Imogen Holloway: Oliver, the Tappa apps share an aesthetic. Was that planned?

Oliver Carmichael: No. It emerged. The first three apps shared a few things by accident — a similar typographic discipline, a willingness to let things breathe, a single accent colour per app. By the fourth one I started to formalise it into a design system. Now we protect it.

IH: What is in the system?

OC: Less than people think. A type stack. A spacing scale. A motion vocabulary. A small set of components: button, list row, card, sheet header. That is it. The rest is left to per-app interpretation.

The restraint is the system, more than the components are.

IH: Restraint is hard to teach. How do you do it?

OC: I cut things. Every design review is mostly me removing screens, removing labels, removing options. The first version of any feature has too much in it. The shipped version has half. The version we are proud of has a third.

IH: What do you remove most often?

OC: Empty states with too many illustrations. Tooltips. Three-line labels that are trying to explain a thing the design should explain on its own. Decorative dividers. Unnecessary settings. Onboarding screens.

IH: The studio has a quiet Japanese-craft aesthetic. Where does that come from?

OC: Half intentional. I spent two years in Kyoto in my late twenties working in a small type studio, and that shaped how I see almost everything. I do think there is something to learn from craftsmanship cultures — the patience, the willingness to do one thing for a long time. The kanji on the apps page of this site are not decoration. They are pointers to that idea.

IH: What is the thing you fight for most often?

OC: Animation budgets. We use animation. We use it sparingly. Every animation has to earn its place. A lot of teams animate everything because they can; we animate only the things that need animation to feel right. The difference is enormous.

IH: Last question. What is the design move you are most proud of in the portfolio?

OC: (thinks) The Lunara streak indicator. It is a small dot. It is the most-discussed part of the app. People who use Lunara talk about that dot to other people. That is a designed object that is doing real psychological work.

A small dot. Not a chart. Not a celebration animation. A dot.

Oliver Carmichael is Lead Designer at Tappa. Before joining, he led design at an Edinburgh fintech and, briefly, at a small studio in Kyoto.