The Carpenter's Square: On the Misplaced Faith in Perfect Symmetry

There is a comforting allure to the grid. In the architecture of a website, the ideal of a perfectly symmetrical structure—where every page lives in a single, logical hierarchy, where every internal link forms a neat pattern of reciprocal connections—is among our most cherished received wisdoms. We are taught to build like cartographers, drawing clean lines and orderly districts. But I’ve come to believe this obsession with geometric purity is a carpenter’s folly, mistaking the tool for the timber, the blueprint for the building.

The square is an invaluable tool. It ensures that two pieces of wood meet at a true right angle, that the frame is solid. Applied to our craft, it represents the logical frameworks we use: silos, topic clusters, hub-and-spoke models. These are the theories that promise that if we just get the structure perfect, the user (and the crawling agent) will flow through our creation with the ease of water through a sluice. The problem arises when we start worshipping the square itself, believing that a site’s value is derived from its adherence to an abstract ideal of order, rather than its ability to shelter and guide a restless, unpredictable visitor.

Human curiosity is not rectilinear. It meanders. It backtracks. It follows a scent. A user doesn't arrive at your site intending to navigate your beautifully pruned tree; they arrive with a need, often half-formed, and they follow the most promising scent of an answer. The perfectly symmetrical internal link, the one that dutifully points only to its direct parent or a tightly related sibling, often feels less like a helpful signpost and more like a directive from a stern librarian. It says, "The information you seek is over here, in the correct section." But what if the user’s path to understanding requires a detour through the workshop to see how a tool is made before they can appreciate the product it creates?

This is where our faith in symmetry fails. A site built for people, not for diagrams, is necessarily asymmetrical. It is rich with what a purist might call "illogical" links—a tangential reference from a deep technical article to a beginner’s glossary term, a narrative link in a blog post that jumps to a seemingly unrelated case study because the connection is thematic, not categorical. These are the links that respect the user’s intelligence and their chaotic journey. They are the hallways and secret passages that make a house a home, rather than a museum where you can only walk along the roped-off paths.

This doesn’t mean we abandon structure altogether. The carpenter’s square is still on the bench. A logical information architecture is the foundation that keeps the walls from collapsing. But the final measure of our work is not its cleanliness on a sitemap.xml file. It is the ease with which a lost visitor becomes a found one. Sometimes, the most valuable link is the one that breaks the symmetry, that creates a diagonal shortcut across our pristine grid. It’s the acknowledgement that a website is not a static monument to our organizational skills, but a living, breathing space that must accommodate the wonderfully crooked paths of human thought.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: