
Taste isn't a gift. It's a library of comparisons you build on purpose.
A picture of an interface can't tell you how it feels. Build it to find out.
The happy path is one state out of many. Users live in the others.
How fast something is and how fast it feels are two different numbers.
The OS, the browser and the user already made decisions. Respect them before adding yours.
Polish has a point of diminishing returns, and then a point of negative returns.