The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2023
Saferules distills visual design into specific rules you can safely follow every time
A side-project page of about 25 visual design rules, each a concrete safe default with a visual before/after — 1,978 HN points in Feb 2023.
Anthony Hobday (anthonyhobday.com)
What it had to solve
Most visual-design guidance is abstract — 'make it clean', 'use breathing room' — so a non-expert cannot tell whether their work follows it. Hobday's side-project page offers rules that are 'safe to follow every time', each small enough to apply without taste or judgement, while explicitly allowing any rule to be broken for a good reason.
How it works
Saferules, published under anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects, is a single page of visual design guidance written as defaults rather than essays. Its opening says the rules do not have to be followed every time — anyone with a good reason may break them — but they are safe to follow every time. That framing turns design from a matter of taste into a checklist a non-designer can execute.
Each rule is concrete and mostly numeric: use near-black and near-white instead of pure values; saturate neutrals by less than 5%; keep body text at 16px or above; hold line length around 70 characters; make horizontal button padding twice the vertical; set shadow blur to double the distance; keep container-background brightness differences within 12% (dark) or 7% (light) in HSB. Most come with a side-by-side visual example and a short reason, so the reader sees the wrong version next to the right one rather than taking the instruction on faith.
The page earned its place on Hacker News on 6 February 2023, drawing 1,978 points and 317 comments. The thread did not just upvote — it argued with the rules at the level of detail they invited, defending pure black on OLED screens, quoting the numbers back, and debating whether the site itself followed its own advice.
Why it lands
- Numbers replace judgement: 'use near-black' or '16px minimum' is actionable by someone who has not yet developed design taste, while 'make it look clean' is not.
- A wrong/right example next to every rule lets the reader verify the claim in one glance instead of trusting the author.
- The explicit permission to break rules for a good reason made the guide feel like advice from a practitioner, not a law, which encouraged discussion rather than compliance.
- One rule cites measured evidence — container brightness across about 100 well-designed sites — showing the defaults were derived from observation, not invented.
- Plain text and near-zero tooling made the artifact cheap to make and easy to share, so the idea itself, not a campaign behind it, carried the attention.
What it did
Posted to Hacker News on 6 February 2023, the page drew 1,978 points and 317 comments — very large engagement for a plain text list — with the thread debating individual rules such as near-black/near-white against OLED and projector screens. The page stayed live as part of Hobday's side-projects section and remains the version readers link to.
What you can take
Prescriptive, measurable defaults travel farther than abstract principles: a rule that says 'use this number' with a wrong/right picture can be applied immediately — and argued with productively.
Since then
The material is the artifact: no company or product sat behind the page. In the launch thread commenters pointed to Hobday's other side-project write-ups, quoted rules back, added exceptions for OLED and projector displays, and asked the site for dates and navigation. The page remained online unchanged, and the rules kept circulating as a reference whenever the thread was cited. Its lasting effect was proving that design guidance written as safe defaults with examples could stand alone as shareable content.
Sources
- Visual design rules you can safely follow every time
- Visual design rules you can safely follow — Hacker News discussion
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