The brand DNA says what Gavlar is. This page is how to choose when the system offers more than one good answer. Six principles, each with a rule. Read them once, then skim when stuck.
When making a creative call, walk down the list. The first principle that gives a clear answer wins. If three disagree, the brief itself needs sharpening, not the design.
1. Start with a spark
Before opening Figma, gather direction. A sketch, a reference image, two adjectives that name the feeling. Tools nudge you toward what they make easy, not what the brief needs. Fifteen minutes of references first changes the trajectory of the whole piece.
2. Earn its place
Every element must be doing work. Most weak design isn’t bad, it’s full. Subheadings that repeat the headline, icons next to self-evident bullets, patterns that fight the type. Before signing off, look at each element and ask: what changes if I delete this? If nothing meaningful, delete it.
3. Zig and Zag
When deciding direction, generate two genuine options. Zig is the conventional, expected choice. Zag is the unexpected, considered alternative. The value isn’t picking one, it’s that holding both up reveals what the brief is actually asking for. Default to Zag where the brief allows, because most ambitious clients arrive because the Zig version of their category stopped working.
4. Restraint over decoration
When in doubt, take something away. Confidence shows in what you leave off the page. Fewer elements, more whitespace, less colour, fewer typefaces than feels comfortable. This is how an accent stays effective and a pairing stays elegant.
5. Break the grid, but only once
The grid is the default, used everywhere except one deliberate place. That single break is what gives the page energy. A headline slipping into the margin, an image bleeding past its column. One per surface. More than one reads as chaos, not craft.
6. Find it, don’t force it
Frame creative decisions as uncovering what’s already true, not fixing what’s wrong. “What we noticed about you” lands differently from “how we’d reposition you”, and the work lands closer to authentic. This shapes component names, proposal copy, and how concepts are shown to clients.
When the principles disagree
It happens. The tiebreaker is never the principles, it’s the brief. Go back to the two adjectives that define the feeling for that surface. Whichever principle serves those adjectives wins. If you can’t tell which adjectives apply, that’s the real problem. Sharpen the brief, then come back.
Decisions log
A living notebook. Build decisions, corrections and open questions get logged here over time, so the next piece of work inherits the last one’s thinking rather than relearning it.
- 2026-06 — Living Framework Portal v1 stood up for Gavlar’s own brand: the dogfood reference and the visibility engine. Knowledge Layer mapped from the Studio markdown.