Design for Makers

A shortbound of the essay “Taste for Makers” by Paul Graham

TL;DR 📚

• Simplicity in design wins.
• Understand and make sure you are designing a solution for the right problem.
• Good design is hard and you will make mistakes, acknowledge them.
• Imitating design isn’t bad per se, but blind imitation is a recipe for disaster.
• Don’t be afraid to challenge current design conventions and provide new solutions.

“I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. “A lot of them seem smart,” he said. “What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.” Taste. You don’t hear that word much. And yet we still need the underlying concept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant was that he wanted students who were not just good technicians, but who could use their technical knowledge to design beautiful things.” — Paul Graham

Taste and design

If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell you that “taste is subjective.” They believe this because it really feels that way to them. When they like something, they have no idea why. Saying that taste is just a personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it’s not true. You feel this when you start to design things. If taste is just a personal preference, then everyone’s is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that’s it. As in any job, as you continue to design things, you’ll get better at it. Your taste will change and it, in turn, will change how and what you design.

Good design is simple

It smells strange to have to emphasise simplicity. You’d think simple would be the default. Ornate is more work. But something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance. A still life of a few carefully observed objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of a flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar.

Design solves the right problem

The typical stove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dial to control each. How do you arrange the dials? The simplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is a simple answer to the wrong question. The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row, the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time about which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dials in a square like the burners. A lot of bad design is industrious but misguided. Problems can be improved as well as situations. In software, an intractable problem can usually be replaced by an equivalent one that’s easy to solve.

Good design is hard

If you look at the people who’ve done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. If you’re not working hard, you’re probably wasting your time. Hard problems call for great efforts. Not every kind of hard is good. There is good pain and bad pain. You want the kind of pain you get from going running, not the kind you get from stepping on a nail. A difficult problem could be good for a designer, but a fickle client or unreliable materials would not be.

Good design looks easy

Great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite. In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn’t you? Some Leonardo heads are just a few lines. You look at them and you think, all you have to do is get eight or ten lines in the right place and you’ve made this beautiful portrait. Well, yes, but you have to get them in exactly the right place. The slightest error will make the whole thing collapse.

Good design is redesign

It’s rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change. Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. It helps to have a medium that makes change easy. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.

Good design can copy

Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it; next he tries consciously to be original; finally, he decides it’s more important to be right than original. Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design. If you don’t know where your ideas are coming from, you’re probably imitating an imitator. The greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that’s no reason not to use it. They’re confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.

Good design is often daring

At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous. If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don’t quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them. It’s easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who’ve made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. But, intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework.

Thanks for reading. We curate longform articles on entrepreneurship, technology and design by thinkers around the world and condense them into short reads.

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