> “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?
> Also, designers, like most people, are inherently uncreative
99% of the time the designer has to do what the client instructs them to do. And in most cases, they will simply point to some recent change by the competition.
Also everybody will have an opinion about a design.
> Considering that the target audience is other designers, why does the presentation matter
I fail to see the logic here. Good design helps people learn easier. It's not like designers have some unique ability to learn equally well no matter how poor the design is.
> I love good design and I am good at design. But I’ve never called myself a designer.
> 1. Designers tweet and blog
> 2. Design is a cheap way to appear like you’re creating value
...
> I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design.
> 3. Everyone’s a fucking designer now
Face it, you're a designer.
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
I don't understand how enhancing value doesn't create value. Value is value, there isn't good value and bad value, there's only more or less of it. If pushing pixels does a better job enhancing value than creating features then I am absolutely going to (have someone else) design the shit out of that product.
I see design much like I see testing. Both of these are meant to build integrity in your product. Design is perceived integrity, while testing is conceptual. If you don't proactively maintain the integrity then the lack of quality compounds. Treating them like a second class citizen will do nothing but cause troubles.
>the near extinction of any professional discussion or capable analysis of design by the people who are doing it.
People don't think through the designs then launch a poorly designed test that can't produce meaningful results. Copy the competition, latest designs, or hope the customer can do it. It's easier to do and defend. Put in the minimal amount of mental labor required to get paid.
Not assigning blame here. These folks all work in an oversubscribed field subject to the whims and opinions of execs focused more on delivering visual appeal or feelings than usability.
It's marketing. It doesn't really matter how usable your product is if people don't want to use it. Many industries make very usable things. Notably the military. They're just ugly.
> they're overly focussed on superficial form at the expense of deeper functionality
Then again, isn't that what almost all advertising is trying to do these days: draw your attention to the superficial form so you forget to criticise fundamental flaws with the design?
> But to me large part of professional design is not personal taste but knowing and understanding your target audience and design intent, and design appropriately.
Design where intent doesn't align looks very ugly to me, so that is still a feeling. Things feel right when designed well.
"""This stuff was bizarre to me:
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
> It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful
> If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look."""
"""
Really? Because it seems damn logical to me.
"""The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be."""
Yeah. Only in web design it almost always are. And in the specific "over-designed" startup web services he rants about it always is. We all heard the quote "design is how it works" from Jobs et co. But:
1) In most cases it's 80% graphic design and 20% though of how it works.
2) How it works still means nothing, if WHAT IT DOES does not add value.
Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them.
Example: a well designed and totally usable "social something" site -- and why would I want to use that if no one of my friends is using it?
tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer
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.
> But there is something to be said for "playing well with others". We're all trying to make things, not be the backdrop for your exquisitely-crafted sense of craft.
I had the same reaction here. Everybody wants good design. This article seems to walk the line between providing valuable insight and just complaining about how other people work.
>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.
> 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?
> 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."
"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?
> You are purposely forgetting that design relies heavily on taste.
Not only that, it ignores how culturally-dependent design is. Sometimes in really big, fundamental ways -- take, for example, the fact that in China, the color red is heavily associated with luck, joy, and happiness. A big part of design is understanding and incorporating these kinds of local knowledge; at the end of the day, design is a process, not a destination.
Much like art, it's impossible to truly separate design from the greater context of the world at large.
> I've met Designers that were awesome at Designing Stuff, but did not really have any interest in User Experience at all.
Those are artists (photoshop pilots, pixel pushers), not designers. Unfortunately the term is so banalized it lost it's meaning, but strictly:
Design (noun): a specification of an object, manifested by an agent,
intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment,
using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements,
subject to constraints
If it's not solving a problem, it's not a design solution. That includes providing the expected/desired experience to the user, which is often the case.
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?
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