Why is it that some things just look so good to you, and you can't quite explain why?

Scrolling through my moodboards, some of which have been running for years, I noticed a pattern. When text sits just that little bit too close to the edge of a page, a frame, a photograph. It doesn't make much sense. There's no obvious reason it should be appealing. But for some reason, it makes me hit save, every single time.

I saw it recently in a PerDiem composition, a wordmark sitting inside a small color block, placed so precisely at its corner that it looked accidental even though it obviously wasn't. Beside it, a mono typeface with irregularly placed type, shoved right to the edge of the page, line spacing tight. Combined with the texture, shapes and colour around it, the whole thing becomes a beautiful composition.

I saw it again on a fashion spread, red type running along the middle of a blurred photograph. The red is doing something specific here. It's not just sitting on the image, it's almost cutting into it, like the colour itself has sharper edges than the letters do. And again on a brand page where the copy runs tight on the left and finishes just as tight on the right, the margins uneven, the text laid out in a way that doesn't exactly invite easy reading. But from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it pulls me right in.

That's the beauty of subjectivity in design. Of course, when identities, campaigns and websites get built, the audience sits at the heart of every decision. But inside every designer there's a private preference too, the version they'd land on if they were making the thing for no one, in an empty room.

Not knowing why something appeals to you, and not being able to explain it even to yourself, is one of the hardest problems a creative faces. But maybe that's exactly why more of us should trust our gut. Instead of deferring entirely to what everyone else says, have conviction in your own instinct. Because the decisions that come from somewhere deep and unexplainable are often the ones that end up defining the work.

Shot of the good stuff.