Cathryn Lavery

Cathryn Lavery is a designer, entrepreneur (founder of BestSelf.co and writer at littlemight.com), and the creator of Diagram Design, an opinionated design system and agent skill for generating high-signal editorial diagrams.

Core Contributions & Philosophy

1. Deletion as Quality: Pioneered the philosophy that visual artifacts for technical explanation should prioritize deletion over decoration (“The highest-quality move is usually deletion”). Every node must earn its place; visual density is targeted at 4/10.
2. Editorial Accent & Signal Discipline: Enforces the rule that accent colors must be reserved for 1–2 focal elements rather than decorative flair, ensuring visual hierarchy guides reader attention immediately to core takeaways.
3. Semantic System Patterns Before Visual Layout: Architected a diagramming methodology that routes behavioral dynamics (queues, bottlenecks, governance catalogs, policy divergence traces) to semantic primitives before picking a physical layout grammar (see editorial diagrams and visual explanations).
4. Accessible, Self-Contained Agent Artifacts: Established standards for coding agents generating visual assets: zero external runtime dependencies, 4px grid alignment, accessible inline SVG structures (role="img", namespaced aria-labelledby, structured descriptions), and deterministic redrawing over mechanical translation.

Relationship to the Engineering Stack

Lavery’s work operationalizes cognitive debt and walkthroughs at the visual communication layer. Where richard feynman emphasizes plain-spoken pedagogy, andrej karpathy enforces code simplicity, and simon willison emphasizes interactive walkthroughs, Lavery provides the visual syntax for rendering complex multi-agent architectures, workflows, and state machines with maximum clarity and minimum visual slop.

Related

• editorial diagrams and visual explanations
• cognitive debt and walkthroughs
• agentic engineering patterns
• context engineering
• progressive disclosure