11 ms·

> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, t

> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. What a designer fundamentally does is communicate the best solution to a problem, given the requirements, goals, and constraints of that problem. Originality is subordinate to that at best.

VirgilShelton 2y ago
[flagged]
burningChrome 2y ago
This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to find information about their work and contact them to hire them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to solve and want you to solve them for them. I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to their problems.
- ozim 2y ago
  It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation. The same with software devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)
  - caseyohara 2y ago
    Wow, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might be true for DJs playing "main stage" style EDM (poppy mainstream music) but for most electronic subgenres – especially techno – the crowd absolutely expects the DJ to be a superb crate digger and pull out new and deep tracks they've never heard before. No one goes to a techno club to hear rinsed tracks; they want the DJ to show them music they've never heard before. Before the digital age, people would go out to see touring DJs specifically for their collection of rare records that no one else had and you couldn't hear anywhere else. This is still true today in the more underground scenes. It's the opposite of cookie cutter.
    - carlmr 2y ago
      It's like the perfect conterexample, a good DJ needs to have really good taste and constantly listen to new tracks and think about where they can be used. Designers everyone thinks are more creative than they are. DJs most people think are less creative than they need to be.
      - brailsafe 2y ago
        Sounds to me like they work out to be the same in this respect, only differing in perception. Both are solving problems with approximately similar levels of caching ideas and techniques and experience, while developing proficiency with similar quantities of tools. They're both generally making their money solving problems with all of that, only occasionally getting a chance to express themselves in some unusual artistic way that most likely won't be a viable income stream until they've really made a name for themselves; save for the rare circumstance they are Aphex Twin
    - jrflowers 2y ago
      Most DJs do not make their livings at techno clubs. The majority are hired to play bars and events that do not cater to particularly discerning audiences.
      - phpnode 2y ago
- DigiEggz 2y ago
  Do you have any examples of some "cool" sites that you designed, even prototypes? You piqued my interest.
  - burningChrome 2y ago
    When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect. It was very similar to this site where you had jarring transitions, background changes and images moving at different speeds. https://doubble.group/sg/ https://doubble.group/sg/ The end result was very similar to site above and we all got a lot of positive feedback when their current clients saw it because they were blown away. While I was busy separating my shoulder patting myself on the back - we realized a few months in, the engagement was horrendous. The leads from their contact form dried up to almost nothing. Analytics showed an insane drop off from the home page. None of the internal pages were getting any traffic. We quickly realized that nobody could find any content on the site, they couldn't get to the contact page very easily, the content was hard to find and or read because of the motion and animation that constantly took your focus off of what you, as a user, were trying to do. We had up for four months before having to pull it and put up their old site, then re-design another simple, more refined site that would work better for their users. It was a great lesson to learn about solving problems or trying to create something cool that nobody could use. We also designed a site for a local event to support a women's shelter and used parallax again to tell a story of how women are shuffled through a system that does little to protect them from their ex-husbands or violent abusers. It used the same techniques in this, where you had both horizontal and vertical scrolling in both directions to show a timeline and story with illustrations and infographics. https://collagestudio.ca/en https://collagestudio.ca/en This also got a ton of good feedback and we had a few other non-profits approach us to do something similar for them and we did a few more using the same template we had, but switching some elements to make it original for each client. This worked out much better because if people were able to digest the story and the points you were trying to make, it had a better impact than new clients trying to find specific content and the contact page. Hope that helps!
    - carlmr 2y ago
- chefandy 2y ago
  > The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. hmmm... That approach is anathema to every other UI designer or UX person I encountered in that field. The core of UI design is 100% about clarity-- letting the user focus on exactly what they need to solve their problem. The core guiding principle of UX work is designing based on empirical research, and then iterating based on user testing... even if it doesn't work out like that in practice, it's still laser-focused on helping the user achieve what they need. Did you transfer into the field from a non-web-design background? The people I've seen approach web design with the intent of making some sexy website that's flashy for its own sake were a) front-end developers that thought the technical know-how was the hard part, b) branding and identity designers, or maybe print designers that never had to consider designs that people actually had to do stuff with, and c) small-org IT people that were sick of IT and were charged with maintaining the organization's website so they figured it would be an easy switch.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. Every UI I see today shows that UX designers were not invited to have input.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
