Design principles for marketing assets

01 Start from research, not from taste.

Open with what the buyer actually responds to, not what looks good to your team. The choice in any creative practice is between the anarchy of ignorance and the discipline of knowledge: ignorance-driven design is fast and confident and usually fails, then blames the audience. Research-driven design is slower and more constrained and ships work with a defensible reason to land. I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance, research before creative

"I prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance."

· David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1983

Pull the buyer language from interviews and the messaging matrix before you touch a layout. The concrete phrases buyers used become your copy. The design then ranks those phrases by importance. Design without that input is decoration.

02 Pass the caveman test before anything else ships.

The first gate is comprehension, not aesthetics. Could a person with no category vocabulary look at the page and immediately know what you offer, how it makes their life better, and what to do next? Marketers accumulate insider language and write copy that reads as obvious to them and opaque to everyone else. The caveman test strips that away. Could a caveman understand your homepage?, three questions, no marketing vocabulary

"Could a caveman look at your website and immediately know what you offer, how it will make their life better, and what they need to do to buy it?"

· Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand, 2017

If the page passes feature-set review but fails the caveman test, it goes back. The brain is wired to conserve calories and filter out anything that does not signal survival, defined broadly as save money, save time, gain status, reduce risk. A hero that does not land a survival-relevant value in seconds is not consciously rejected by the buyer. It is never consciously processed at all. The brain ignores anything that doesn't signal survival, your message has to land in survival terms in seconds

03 Make the hero clear, not clever.

A headline that requires interpretation has already failed. In a scanning context the reader allocates one to two seconds and zero interpretive effort. Clarity is what lets the headline pattern-match to an existing need. Cleverness, wordplay, and intentional ambiguity all fail the match because they ask the reader to decode, and decoding reads as "this is not for me." Clarity beats cleverness, always, a headline that requires interpretation is a headline that fails

"Clarity beats cleverness, always. A headline that requires interpretation is a headline that fails."

· Eddie Shleyner, VeryGoodCopy, 2024

The instinct, especially in B2B, is to over-rotate to clever lines that signal sophistication. Resist it. Run a two-second scan test with someone outside the team. If they cannot say what the offer is, rewrite the headline.

04 Build a visual hierarchy with three levers, in grayscale first.

Rank every element by importance using size, weight, and color. Design in grayscale first so the hierarchy works on size and weight alone, then add color only after it does. Color is the last lever, not the first.

De-emphasize labels and emphasize values: in "Revenue: $4.2M" the number wins. Prefer spacing over borders, because borders add noise. Never use a font weight below 400. Keep hierarchy levels perceptibly apart: if H2 is 24px, H3 is 20px, not 22px. The call to action gets a color used nowhere else on the page, so the eye finds it without searching.

05 Constrain typography to a single scale.

Pick a small type scale and use only its sizes. Recommended steps: 12, 14, 16, 20, 24, 30, 36, 48px. Two font families maximum. Sans-serif as the default for B2B.

Line length runs 50 to 75 characters, with 66 as the sweet spot. Mobile tolerates 35 to 50. Body text never drops below 16px.

06 Use white space as oxygen, not as leftover.

White space is a structural reading lever, not formatting decoration. A dense block of unbroken text triggers a visual-fatigue response before the reader has processed a single idea: the eye registers "this is going to be effort" and the reader skims or leaves. Short paragraphs and generous margins defuse that response and let the reader continue. White space is oxygen, dense unbroken text creates cognitive load; strategic white space lets the eye rest and the reader continue

"treating white space as oxygen in her formatting"

· Ann Handley, Total Annarchy, 2024

Keep paragraphs to one to three sentences in long copy, with explicit breaks between major ideas. Whitespace is the structure: generous outer margins, tight relationships between items that belong together. Group related items by proximity. Do not fragment every sentence into its own paragraph, which erodes the rhythm white space is meant to support.

07 Let one sentence per section scream.

Persuasive long copy needs one high-impact line per section, the sentence that makes the reader stop and that does the disproportionate persuasive work. The mistake is trying to make every line loud. When everything screams, nothing is remembered. The quiet sentences are the contrast that makes the scream land. Once per section, one sentence should scream, and the quiet sentences are what make the scream possible

"once per section, one sentence should make the reader stop. The scream is what gets remembered. The quiet sentences are what make the scream possible."

· Dave Harland, The Copy Cabin, 2024

The scream is usually the most concrete sentence on the page. Abstract claims do not survive the gap between reading the page and making the decision. Concrete images do, because concrete language encodes across more brain regions and is retrievable through more cues. "Save time" is abstract. "Stop spending Saturday morning rebuilding the spreadsheet" is concrete and recalled at the moment the buyer decides. Abstract claims disappear from memory; concrete images persist, vividness creates memorability

"Vividness creates memorability. Abstract claims disappear from memory; concrete images persist."

