5 ms·

Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way. If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't.

• river_styx 18y ago
  Right. That must be why Google, Craigslist, and MySpace are such monumental failures.
  • sdurkin 18y ago
    Google is pretty, downright beautiful in fact. Notice I said that pretty is good, but not the only good. Myspace and Craigslist 'can't' make beautiful products, Myspace because that would detract from user personalization, and Craigslist because they never hired the design muscle because it works well enough.
  • ashu 18y ago
    The grand-parent is merely suggesting that Pretty is good and ugly is bad. NOT saying that is the only thing that matters. So your comment is not a refutation. (and hence, I see no reason for sarcasm either.)
  • sc 18y ago
    Google and Craigslist are minimalist relics that do a job and do it well. They're too plain to be _ugly_. MySpace is popular with the same personalizing crowd that would put stickers on their MacBooks.
    • drm237 18y ago
      I disagree that craigslist does what it does well. I think it does it extremely poorly. They've managed to get a huge critical mass though which means people will deal with the flaws because its where the content is.
    • mattmaroon 18y ago
      And for all we know, both would be twice as popular with good design.
  • brlewis 18y ago
    People don't have an emotional connection to classified ads or search results. This was an epiphany for me which I detail here: http://ourdoings.com/2008-02 http://ourdoings.com/2008-02
• unalone 18y ago
  Yes. Nobody sets out to make ugly things. It's just that if they CAN'T make it look good, they justify it by saying that it doesn't matter how good it looks. All due respect to Matt Maroon, as always, but it's SUCH a snotty thing to dismiss a line of products because they're pretty. It's not only backwards thinking, it's snotty, too.
  • aneesh 18y ago
    He didn't dismiss a product because it was pretty. He dismissed the people who buy products solely because they were pretty.
    • unalone 18y ago
      But I think that's a bit snotty as well. Some people like pretty things, some people like things with insane benchmarks. To each his own if it works.
      • Herring 18y ago
        Most people, i think, like both. Problem is when some company in Cupertino, CA tries to pass off crap using pretty packaging. Nobody likes to wake up one day next to a fruit colored laptop. Edit: Too soon?
        • unalone 18y ago
          I use Apple's MacBook Pro, and it runs quickly, its programs are all aesthetically pleasing, and it's an absolute joy to use. I didn't get an Air because I plan on doing some pretty intensive stuff on here, but from what i've seen of it it does a great job of being very fast for basic processes while looking beautiful. I haven't seen a single Apple product that I think is crap, not in a decade. I think that a lot of them could be BETTER, but Apple absolutely cares about making the best product that they can, and they've shown it time and time again. Also, for the record, I LIKED the original iMac. I like the new ones better, but I think that iMac was great when it first came out. So unless you've got a quantitative argument against Apple, close it: I don't care to hear insults against a company that I like without any sort of backing-up.
• nonrecursive 18y ago
  I'm sure this conversation has been had on news.yc, but how do you account for ugly ass sites like myspace, plenty of fish, and craigslist?
  • sdurkin 18y ago
    Tradeoffs. Pretty has costs, in one form or another, and each of these firms takes these costs into account. The original walkman was ugly as sin, but it was cheap and reliable. Had it been beautiful, it would have been even better, but it couldn't, without costing more.
  • brlewis 18y ago
    Aesthetics speak. Craigslist says "cheap". MySpace says "My parents wouldn't like this place and I can decorate it how I want". I don't know what plentyoffish says.
    • dissenter 18y ago
      rationalization / post-hoc. If you were setting out to make the next MySpace or Craigslist, would you consciously decide to make it ugly as a competitive advantage? Ugly designs happen by accident [re: neglect] and in spite of the underlying site's success. By the time the site is successful it's too late/unnecessary to change it.
      • brlewis 18y ago
        I would test different designs to see what gives the best results.
      • mechanical_fish 18y ago
        If you were setting out to make the next MySpace or Craigslist, would you consciously decide to make it ugly as a competitive advantage? Sure. But the word you're looking for is functional, not ugly. The ugliness is just a side effect. Craigslist was criticized for being too plain from the moment it was built. But it's buried a lot of better-Photoshopped competitors.
• william-newman 18y ago
  "Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way." Pretty is often good. Ugly is even more often bad. It has often been that way, and it will often be that way. "If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't." Or because your product is wooden pencils, or bulldozers, or parachutes, or test tubes, or transistors, or pillows, or ammunition. Various things resist beauty enough that all you get is the elegance of something that's efficient and reliable, which is not the usual meaning of beauty. (Yes, I remember our host's SR-71 example. And good sailboats look nice too. But efficient submarines and high speed rockets aren't particularly pretty. Once simple design constraints become too extreme --- streamlining in this case --- it can become hard to satisfy the constraints in an interesting way.) Various other things like books are borderline cases. A well-done book may have more appealing aesthetic touches than a well-done wooden pencil. But not so many more, because mostly its presentation should keep out of the way of the words. A particularly beautiful fire alarm or fire extinguisher is not necessarily a good idea, either.