Beautiful design

A collection of languages ranging from Romanian to Russian to Japanese. Image courtesy of Studio Politica

Many design talks argue on the definition of good design, others argue whether design should be beautiful or merely functional. Some agree, that you can’t go wrong with design that is both functional and beautiful, but what does it really mean for a design to be beautiful? This article develops on the idea that beautiful design is more than just a set of typefaces, color combination or a trendy illustration, but it is a combination of the unfamiliar, heritage, craft, clarity, and audacity in some proportion or the other.

Unfamiliar is beautiful

At first it sounds odd, but actually, be it Christopher Columbus, a tourist in the city, or a person in the science museum — we tend to appreciate the unknown. We are mesmerized by travels abroad, by the foreign languages, scripts on the signage. Western visitors to Asia find hieroglyphs beautiful, but asians are perceiving cyrillics as some sort of cultural code, that is beautiful, because it is unknown to most of them. Unknown is the ultimate decoration out there, since it is the decoration of meaning. Things that are unknown are complex and hard to understand, thus — beautiful to the mind. It is the kind of beauty that keeps you interested and is temporary in the way, that is related to your knowledge. Here, Kenya Hara’s book “Ex-formation” comes in handy, because it studies new ways of visualizing ordinary things, by presenting us with the familiar object in the unfamiliar interpretation.

Unfamiliar to the wester world models. Image courtesy of Apple

Kenya Hara, Ex-formation. Slide providing new insights into how different ice cream cone could be. Image courtesy of Lars Muller Publishers.

Excerpts from Kendall Henderson’s poster, a tribute to the Tokyo Signage. Via Fast Company

Heritage is beautiful

A twelfth century porcelain cup, painted in vast ornaments is beautiful because it delivers heritage and presence of another time. When you look at it, you are not looking and appreciating the object in front of you — you are looking and appreciating the possibility to travel through time, to experience the past. Your grandmother’s necklace, family house, classic art exposition. Heritage is beautiful, because it delivers complexity that enriches human life and pushes it closer to the feeling of having lived a longer life. It awakens memories and provides a sense of belonging. Blank white walls are only appreciated in the building next door to the 18th century cathedral, full of sculptured facade, decorative ceilings, with hand-painted corridors. Unprepared eye might find these things boring, but even it can appreciate heritage of a lower density. For making use of the heritage aspect of beauty in our designs, we might borrow metaphors, textures, and objects and put them into the modern context. Another good way of injecting heritage into your work is to do preliminary and secondary research into the subject matter, archives. If you are doing a redesign of a brand identity, don’t rush to abandon everything your client have had developed until now, consider doing a revisit. Make sure you go to the MAK Museum Viena’s instagram and read their story.

Notre-Dame de Paris, element of the facade Image courtesy of Christophe Hamm

Coca-Cola logo, 1903. Very similar to today’s version, it is beautiful because company evolved it, but not completely redesigned.

Craft is beautiful

Basically, and this has nothing to do with the money value of things btw, everything that is hard to produce and doesn’t smell bad — is beautiful, because you can’t do it yourself, because it is rare. And I mean craft as a result of a hard and precious labour that took time to master, like woodcutting, glass blowing, sculpture, typographers, or neon sign makers to name a few. We take pleasure in looking at things that took days, months or sometimes years to be made. We somehow lose this when we present to our client a clean, vector-based illustration, featuring a geometric-like character, paused in a super-hero shape. When we become retro-nostalgic, it’s not because we’ve had enough of modernity — it’s because we appreciate the craft and we find it beautiful. Look at Paula Scher maps, for instance. This is pure craft, a pattern that’s never really understood, it combines both: the unfamiliar with the craft in a very smart way.

Hand drawn maps, Paula Scher.

Neon signage. Author unknown

Clarity is beautiful

We don’t find 2+2=4 clarity appealing, because it’s rather obvious other than easy to understand, but we find road/traffic signs, accessible wayfinding, expected UX scenarios as beautiful, because they enable us with super powers to do the things that we want. This type of beauty is very hard to achieve without jumping into the naive or amateur category. It brings it close to the craft type of beauty, since it takes time polishing and simplifying things for them to become easy to understand. A person that says it’ll do one thing and does just that is a beautiful person, so as the people that arrive on time. Other words that are synonymous with clarity is intuitiveness, easiness, respect and accessibility. To make use of this type of beauty always iterate, work in teams or ask for external supervision, and remember the golden rule of Albert Einstein, quote: “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

Felt boots, aka Valenki, are a good example of straightforwardness and effectiveness. A good reference would be a book called Super Normal by Naoto Fukusawa and Jasper Morrison

Straightforward road sign

Audacity is beautiful

People adore audacity, but will never confess they do it if you ask them. Audacity is courageous, is challenging the status quo, is giving millions or even billions of people hope that they too can do it. It’s a truly global motivator for those that listen. Audacity is very close to the humor, as just like it — it is grounded in breaking the rules. Marian Bantjes’s golden boots on the stage of the 2013 AGI Open in London are audaciously beautiful, Kazimir’s Black Square, representing a facepalm to the times conservative and classical art, Diesels’s advertising campaign “BE STUPID” is a rather good example of audacity kind of beauty in action. Audacity is based on breaking the rules, so a good tip for using this type of beauty in your design is to have your own judgements on trends and styles. Sometimes, it might be a good idea to start running backwards and be first to cross the finish line, so what if you’ve cheated? They’ll love you.

Lovely Outdoor Voices approach to make clothing for all types of bodies and show them. How often do you encounter these models in brand imagery? Rarely. That’s making use of unfamiliarity + audacity. Image courtesy of Outdoor Voices.

Diesel’s advertising campaign BE STUPID. Image courtesy of Diesel.

There are certainly more types of beauty in design, and the right ones will always depend on the context and on your brand platform’s key attributes, be they discovery, visionary, rebel or other. We also like to refer to beauty as being encapsulation of complexities, that implies things beyond appearance, and makes content and exploration an important aspect of any design.

For further reading consider looking at Stefan Sagmeister’s ongoing exploration on beauty.