Every full-bleed video, every custom font weight and every carousel is a performance decision made in design and paid for in engineering.
Budgets before mockups
Agree a page weight and an interaction budget before the first artboard. It turns a late, awkward conversation into an early, ordinary constraint.
Constraints improve work. A hero that must load in under a second tends to be sharper than one that can load in four.
Layout stability is part of the craft
Reserved space for media, predictable font loading and animations that transform rather than reflow are all design choices as much as engineering ones.
Users read a stable page as a well-made page, even when they cannot name why.