Design
Design is the process of planning and specifying an artifact’s structure, behavior, or presentation, and the resulting arrangement, to meet intended purposes and constraints.
Functional Design and Architecture: Examples in Haskell
The creative activity of selecting and organizing software structures and mechanisms to satisfy requirements while managing trade-offs.
- How it is used
- Translates requirements and domain models into architecture and high-level code structures that meet goals while limiting complexity.
- How deep it goes
- Defines design, analyzes accidental complexity and trade-offs, and outlines interfaces, patterns, and top-down iterative architecture rather than detailed implementation.
- Examples
- Uses spaceship control requirements, engine-control UML, thermometer adapters, interface-based sensors, and deliberately overcomplicated FizzBuzz structures.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand design choices by balancing requirements, simplicity, abstractions, maintainability, and paradigm-specific techniques.
Read how Functional Design and Architecture: Examples in Haskell explains design →
WordPress Power Toolkit: Harness AI to build next-level websites
Site design is the planning and creation of a website's visual appearance, layout, and user-facing presentation.
- How it is used
- Guides visual decisions that make a WordPress site comfortable, distinctive, and aligned with audience goals.
- How deep it goes
- Explains theme customization and gives procedural AI-led reviews, stopping short of formal color theory or typography instruction.
- Examples
- Uses recipe and water-garden home pages, an incongruous potato image, reference websites, and Canva landing-page templates.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand a site’s visual strengths and weaknesses, then customize themes or templates to improve coherence and fit.
Read how WordPress Power Toolkit: Harness AI to build next-level websites explains design →
Collaborative Software Design: How to facilitate domain modeling decisions
Software design is the activity of determining a software system’s structure, behavior, and implementation decisions from its requirements.
- How it is used
- Guides collaborative activities that move a current software system from understood problems toward a preferred system.
- How deep it goes
- Defines design, distinguishes architecture, and connects modeling with facilitation, bias, explicit decisions, and iterative feedback.
- Examples
- Uses BigScreen modeling, boundary decisions, ambiguous terminology, architectural disagreements, and evolving decision records as practical examples.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via collaborative modeling to expose assumptions, make decisions, plan system changes, and keep designs adaptable.
Design for Developers
Web design is the planning and creation of a website’s visual presentation, structure, and interaction.
- How it is used
- Guides visual, structural, and interaction decisions while connecting developer implementation with user goals.
- How deep it goes
- Explains an iterative workflow from research and wireframes through visual design, implementation, testing, and refinement, without specialist depth.
- Examples
- Uses competitor comparisons, user personas, wireframes, pixel-perfect mock-ups, whitespace adjustments, and minimum viable product testing.
- What you can do after
- Apply design fundamentals to make interface decisions, communicate with designers, and iterate from tested feedback.
Related concepts
- sustainable applicationproduces · A sustainable application is software designed to remain useful, reliable, maintainable, flexible, and deployable throughout a long operational lifespan.
- object-oriented programmingincludes · Object-oriented programming is a programming paradigm that organizes software around objects combining state and behavior, commonly using encapsulation, classes, inheritance, or polymorphism.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.



