We’re obsessed with “frictionless.” Frictionless payments. Frictionless interfaces. Frictionless experiences. It sounds good. It sounds right.
We all remember the lesson: a quiet night in California. Mr. Miyagi’s car in the driveway. Daniel LaRusso repeating the same movement for hours, without knowing why.
“Wax on, right hand. Wax off, left hand.”
For a generation, Mr. Miyagi defined what mastery looked like. He taught us that the result of hard work should be a surface so perfectly polished, so smooth, that it reflects your face when you look at it.
And that is exactly the trap.
As designers, we have internalized the “wax off.” We sand down the edges. We refine the copy until it’s bland. We smooth the interface until it creates zero resistance. It’s our dopamine. We share high-gloss renders that will never see the light of production.
Design for likes. Design for designers.
But we forget a fundamental truth about materials: smooth things are slippery. They are hard to hold onto. Because they offer no resistance, they slide right out of our memory. When everything is so polished, nothing sticks.
We don’t need to look far to see it everywhere: perfectly reflective surfaces and high-gloss renders that look flawless. And don’t get me wrong, I admire the craft, but it’s worth asking: is perfection really the goal?
All of this frictionless discourse pushes me in the opposite direction. And in my case, it comes naturally. If you know me, you know how much I love brutalism.
To most people, brutalism is just “ugly concrete.” To me, is much more than that. The term comes from the French béton brut: raw concrete. The philosophy wasn’t about being aggressive; it was about being honest.
Architects like Javier Sáenz de Oiza didn’t try to hide the process. They didn’t “wax off” the reality. They let the concrete show the grain of the wood forms it was poured into. They let the light catch the imperfections and the air bubbles.
They understood what Miyagi didn’t: Texture creates reality.
When you stand in front of Torres Blancas here in Madrid, you feel a physical weight. The building is not trying to sell you a fantasy. It is saying: I am here. I am made of this. I am not perfect. And I am not apologizing for it.
We need to build brands that escape the trap.
Trust is not built on a polished surface. Trust is built on texture.
That texture shows up in the grain of a voice. In a layout that isn’t perfectly snapped to the grid. In the decision to leave a flaw visible. It’s the friction that makes you slow down and pay attention.
Think about the things you love most. An old leather jacket. A vinyl record with its characteristic cracky sound. A 90s videogame with visible pixels, hard levels, and no forgiveness.
None of them are easy.
None of them are frictionless.
But they stay with you.
So next time you are refining a design, pause. Do the work. Respect the craft. Apply the wax. Just don’t keep polishing until there’s nothing left.
Leave the grain visible.
Give people friction to hold onto.
