What actually goes through my head three moves into a chess game, and why it looks a lot like designing a website.
I’ve put in enough hours on chess.com to climb to a 2000 rating, which mostly means I lose more slowly than I used to, and I actually understand why afterward. One habit stuck with me along the way that never left: before I move a piece, I’m already picturing what the board looks like two or three moves after that, not just the move sitting in front of me.
There’s actual research behind why that habit matters so much. Decades ago, a psychologist named Adriaan de Groot ran a now-famous experiment. He showed chess players a real position from a real game for a few seconds, then asked them to rebuild it from memory. Grandmasters nailed it almost every time. Beginners could barely recall half the board. Here’s the interesting part though: when he scrambled the same pieces into a random arrangement that could never actually happen in a real game, the grandmasters’ advantage disappeared completely. They weren’t remembering more pieces. They were recognizing patterns they’d already seen a thousand times, which freed up the rest of their brain to think ahead instead of just processing what was sitting in front of them.
That’s basically what a good design system does for me. Once the buttons, fonts, and colors are settled and reused everywhere, I’m not solving the same basic problem on every single screen. That frees me up to actually think a few moves ahead: how this button behaves when the text runs long, how this color reads next to the ten other colors already on the page, how this whole flow holds up when someone’s on a slow connection and things load out of order.
Color is where this shows up even to someone who’s never opened a design tool. Think about brown shoes with a black belt. Nothing is technically wrong with either one on its own. Put them together and most people can feel something’s off before they could ever explain why. Interfaces work the same way. A palette can look fine color by color and still feel wrong the second it’s all on screen together, because you weren’t just picking colors, you were setting up how they’d all have to get along later.
The pieces themselves make decent stand-ins for this too. A pawn looks like the least important thing on the board, until you realize it’s basically your button: plain, everywhere, and the whole formation falls apart the moment you stop protecting it. A bishop only ever moves on one color for the entire game, which is exactly how a typeface should behave, once you set its tone, it shouldn’t wander off into a different mood halfway through the site. And the king barely moves at all, but your whole strategy is built around protecting it, because losing that one piece ends everything. On a website, that’s usually the checkout button or the sign-up form. Everything else can have a rough day. That one can’t.
Honestly, a lot of design work I come across skips this part entirely. A nice-looking button here, a trendy shadow there, and nobody’s asked what happens three screens later. It’s the design version of a beginner’s chess blunder, fine for one move, and the reason the whole thing falls apart by move ten. Thinking a few moves ahead used to just be a chess habit of mine. These days it’s most of what someone’s actually paying for when they hire a designer who’s done this a while instead of someone who’s still just moving pieces.
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