Embracing Asymmetrical Design

When Text Just Won’t Fit

Karen McGrane’s famous maxim—truncation is not a content strategy—still lands hard. Slicing off text with code is a blunt instrument. It sidesteps the genuine editorial work required to craft interfaces that feel right for real users, not just demo data.

Yes, CSS makes cutting text off trivial. A dose of overflow: hidden; clips anything, and text-overflow: ellipsis; adds a tidy visual cue. Even multi-line clamping is straightforward nowadays. Those tools are handy; the web is a messy place. But they are a fallback, not a plan.

The more durable fix combines two things. First, real content strategy: actually plan copy to fit its container, using human judgment to get lengths right. Second, embrace asymmetrical design—let the layout bend around the data instead of forcing data into a rigid frame. Ben Nadel put it well recently: data is not symmetrical. He points out that Apple demo slides always show users with four-letter names—Dave, John, Anna, Sara—because symmetrical data fits cleanly into a symmetrical UI.

Once a product meets “the real world,” users type real-world data into it. Asymmetrical data crammed into a symmetrical design may still look fine in screenshots, but it creates a terrible user experience. The answer is to lean into that asymmetric reality. Interfaces need to expand and contract, to work with the asymmetry rather than fight it.

Modern CSS is rich with tools for exactly this kind of flexible layout. Grid, for instance, makes overlapping areas and collaging imagery and text straightforward. Text can grow upward, items can align with siblings that aren’t the same size, and awkward whitespace can be avoided without resorting to clipping.

Add aspect-ratio to maintain intrinsic proportions and object-fit to control how media fills its box, and you have what you need to design for asymmetry without falling into misalignment or ugly gaps. The goal isn’t to truncate less; it’s to design with the data’s natural shape in mind from the start.