What is Good Design
Before we start, some background.
I was trained as an oil painter. I went to Purchase College (among others!) and thought I would be an oil painter with my work in a gallery all my life. This was all before 1999. Yes, I’m also old.
My only design experience at the time was in print. I did college a little backward. I had already worked as a visual designer at an agency for national clients and small freelance projects. When I got to art school, I thought I knew it all.
I didn’t know anything.
At the same time, the internet was starting. It was exciting. And no one knew what was going on. So, naturally, I quit school and became a web designer. Again, I had no idea what I was doing.
So how I define good design is based on my experience of trying to figure it out in a practical, feed my family kind of approach. This experience leads to a very pragmatic approach to design. This has taught me that good design does one thing well.
It works.
Good design works. It’s that simple. There are lots of ways to define “work, “ but the measure I use is, does it do the thing it’s supposed to do well?
I do not define “work” as pretty, or clever, or neat, or even awe-inspiring. God forbid it should work as a trendy approach. Good design delivers a solution to a problem with the most possibly considered, produced and executed approach possible. And this will inspire, awe and knock your socks off. But that’s because it does the thing it is supposed to do.
What is an easy way to figure out if something is working or not?
Go back to your problem/solution research. Does what you are doing solve the problem in a way that works for your customers? Great! That’s a good design.
Look at craigslist. If you confuse good design with aesthetic, you will miss the solution. Craigslist is one of the “ugliest” sites I’ve ever used. But it just works. There have been lots of upstarts in the space that were pretty. They were elegant. They were everything that Craigslist wasn’t. But the search tool was usually awful. And that meant that the service was awful and the design didn’t work.
Good design works. If you have something that doesn’t work, you don’t have good design
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