Can we please, please, please stop trying to redesign everything under the sun, especially in the name of eco-friendliness or usability or some other such thing?
That is not to say that designs and decisions and concepts should not be questioned, but that they should not be questioned for questioning's sake. A lot of thought, time and effort goes into the design of recognizable brands and widely used things. Just because they are designed by behemoths does not necessarily mean that they don't know what they are doing. On the contrary I would think they have put a lot of thought into it and the designs work quite well given the constraints.
So if you are going to challenge it, please have something substantial that operates in the constraints that apply to the product, not just something that looks pretty.
> Good design is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.
Excuse my French, but fuck Dieter Rams. I certainly understand this viewpoint, and I have no problem with folks that adhere to it, but my problem is with stating as some sort of axiom, with no evidence or reason, that "Products fulfilling a purpose are neither decorative objects nor works of art."
Humans have built things that are both functional and beautiful since culture first existed, and there is nothing wrong with designing products with a strong visual aesthetic viewpoint. If we all followed Dieter Rams' silly advice, all of our computers would still be boring beige boxes, maybe covered in stickers "for the user's self-expression."
Note I say this while agreeing with the latter part of your post. I'm not a fan of this particular design - it feels kitschy and shallow in the same way that Hollywood "hacker" movies show terminals that look like 3D game worlds. But that's just my personal opinion, and I don't fault people for feeling the exact opposite. I do fault people for saying that you shouldn't be allowed to try, and if you do that you are "not following principles of good design."
>Design is complicated and very much like taste - subjective.
Aesthetics are subjective. Design is not. Design can contain aesthetics, which complicates things.
Just because something is difficult to measure doesn't mean that it can't be measured. A design exists to solve a problem. How well it solves problems is not subjective. The priorities might be subjective, but how well it fulfills its goals is not subjective.
"Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art."
Why do you assume that focusing on design in a startup means that the startup will "solve zero problems"? Admittedly, I'm biased (my startup is in the current batch of The Designer Fund), but the fund is very focused not on "prettiness", but usability and interfaces that work and convert.
I think it's rather unfair that you look at the graphic which is celebrating companies with designers and then rant about design making shitty products. Design is CRUCIAL to a good product, because design isn't "prettiness", it's how people use it and how it works.
Which of those infographic cards would you call shitty? And why?
I think we're getting confused by fuzzy and overlapping definitions of different scope.
Absolutely, design is also how it works. However, how it works is also very much engineering. In fact, I'd argue that the overlap is even stronger there.
> The first is easy, and most of us probably already agree; designers gotta design. They have to justify their salary _somehow_.
Designers are typically just _workers_, if it's their own thing, then sure they might want to use that as a canvas to explore things. But generally they produce things and solve problems and don't create them.
In my experience and opinion, products are redesigned because:
- Users who get bored quickly and have superficial concerns are very loud. They want more stuff and different stuff all the time, and they make sure you know it. They don't care about orthogonal, minimal features that work nicely together, nor about stability.
- Marketing people are very good at selling things, internally and externally. Sometimes this is data driven, but it's generally a very hard and fuzzy thing to interpret. They are very good at hitting the right nerves.
- Decision makers, executives are good at inventing work for others, convincing people to follow and expanding their influence. They need to think in the abstract and are often detached from workers and users so they miss important details.
It's an interesting rant - and quite amusing, but it sounds like the author is debating against aesthetically pleasing visual design, rather than design in general.
Graphic design is visual engineering.
Sometimes the value proposition put forward by a company is 'a way to [do x] better'; if better is equivalent to 'more efficiently', 'more cheaply' or 'more easily' - chances are design is going to be factor that allows the change to happen.
> “From a design point of view, it’s pretty lazy,” says Hurley.
I love designers criticizing design used for business. It rarely incorporates any perspective on business objectives. As long as the design is achieving its goal then who cares?
> In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design?
If that detail helps them achieve their desired business outcomes, then yes. You might not like the product, but the design work is good. If you are trying to weed your garden, a Tesla is not useful to you. That doesn't mean it's a bad design, it just wasn't designed for that particular need.
All design comes from a specific set of values, and can only be evaluated within the context of those values. The notion of universal design is a fiction. It's the remnant of the colonialist mindset, where there is a presumption of universal values.
