https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/notablebooks/
Summaries of books I’ve read.
Semantics is about meaning. If you design something you need to know everything you can about the meaning of the thing you’re working with. Everything in your design should support that meaning.
Syntactics is about the building blocks of your design and how they relate to each other. Like any syntax those elements should form a language together. They should be a connected system.
Pragmatics means that even if you’ve got these first two right, if no-one knows what your design means it’s useless. A design exists to be understood.
You must pay attention to absolutely every element of your design. Nothing can escape your notice.
Elements in your design can mean more than one thing, and this is generally good. Try to have multiple meanings throughout, but make sure they support the overall purpose of the design.
Simple shapes, colours, and type give a design a timeless quality. Designs made in this way will last longer than designs that pay too much attention to fashion.
No part of your design should be arbitrary. Every element should be there because it adds meaning, and is appropriate to the design. Arbitrary splashes of colour, for example, make a design worse.
Simplicity means “consisting of relatively few connected parts and being easy to understand”. Simplicity is the opposite of two concepts: complexity, which is how many parts are involved in something, and complicatedness, which is how difficult to understand something is.