It looks like magic. It is a trick.
Witch of Design is for people who make their own flyers, posts, price lists and websites, and are not designers. When something you made looks off, it is almost never talent. It is a gap, a grey, a size: small things with names, and each one has a fix. Here you get them one at a time.
Ms Gridzelda
Ms Gridzelda Zirkel is the witch of Witch of Design. She is a drawing compass with a crooked hat pulled down over her one eye.
She measures before she does anything else. She corrects the thing and never the person. She enjoys catching a mistake a little too much, and she is quietly pleased when you get it right.
She does not talk. She hums, scratches and cackles, and the rule appears beside her. Her pencil lead takes the colour of what she is doing: cyan while she measures, magenta while she corrects, yellow when it is right.
She gives her tricks away. It looks like magic. It is a trick.
Design is what makes things happen and exist.
Design is what makes things exist.
An idea that nobody can see does not exist yet. A shop without a sign is a room. Design is the moment a thing becomes visible, and can be found, read and chosen.
Design is what makes things happen.
Someone reads, understands, clicks, comes, pays. If nothing happens, the design did not work, however good it looks.
So it can be tested.
A design rule is a claim about what will happen. Claims can be measured. Witch of Design measures them and publishes the numbers.
It is tricks, not magic.
A trick is a thing that works every time, once someone has shown you. Line length, contrast, one left edge. None of it needs talent.
Most of it is corrections.
Good design is rarely one big idea. It is thirty small corrections in the right order. One a day is enough.
You do not have to be a designer.
You need a few rules that hold, a list to check before the file leaves your hands, and the nerve to publish.
Published and slightly wrong beats perfect and unseen.
A thing that is out there can be corrected. A thing in a folder does not exist.
How the tests are done
- One question per test, written before the measuring starts.
- Measured in a real browser, on real typefaces and colours, with the method written out so it can be repeated.
- The numbers are published in full, including the ones that do not fit the headline.
- Every test says what it does not cover.
- Every test carries the date it was measured. Nothing is backdated.
Corrections to the tests
When a test or a trick turns out to be wrong, the fix is listed here with its date, and the page is corrected in place.
None so far.
Who runs it
Witch of Design is run by Nina (Andreea-Cristina Mircea), a designer in Berlin. Her client work is at andreeacristina.com.
It started in October 2026. It is new, and it says so: the test log begins at 001.
Working with Nina
If you want your own project out there by New Year, with someone beside you, that offer is on her own site.
Write in
A mistake in a test, a rule you want measured, a trick that is missing, a question. Every message is read.
Or write to contact@andreeacristina.com, or to @witchofdesign on Instagram.
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