> - better default styles that don't look like troff from 1985
Design is not something that should be tied to a particular decade. It's not fashion. Good design is timeless and only adopts to new technologies/media. Design is how well a particular solution works for the purpose of it. If it looks like 1985 and works well, there is absolutely no reason to change it. If it doesn't, then there is no need to look at "modern trends", instead we need to go back to the drawing board and find out what the problem is first.
Can you identify the problem with the design besides the superficial aesthetic (which can be easily themed)?
> “Try to be brutally honest with yourself: is the goal actual innovation? Or is really to appear innovative?” I have asked these questions of many senior executives now, assuring them I am not being glib
This type of reaction eats itself. If you're a person who prioritizes "actual innovation," why are you spending so much time complaining about a fucking logo redesign?
> explaining that these objectives are often in fundamental opposition to one another.
No, they're not. Is Apple innovative? Is Google? Both examples of companies who have demonstrated tremendous amount of investment in design updates over the years. Heck, they even created custom fonts for their blog posts.
I totally understand and appreciate design critiques. Aesthetic opinions are valuable in and of themselves. I even happen to agree with the author that the new Oxford Press logo is worse than their old one. But I have to jump off the wagon when this sort of exaggeration shows up.
> This is why graphic designers should be kept as far away from projects that create things that must be used by other people and not just admired for their beauty.
> If I need beautiful or creative content for my art gallery, graphic designers are invited.
You're confusing design with art or decoration.
It doesn't make sense, at all, to say that designers should be kept away if you don't even have a correct working definition of design. I'd suggest you do a little bit of research before establishing such a position. You wouldn't dismiss, e.g., an economical model without at least some knowledge about it, right?
> This is not about good design, this is about whether it's possible.
...but a good designer would have some appreciation of whether it's possible or not and thus not bother drawing trees on tops top of skyscrapers. Or at least they'd draw realistic stumpy trees.
> but you do reap the benefits of good design
Absolutely, yes. I need to be clearer. I am very grateful for good design. It has made my life better. Through HN I have developed a better appreciation for the hard, hidden, work of good design. In the past I automatically thought of of things I'd find on Yanko as 'designery stuff' - but I've learnt that many designers hate that kind of design just as much as I do.
> Design is also an engineering constraint. All of these constraints are interconnected. None are wholly independent.
Did I say they weren't interdependent? My response to you LITERALLY stated an interdependency.
Also when does "design" being an engineering constraint have to do with anything? Are you talking about aesthetic design choices made by an artist/product designer that an engineer has to take into account? You should be more specific because engineers "design" solutions around constraints as well, and the statement makes no sense when viewed from the engineering perspective.
>The “fashion” argument is particularly silly. Fashion and style are concepts that have existed as a part of human nature longer than manufacturing, corporations, or even money itself have even existed.
What fashion argument? You say the "fashion" argument is "silly" but I'm over here thinking, what "fashion" argument? I NEVER made such an argument. What's silly here is that you're talking about some weird imaginary tangent that I never even touched upon.
If you actually did watch that video or even read my posts I'm thinking you read it really quickly and you skimmed that video. I think you skipped some words and sentences and made a huge assumptions about what I'm talking about.
>
The part of my response that you didn't even address is that I'm saying FAILURE is engineered into the design DELIBERATELY. It's not a side effect of creating a cheaper product. It's a actual design choice making the consumer more likely to buy a new product.
You realize that the filament for those bulbs weren't picked because the filament was cheaper. A deliberate R&D effort was created to pick filaments that were roughly the same cost but failed quicker. That's counter to your entire argument. R&D costs money so costs are actually INCREASED to make the product fail quicker.
Can we please, please, please stop trying to redesign everything under the sun, especially in the name of eco-friendliness or usability or some other such thing?
That is not to say that designs and decisions and concepts should not be questioned, but that they should not be questioned for questioning's sake. A lot of thought, time and effort goes into the design of recognizable brands and widely used things. Just because they are designed by behemoths does not necessarily mean that they don't know what they are doing. On the contrary I would think they have put a lot of thought into it and the designs work quite well given the constraints.
So if you are going to challenge it, please have something substantial that operates in the constraints that apply to the product, not just something that looks pretty.
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