· Eddie Shleyner, VeryGoodCopy, 2024

Where the asset has room for a full problem statement, name the problem at three layers: the external problem (the tangible thing happening), the internal problem (how it feels), and the philosophical problem (why it is wrong that this exists). Hit only the external layer and the asset feels transactional. Articulate the buyer's problem at three layers, external, internal, and philosophical, or your message rings shallow

08 Hold the color and spacing system to fixed rules.

A consistent system is what makes an asset feel built rather than assembled.

• 60/30/10 color: 60% dominant (usually neutral), 30% secondary, 10% accent. The accent appears only on action elements, nowhere decorative.
• Limit the palette to 4 to 6 colors total including neutrals.
• WCAG AA contrast everywhere: 4.5:1 for normal text, 3:1 for large text.
• 8-point grid: every spacing value is a multiple of 8, or 4 for fine detail. No 13px, no 19px.
• Reuse the same button, card, and section-padding styles across the asset. Define a section rhythm and hold it.

09 Cut features until the asset explains itself.

Feature Shock is the failure where too many features crowd one surface, making it hard to explain, costly to build, and overpriced against any single use case. The team feels feature richness as ambition. The buyer experiences it as confusion. The buyer's mental model holds one or two features they care about, and the surplus adds cost without adding perceived value. Feature Shock, too many features make the product hard to explain, costly to build, and overpriced (Amazon Fire Phone)

"Feature Shock occurs when too many features are crammed into a product, making it hard to explain, costly to build, and overpriced (Amazon Fire Phone being the canonical example)."

· Madhavan Ramanujam, Monetizing Innovation, 2016

The page-level version of Feature Shock is a hero that lists eight capabilities. Cut to the one or two that drive the decision. The rest go below the fold or onto a separate page. Subtraction-first operating discipline

10 Design the price so the buyer can judge it.

People have no internal absolute-value meter for prices. They can only judge a price by comparing it to another price. A pricing surface that shows a single option forces the buyer to guess at value with no reference, and the question in their head ("is this worth it?") has no answer-generating mechanism. Introduce a second and third tier and the brain switches to "this option vs. that one," which it can do fast and confidently. This is why three-tier pricing converts better than a single price even when the buyer ends up choosing the original tier. The Relativity Principle, humans cannot evaluate prices in isolation, only by comparison

"humans cannot evaluate prices in isolation; they can only compare them"

· Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, 2008

Two more levers from the same body of work shape the felt cost without changing the total:

"The difference between 1 cent and 0 cents is psychologically enormous, not because of the penny but because \"free\" triggers a qualitatively different emotional response: zero risk, zero loss, zero cognitive load."

· Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, 2008

Use these honestly. A daily frame on a product nobody uses daily, or a free tier that collects users who never activate, erodes trust and inflates vanity metrics without lifting revenue.

11 Hold accessibility and tap-target floors on every asset.

Accessibility is not a final pass. It is a floor the asset clears throughout.

• Minimum 44×44px tap targets.
• Body text minimum 16px.
• Visible focus states on every interactive element.
• Alt text on every meaningful image.
• Never use color alone to convey meaning, so the asset works for colorblind readers.

12 Make the asset legible to agents, not only to humans.

A growing share of traffic is an agent fetching the page in one or two requests, not a human browsing for minutes. The platform-level moves that serve agents are concrete and stackable: access control, discovery via llms.txt, explicit capability statements, an answer-first TL;DR in the first 200 tokens, token discipline so the page fits a context window, and a "Copy as Markdown" handoff. None of these is fixed by writing a better headline, and they compound only when shipped together. Agent-first content has six platform layers, access, discovery, capability, format, token, UX bridge AEO experience and structure gate

This is a docs, help-center, integration-page, and comparison-page concern. For a brand page whose whole job is human emotional response, optimizing for agent legibility can flatten the experience. Apply it where information transfer is the job, not where feeling is.

13 Keep the design role inside the build, and keep a taste-keeper.

Two operating moves keep quality from drifting once the asset ships into a pipeline. First, the design role now sits next to the build instead of throwing finished mocks over a wall. The middle of the old design pie chart, long mocks, collapsed; the role expanded into short-cycle direction-setting plus last-mile polish on what engineers shipped quickly. The design role's time mix shifted from 60% mocking to 30% mocking, 30% pairing, 20% code

"You can't make a clickable prototype with these models — you have to use the actual models underneath and see people try it with their use cases."

· Jenny Wen, Lenny's Podcast, 2026-04-27

Second, a single taste-keeper choke point preserves coherence across many assets. At Snap, design approval is a deliberate ship-blocking bottleneck, and the cost of a little velocity buys durable consistency across hundreds of surfaces. Make design an explicit ship-blocking bottleneck The bottleneck works only when the taste-keeper has authority and actually ships through a backlog. A theatrical gate that only slows things down is worse than none. Brand and quality are growth levers, not the tax you pay for growth. Quality and friction-as-feature are growth levers, not constraints