Your site looks great. I already forgot it.

_{Day 73/100}

Hey—It's Tim.

It’s Friday.
It’s Frontend.
And this is a new corner of the internet I’ve been loving lately.

I spend way too much time thinking about how things look.
How they feel. How the first 5 seconds on a page makes someone stay… or bounce.
Part of that’s just me.
Part of it’s because I’m deeply in the weeds with the product and design of Penfriend.

I’ve been obsessing over this stuff way more than I have the right to.
Which means you get to benefit from the spiral.
Let’s talk about the Notionification of the Internet.

But here’s the thing:

That’s not always bad.

Minimal isn’t the enemy

I like clean design.
I like tools that get out of the way.
I like when a product doesn’t make me fight it to use it.

Let’s not pretend “chaos” = character.

You ever open software with every toolbar visible at once?
Feels like being punched in the eyes by a UX committee.

Clean design, when done well, is thoughtful.
Not plain. Not sterile. Just… considered.

The good ones don’t show everything.
They show what you need - when you need it.

A quick story from my engineering days

I was formally trained on 3DS Max. Blender. Revit.
All powerful. All absolute nightmares to use.

I wrote hundreds of keyboard macros just to make them usable.
Like building IKEA furniture before you can sit on it.

Then there was SketchUp.

SketchUp was intuitive out of the box.
It just made sense. I could think → click → build.
It respected how I worked.

That’s what clean software should do.

Not strip out personality - just friction.

So why does everything still feel… the same?

Because most teams stop at “looks nice.”

They forget:

And that’s the real problem.

The design isn’t too clean.
It’s just too default.

What to do about it

Here’s the play:

• Keep the clarity

• Keep the spacing

• Keep the speed

But add a fingerprint.

Say something a little strange.
Use a color that makes your founder nervous.
Inject a weird story.
Drop in a visual that shouldn’t work—but does.

I wrote a whole newsletter about adding weird to your site.
Adding the human back into it.

We don’t need more brutalist madness.
We just need websites that feel human again.

TL;DR

Minimal is good.
Default is forgettable.

If your product is special, your site should feel like it.

✌️ Tim "Everything Is a White Box Now" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. During my engineering days I managed to acquire the title “Head of Visualisation”. Turns out it’s easy to be the head of something when you have a department of just me, myself and I.

New round here? Subscribe to get a daily hit of content goodness in your inbox.