Smashing Magazine: A practical guide to establishing design principles

Vitaly Friedman published this piece in April 2026 as a practical guide to what design principles actually are, why most teams get them wrong, and how to run a workshop that produces principles worth using. The context the article places its argument in is directly relevant for 2026: in an era where AI can produce passable interface designs quickly, intentional principles become more important, not less, because the question of what deserves building and what values a product should embody has become harder to default-answer through convention.

The article’s first contribution is definitional. Friedman draws a clear distinction between principles that function as guidelines — specific, applicable to real decisions, expressible with examples — and principles that function as brand slogans. He uses Dieter Rams’ ten principles of good design as an exemplary reference: humble, specific, and directly applicable to individual objects rather than abstractions. Contemporary examples include Anthropic’s AI Constitution and Linear’s Agentic Design Principles, which Friedman cites to show that principles are being written for AI interactions specifically, not just for interfaces.

The diagnosis of why most design principles fail is practical: they are produced in a half-day meeting without user research, approved upward, and then ignored because no one can tell whether a specific design decision violates them. Principles that are too abstract become invisible in practice.

The workshop method Friedman describes has eight steps. It begins with pre-session user research — reviewing existing findings, not generating new data — to ground the session in actual user needs. The workshop then uses tangible object analogies to help participants articulate values through comparison rather than definition. Product analogies and attribute extraction follow, building toward value statement drafts that can be tested against existing product decisions. The method ends with a “reality check” step that involves applying draft principles to recent decisions the team already made, to test whether the principles would have provided useful direction.

The article also addresses the organizational dimension: principles without executive alignment and clear ownership tend to decay. Friedman recommends assigning ownership of each principle to a named person rather than leaving them as a shared document.

The piece is most useful for design leads and product teams at the stage where they want to move from ad-hoc decision-making to something more repeatable, and for teams introducing AI-assisted design tooling who need alignment on what the output should look and feel like before scaling generation.