The Northstar blog
Ideas with
intention.
Practical perspectives on brand, design, and the details that make a difference.
Motion with purpose: animate the change, respect the reader.
Use animation to explain what happened, give people control, and design a thoughtful reduced-motion experience.
Read article ↗Accessible interaction design: make every click and keypress count.
A researched guide to target size, keyboard access, and visible focus—with practical checks for your next website.
Read article ↗Human-centred design: start with the people using it.
Turn real needs, everyday constraints, and observed behaviour into useful design decisions.
Read article ↗Iterative design: build clarity one version at a time.
Use focused experiments, realistic prototypes, and clear stopping points to move a design forward.
Read article ↗Warm and cool colours: create balance without losing character.
Explore temperature as a relationship between neighbouring colours, with a controlled composition exercise instead of a colour-meaning formula.
Read article ↗Colour theory: understand the relationships, improve the design.
Understand hue, value, and saturation before combining colours, with a small visual exercise that changes one property at a time.
Read article ↗Choose colours with a job to do.
Turn a collection of swatches into usable colour roles, with a worked palette for a fictional workshop website.
Read article ↗Better briefs make room for better ideas.
Turn a vague website request into a workable brief that separates known facts, design assumptions, and decisions still needed.
Read article ↗Feedback that moves the work forward.
Make design reviews clearer, kinder, and easier to turn into a useful next step.
Read article ↗Show the thinking behind the finished work.
Explain a design through its decisions and evidence, with a transparent structure for a self-initiated studio concept.
Read article ↗A brand is more than a beautiful logo.
Build a visual identity that holds together wherever your audience meets you.
Read article ↗Let your typography do the work.
Build a useful reading order with real words, deliberate spacing, and an annotated workshop-page example.
Read article ↗Clarity is your website’s best feature.
Follow one visitor task from the opening headline to the next step, using a fictional workshop site as a worked example.
Read article ↗Make the first impression worth keeping.
Bring brand character and practical thinking to packaging design.
Read article ↗