Practice methods - how Kennedy trains the eye

Digested from Erik D. Kennedy, 5 Practical Exercises to Learn UI Design (For Free) and rule 7 of 7 Rules Part 2. Paraphrased in our vocabulary.

The five exercises

Analyze. Weekly: pick 5 good and 1–2 bad interfaces and articulate why. Every reason you can name becomes a technique you own forever.
Copywork. Recreate an excellent design pixel-for-pixel; every decision the original made, you must remake, which surfaces the invisible ones. Write down each technique discovered.
Fonts database. Keep a living record of fonts you like - character, uses, pricing, screenshots - so font choice becomes lookup, not paralysis.
Style tiles. Quick, loose compositions of type + palette + imagery + components; speed matters, because learning rate = speed of the think→make→judge loop.
Personal project mockups. 1–3 screens of something you care about - the low-stakes arena where the other four exercises combine.

The meta-rule: 90% production, 10% consumption - ten minutes making per minute reading.

Steal like an artist

Mimic the best until mimicry is easy, then diverge. Sources he rates: Dribbble (curated eye candy), Mobbin (300k+ real app screens, filterable by UX pattern), Layers. Style emerges from craft, never before it (his Paul Graham quote: just make good things and the distinctiveness follows).

Delta vs our system

CONFIRMS - "Reference implementations audited to 0 violations" = his copywork logic. Our system doc's exemplar pages (Cuba tower, Jamaica tower, marketplace v2) play exactly the role of his copywork corpus: learn by inhabiting a verified artifact. - Style emerges from craft matches our stance that the system doc, not taste talk, produces the look. - 90% production is how this workspace already operates - screens first, artifacts over narratives (screens-first-design).

ADDS - The adversarial analysis habit as a scheduled practice. Our typography diagnosis of 2026-07-03 was exactly exercise 1 - done once. Kennedy makes it a cadence: periodically pick one shipped page and one admired external page and articulate the differences. - Mobbin as a pattern reference - when designing an unfamiliar screen type (login, wizard, profile), look at 20 real implementations before inventing. - The fonts database idea - for us, a small fonts.md ledger of faces we've validated per brand/country would end repeated deliberation.

TENSION - None. This file is method, not rules; it explains how the rest of the shelf was earned.