I started at an advertising agency in Cairo, making concepts and layouts and campaigns. Then two Adobe diplomas, graphic design and then motion. Then cinematography at The American University, which is where the useful part happened.
Film school is largely framing, focus and light, and all three come down to the same question: what does the audience look at first, and what do they find second. You cannot put everything in the frame. Choosing what to leave outside it is most of the craft, and nobody in that room ever called it a nice to have.
Why a feature list rarely lands.
A feature list has no order of attention. It is a set of true statements arranged alphabetically or by engineering effort, and it asks the reader to assemble the meaning themselves. Most will not. They will scan it, fail to find the one line that concerns them, and leave with a vague sense that the product does a lot of things.
A story has an order built in. Something is wrong, here is what changed, here is what happened next. That is the shape a case study takes, the shape a good product page takes, and the shape an app's first run should take. None of that dresses up a weak product. Sequencing just admits that attention arrives in order rather than all at once.
The first screen is an establishing shot.
In film an establishing shot tells you where you are and what kind of story this is before a word is spoken. A first screen does the same job and usually gets handed a carousel instead.
The Hotels.com work is built on this. It is a dark, image-led system across eight core screens, and the images are not decoration sitting behind the interface. They do the work an establishing shot does: this is the room, this is what the evening looks like, this is what you are buying. The interface then stays quiet enough to let them. Dark was the harder choice and it is why contrast had to be checked across the whole palette rather than screen by screen.
You cannot put everything in the frame. What you leave outside it is most of the craft.
What brand systems taught me that products needed.
Years of brand work, much of it remote, for clients who needed a system rather than a logo. A brand system is a set of decisions made once so that hundreds of later decisions can be made quickly and consistently by people you will never meet.
That is a design system, described before the term was in the room. The difference in product work is that the consistency has to hold under interaction as well as in layout, so the system carries states, feedback and motion alongside colour and type. The instinct is the same one: decide once, centrally, and let the rest of the work inherit it.
Where the analogy stops.
Film is a fixed sequence and the audience cannot touch it. Products get used out of order, interrupted, abandoned halfway and resumed two days later on a different device. Anyone who carries the storytelling instinct into product design without noticing that will build a beautiful linear onboarding that people skip.
What survives the move is narrower than it first looks, and more useful. Decide what someone sees first. Know what the second thing is. Leave things out on purpose. That is not a philosophy of design, it is just the part of the job that predates screens entirely.
