Whenever I’m visiting my family back home, it always feels like a giant timer starts the moment I walk through the front door. Before I even get settled, there’s a countdown blaring, “T-minus 4 minutes and 18 seconds until you’re completely over this.” It’s as if setting foot in my parents’ living room instantly transforms me into the irritable, angst-ridden teenager I was over ten years ago. Now, I’m a super complex person with an intricate tapestry of emotions, so I assume there’s a psych dissertation’s-worth of reasons I feel this way, but there’s one thing I know for certain: I have one trigger that immediately runs the clock down to 0, and that is my mother slightly adjusting the position of something right after I set it down.

A lot of people find it harmless or don’t even notice it at all, but among my mother’s many quirks is the uncontrollable urge to reposition everything. I’ll sit down at the kitchen table with a plate of food and a drink, and before I can even touch fork to mouth, she has nudged my glass 3.2 millimeters to the northeast. Maybe I just don’t like being corrected, but I usually think I do an above-average job arranging my beverages, so this sends me into somewhat of a wide-eyed rage spiral. I’ll usually just look up and ask, “Was that really necessary?” only to be met with, “Yeah it’s fine.” as she glides away to whatever corner of the house she was watching me from, patiently waiting for me to make the wrong decision about the relative placement of my cutlery.

So what does this have to do with being a designer?

Great question, you. I remember when I first started in design, the name of the game was Pixel Perfect™ or GTFO. Every designer’s point of pride was creating the crispest mocks in Photoshop — user or audience be damned. If you could painstakingly cobble together the freshest photo comp, you were a “world-class” designer.

So cut to me with my eyes glued to a monitor, tilting my head at various angles whilst standing 1, 5, and 10 feet from my desk in order to ensure that every perfectly letterpressed and beveled button landed on the wholiest of pixels. Is it possible that my mother’s constant futzing conditioned me to become a natural at UI design? A lot of people say that certain aspects of being a talented designer can’t be taught. Proportion, whitespace, balance: all principles of design that everyone can learn and understand, but for some people they come naturally. Maybe every nudge of a dish, every refolded towel, every adjusted picture frame was a lesson in alignment. Maybe my mom was on a mission to groom the greatest designer there ever was!

Or maybe my mother created a monster fueled entirely by perpetual anxiety

What can I say, I’m not a photographer

Almost everyone I’ve worked with has taken note of a particular quirk I have. Each morning when I get to my desk, I empty out my pockets. Lined up along the right edge of my desk are my keys, wallet, chapstick placed on top of a lens cloth, and then phone. It’s worth mentioning that the items in this column are all roughly the same width. It’s also worth mentioning that they’re arranged in order from least likely to be used during the day, to most likely to be used. It’s also worth mentioning that I am completely out of my mind.

At the beginning of my career, being a perfectionist really served me well, but the field of design has changed a lot since then. We’ve sashayed our way through lots of mantras: pixel perfect, content is king, fail fast, mobile first. It’s not that any one ideology suddenly becomes wrong, but there’s definitely such a thing as being fashionable when it comes to design thinking. Nowadays, with accessibility and usability at the forefront, many would say putting the user first is what’s in vogue. Gone are the days of obsessing over pixels. With design systems and atomic components being the standard in UI development, what matters is the final product and not how pristine your mocks are. Designers can focus more on understanding their users instead of nudging that arrow icon 2 pixels down to optically center it vertically with the text in the blah blah blah blah blah.

Now I find myself left with this pent up need to nudge that doesn’t always get fulfilled in my day-to-day work. Instead, it manifests in a number of (hopefully) charming habits.