      >UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. But also back then, anyone could and did call themselves a UI/UX developer because it was trendy to do so and paid well. Most weren't actually good at it.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      That's weird because the dozens of UI designers and also UX designers and researchers (UI design and UX Design are not the same thing) I know are employed doing exactly what they were trained to do. If you think UX was at an apex in the 90s, you haven't actually looked.
- f1shy 2y ago
  In UI you want to be anything but original. It should be as “the same” as possible.
m12k 2y ago
Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them leverage the expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on paradigms that others have established as the norm means meeting users where they are.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."
  - rachofsunshine 2y ago
    As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one before. Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to physical concepts users did understand ("oh, I have a physical card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes sense!").
    - moomoo11 2y ago
      Wow that’s cool. I remember my dad was addicted to solitaire lol
      - carlmr 2y ago
        He was playing the tutorial all along.
    - robinsonb5 2y ago
      > was once... ...and is rapidly becoming so again, hence modern UIs treating it as a second-class citizen.
  - 2y ago
gyomu 2y ago
Design is about navigating ambiguity, and finding which fine lines to walk when resolving tensions inherent to opposing constraints in any sufficiently complex problem space. There is rarely a single best solution to such problems. Originality certainly has a role to play in there - many (most?) iconic products were strikingly original. Would the iPod have been a better designed product with a D-pad (or other standard button arrangement) over its scrollwheel? Or the Wii with a standard gamepad? Originality and novelty (particularly when it comes to visual aesthetics) are forces people respond to, and great designers know how to channel those forces in constructive ways for their work.
- RunSet 2y ago
  > Or the Wii with a standard gamepad? Or the 3DS without the 3D?[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_2DS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_2DS
gchamonlive 2y ago
Maybe even if you copy and reuse virtually everything the composition can be original if you are not just applying the latest trends blindly because it's shiny and new. I come from IT architecture and for me this is the best transposition of originality for the concept of "there is no silver bullet". Do you think this also counts as originality?
- karaterobot 2y ago
  I guess it's original if it's not been done exactly the same before. But my point is that originality isn't what designers should be going for 99% of the time, even if it's a side effect. I'm sure that you follow patterns and conventions when designing an IT architecture: the combination of individual patterns you end up using, even if they've been used a million times before, still constitute a solution to the specific problem in front of you. They may be "original" in some sense, but that's beside the point: you're not aiming for originality, you're just trying to deliver whatever the best infrastructure or network architecture is for that particular usage. That's what design is, and indeed that activity itself meets all my criteria for being a design activity.
  - gchamonlive 2y ago
    Sure, there are books like Software Architecture the hard parts and even the well architected framework from AWS but they only indicate possible ways to investigate problem domains, design solutions and test and validate implementations, but it's all context dependent
psychoslave 2y ago
Even an artist as to meet something that can resonate within its public to be called thus, otherwise the person might be creative but lake the social dimension which is a preponderant trait of any artistic practice. Much like the difference between creating a language of your own for exclusive usage in your diary and creating a language enshrined in some literature work like Tolkien did.
raincole 2y ago
> If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. Copying is the way art works as well (at least for those who are not doing super-edgy-fine-art). Typical journey of a digital painter: 1. Refuse to copy. Refuse to even look at references. 2. Hoard references. Over reference. 3. Copy in the right way.
- tetha 2y ago
  Music isn't very different either. A common recommendation is to first learn to play songs you like, and then to start diverging a bit and to adjust the things you don't like and merge the ideas you like later on.
atoav 2y ago
As a former professional designer (and current improvisational musician( myself I would even come at it from the other direction: There is no true originality to begin with. Everything you do borrows from somewhere else, except maybe the things you do by accident. But there is still a difference between a designer who blatantly slaps an existing aesthetic onto your project and a designer who tries to come up with a suitable look from first principles. Design isn't styling, it is the visual organization of information with styling. So unless your information is the same the outcome will differ anyways.
