If you’re old enough to have loaded an image over dial-up, you’ve seen a progressive JPEG: the whole picture shows up at once, blurry, and then sharpens pass after pass. Its ugly cousin, the baseline JPEG, loads top-to-bottom — a crisp strip of sky above a gray void.
That technical difference shapes a helpful way of thinking: a project should be 100% ready at any given moment, even when it’s only 4% detailed.
Most work defaults to baseline. You perfect the header, then the hero section — and then the deadline hits with half the screens still a gray void. You shipped a crisp strip of sky.
The progressive way is to rough in the entire thing first. Every screen exists as a wireframe before any gets a shadow. Then you raise the resolution everywhere, in passes:
- Pass 1 — layout. Everything exists, nothing is pretty.
- Pass 2 — structure. Type, spacing, and hierarchy settle.
- Pass 3 — detail. Real content, states, interactions.
- Pass N — polish, until time runs out.
Stop at any pass and you have a coherent whole. Nobody’s staring at a void.
People confuse this with MVP thinking (the skateboard-to-car story), but they’re opposites. MVP changes the shape. Progressive JPEG keeps the shape fixed and only adds resolution. A wireframe of fifty screens isn't a skateboard — it's the whole car at 4%.