guappa 2y ago
There's a full time design team where I work. The menu items got decided before they all got hired. What they do is to move them around every few months, change the colours, design our application with a mobile layout, despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers…
- nox101 2y ago
  they need to be punched in the face! Designers that change up the UI just to have something to do drive me nuts! And, now it's life threatening because cars now get updates every ~12 months where some designers have decided how to use the car changes. So, things you got used to suddenly change and you have to figure them out WHILE YOU'RE DRIVING! I hope someone manages to sue over these changes when someone inevitably dies, so they'll be some pressure not to make them.
  - carlmr 2y ago
    I still think cars need to be controlled through hardware knobs. At least all the normal car functions. GPS and AndroidAuto/Apple CarPlay interaction should be the one exception, but even here you need a volume knob at least, so that if the volume is suddenly too high you can react with muscle memory. Because surprisingly high volume can distract you enough to crash.
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  Missing the mark in terms of aligning with user needs
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Keep in mind that the design team usually doesn't just make up work items, somebody is telling them to work on some product area. That somebody could be a product manager, or somebody higher up. Presumably there's a reason for them to be working on those things, and it's related to creating some sort of value for users and the company. If not, there just won't be a design team there for long.
  - 2y ago
strogonoff 2y ago
The interesting thing about design is that once you combine the good parts from preexisting approaches (not least because those are patterns familiar to users already), relevant first principles (visual hierarchy, legibility), forward thinking (sustainable architecture with flexibility in the right places), and the context of your specific circumstances and goals, you most likely will end up with something sufficiently original without making an extra effort in that direction—and, rather than being an artist’s whim, it would be true beauty arising from function.
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  I think true beauty in design arises from its function. It’s a beauty that serves a purpose, solves problems, and meets needs
bingemaker 2y ago
In my experience, designers mistake web design with print design. Too often, the focus is on the UI rather than on the UX.
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  A common challenge in the design industry
hyperbolablabla 2y ago
At a company I used to work at, the head of design told me that artists work to establish their vision, and designers work to establish the audience's vision - something like that. Made a lot of sense to me!
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  It gives a profound distinction between the roles of artists and designers
ErigmolCt 2y ago
Your distinction between designers and artists is particularly compelling. While artists have the freedom to prioritize personal expression and originality, designers usually balance creativity with functionality. Agree.
joveian 2y ago
My sense (and I think this matches what you are saying) is that the best design is to make habits smoother and doing that often involves difficult engineering. We like to think about reasons and meaning and purpose and such but humans are primarily a collection of habits with rare changes in intent and a lot of correcting for stuff that doesn't go smoothly. The best design often becomes almost invisible because it just works, but it takes a lot of design effort and engineering for that to be possible. If you write down the differences between a great design and an ok design they can often sound entirely trivial but aren't if you think from the perspective of habits. I recently found this really excellently designed grain bin from Masuda Kiribako: https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902 https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902 It looks nice but is fairly simple; if you haven't spent a bunch of time looking at available alternatives it might not look like anything special. Keeping grain away from insects and humidity and oxygen (and sometimes rodents, though I'm not sure how well this one would do in that case) while still being able to access it easily is not trivial. Plastic buckets work well and are cheap but don't look as nice and most lids are annoying (I suspect the lid on this one might possibly be a bit annoying as well but likely not as bad). Glass jars are nice to use but fragile and best for smaller amounts. Wood is particularly challenging due to the dimensional instability and they use a particular type of wood with something like eight years of preparation to make durable boxes. (I suspect the magnet on the scoop is pure marketing though, you can't even use it when refilling if you hook the lid on the edge which is the one time it would be really handy). I think low latency is one of the things that makes software and websites feel really nice to use and is often overlooked.
markk 2y ago
Designers should feel the "need to be original", in the sense that every project is different, and can be looked at with fresh eyes. Perhaps a project is 50% similar to existing project A, 45% similar to existing project B, and 5% novel. Finding this correct balance of copies of A and B, and finding a good solution to the novel part - this process feels "original" in many ways.
nashashmi 2y ago
For some reason, I swapped the word designer with artist. Designers are artists first in my head. They adapt off the shelf solutions second.

VirgilShelton 2y ago

[flagged]

burningChrome 2y ago

This. I was a UI/UX guy for about 5 years and worked for a company that pumped out thousands of sites a year. A bunch of their designs won awards and I saw their model and thought I could do that, it seemed easy. The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. Reality set in with my first client. Same thing, they didn't want cool shit, they just wanted their potential clients to find information about their work and contact them to hire them. After another 4-5 clients, I suddenly realized that web designers aren't some artist creating ultra cool, ultra rare stuff that your clients must absolutely have like a Banksy piece, they have more fundamental problems they're trying to solve and want you to solve them for them. I got my ego checked in a hurry, but it was a good lesson to learn. You're not selling art, you're selling a solution to their problems.

ozim 2y ago
It is not only that. For example wannabe EDM DJs think they have to be creative and find tracks that no one ever heard to be edgy or whatever… most of people pay for having cookie cutter songs played so they can dance and have a good experience and they don’t want to be surprised on EDM event - well there are big names that can do whatever they want of course but that is different expectation. The same with software devs that they think, it must be “framework like code, extensible, reusable that will be there for 20 years” - well no if it is crud app most likely it will be trashed in 2 years stop overthinking and just do it :)
- caseyohara 2y ago
  Wow, this couldn't be further from the truth. It might be true for DJs playing "main stage" style EDM (poppy mainstream music) but for most electronic subgenres – especially techno – the crowd absolutely expects the DJ to be a superb crate digger and pull out new and deep tracks they've never heard before. No one goes to a techno club to hear rinsed tracks; they want the DJ to show them music they've never heard before. Before the digital age, people would go out to see touring DJs specifically for their collection of rare records that no one else had and you couldn't hear anywhere else. This is still true today in the more underground scenes. It's the opposite of cookie cutter.
  - carlmr 2y ago
    It's like the perfect conterexample, a good DJ needs to have really good taste and constantly listen to new tracks and think about where they can be used. Designers everyone thinks are more creative than they are. DJs most people think are less creative than they need to be.
    - brailsafe 2y ago
      Sounds to me like they work out to be the same in this respect, only differing in perception. Both are solving problems with approximately similar levels of caching ideas and techniques and experience, while developing proficiency with similar quantities of tools. They're both generally making their money solving problems with all of that, only occasionally getting a chance to express themselves in some unusual artistic way that most likely won't be a viable income stream until they've really made a name for themselves; save for the rare circumstance they are Aphex Twin
  - jrflowers 2y ago
    Most DJs do not make their livings at techno clubs. The majority are hired to play bars and events that do not cater to particularly discerning audiences.
    - phpnode 2y ago
DigiEggz 2y ago
Do you have any examples of some "cool" sites that you designed, even prototypes? You piqued my interest.
- burningChrome 2y ago
  When parallax scrolling was cool and different, I designed an architecture site for a local architect using the effect. It was very similar to this site where you had jarring transitions, background changes and images moving at different speeds. https://doubble.group/sg/ https://doubble.group/sg/ The end result was very similar to site above and we all got a lot of positive feedback when their current clients saw it because they were blown away. While I was busy separating my shoulder patting myself on the back - we realized a few months in, the engagement was horrendous. The leads from their contact form dried up to almost nothing. Analytics showed an insane drop off from the home page. None of the internal pages were getting any traffic. We quickly realized that nobody could find any content on the site, they couldn't get to the contact page very easily, the content was hard to find and or read because of the motion and animation that constantly took your focus off of what you, as a user, were trying to do. We had up for four months before having to pull it and put up their old site, then re-design another simple, more refined site that would work better for their users. It was a great lesson to learn about solving problems or trying to create something cool that nobody could use. We also designed a site for a local event to support a women's shelter and used parallax again to tell a story of how women are shuffled through a system that does little to protect them from their ex-husbands or violent abusers. It used the same techniques in this, where you had both horizontal and vertical scrolling in both directions to show a timeline and story with illustrations and infographics. https://collagestudio.ca/en https://collagestudio.ca/en This also got a ton of good feedback and we had a few other non-profits approach us to do something similar for them and we did a few more using the same template we had, but switching some elements to make it original for each client. This worked out much better because if people were able to digest the story and the points you were trying to make, it had a better impact than new clients trying to find specific content and the contact page. Hope that helps!
  - carlmr 2y ago
chefandy 2y ago
> The hitch was that I was going to design really cool sites, with all kinds of animations, huge text, have really cool navigation menus, etc. In short, I had a very romantic idea that I would dictate some incredible design to my clients. I thought I was like the Frank Lloyd Wright of design and whatever I showed people they would swoon and then go with whatever uber cool thing I showed them. hmmm... That approach is anathema to every other UI designer or UX person I encountered in that field. The core of UI design is 100% about clarity-- letting the user focus on exactly what they need to solve their problem. The core guiding principle of UX work is designing based on empirical research, and then iterating based on user testing... even if it doesn't work out like that in practice, it's still laser-focused on helping the user achieve what they need. Did you transfer into the field from a non-web-design background? The people I've seen approach web design with the intent of making some sexy website that's flashy for its own sake were a) front-end developers that thought the technical know-how was the hard part, b) branding and identity designers, or maybe print designers that never had to consider designs that people actually had to do stuff with, and c) small-org IT people that were sick of IT and were charged with maintaining the organization's website so they figured it would be an easy switch.
- bluGill 2y ago
  UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. Every UI I see today shows that UX designers were not invited to have input.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >UI and UX designers had their heyday in the 1990s. But also back then, anyone could and did call themselves a UI/UX developer because it was trendy to do so and paid well. Most weren't actually good at it.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    That's weird because the dozens of UI designers and also UX designers and researchers (UI design and UX Design are not the same thing) I know are employed doing exactly what they were trained to do. If you think UX was at an apex in the 90s, you haven't actually looked.
f1shy 2y ago
In UI you want to be anything but original. It should be as “the same” as possible.

m12k 2y ago

Also, one of the most important UX principles is for things to work the way the user expects. And unless you are the market leader, those expectations are mostly built based on all the other designs that your users interact with, rather than yours. So to the extent that originality means diverging from those expectations that are built elsewhere, it is actively doing your users a disservice, by not letting them leverage the expectations and muscle memory they already have. Building on paradigms that others have established as the norm means meeting users where they are.

robertlagrant 2y ago
Right. "Intuitive" mostly means "I have seen this elsewhere."
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  As a concrete example, the idea of a mouse was once counterintuitive to users because they'd never seen one before. Windows included Solitaire with the OS in part to introduce ideas like "click" or "click and drag" to users that were unfamiliar with GUIs, by linking them to physical concepts users did understand ("oh, I have a physical card, I can grab it and move it around, that makes sense!").
  - moomoo11 2y ago
    Wow that’s cool. I remember my dad was addicted to solitaire lol
    - carlmr 2y ago
      He was playing the tutorial all along.
  - robinsonb5 2y ago
    > was once... ...and is rapidly becoming so again, hence modern UIs treating it as a second-class citizen.
- 2y ago

gyomu 2y ago

Design is about navigating ambiguity, and finding which fine lines to walk when resolving tensions inherent to opposing constraints in any sufficiently complex problem space. There is rarely a single best solution to such problems. Originality certainly has a role to play in there - many (most?) iconic products were strikingly original. Would the iPod have been a better designed product with a D-pad (or other standard button arrangement) over its scrollwheel? Or the Wii with a standard gamepad? Originality and novelty (particularly when it comes to visual aesthetics) are forces people respond to, and great designers know how to channel those forces in constructive ways for their work.

RunSet 2y ago
> Or the Wii with a standard gamepad? Or the 3DS without the 3D?[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_2DS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_2DS

gchamonlive 2y ago

Maybe even if you copy and reuse virtually everything the composition can be original if you are not just applying the latest trends blindly because it's shiny and new. I come from IT architecture and for me this is the best transposition of originality for the concept of "there is no silver bullet". Do you think this also counts as originality?

karaterobot 2y ago
I guess it's original if it's not been done exactly the same before. But my point is that originality isn't what designers should be going for 99% of the time, even if it's a side effect. I'm sure that you follow patterns and conventions when designing an IT architecture: the combination of individual patterns you end up using, even if they've been used a million times before, still constitute a solution to the specific problem in front of you. They may be "original" in some sense, but that's beside the point: you're not aiming for originality, you're just trying to deliver whatever the best infrastructure or network architecture is for that particular usage. That's what design is, and indeed that activity itself meets all my criteria for being a design activity.
- gchamonlive 2y ago
  Sure, there are books like Software Architecture the hard parts and even the well architected framework from AWS but they only indicate possible ways to investigate problem domains, design solutions and test and validate implementations, but it's all context dependent

psychoslave 2y ago

Even an artist as to meet something that can resonate within its public to be called thus, otherwise the person might be creative but lake the social dimension which is a preponderant trait of any artistic practice. Much like the difference between creating a language of your own for exclusive usage in your diary and creating a language enshrined in some literature work like Tolkien did.

raincole 2y ago

> If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist instead of a designer. Copying is the way art works as well (at least for those who are not doing super-edgy-fine-art). Typical journey of a digital painter: 1. Refuse to copy. Refuse to even look at references. 2. Hoard references. Over reference. 3. Copy in the right way.

tetha 2y ago
Music isn't very different either. A common recommendation is to first learn to play songs you like, and then to start diverging a bit and to adjust the things you don't like and merge the ideas you like later on.

atoav 2y ago

As a former professional designer (and current improvisational musician( myself I would even come at it from the other direction: There is no true originality to begin with. Everything you do borrows from somewhere else, except maybe the things you do by accident. But there is still a difference between a designer who blatantly slaps an existing aesthetic onto your project and a designer who tries to come up with a suitable look from first principles. Design isn't styling, it is the visual organization of information with styling. So unless your information is the same the outcome will differ anyways.

guappa 2y ago

There's a full time design team where I work. The menu items got decided before they all got hired. What they do is to move them around every few months, change the colours, design our application with a mobile layout, despite 99% of our users being on desktop computers…

nox101 2y ago
they need to be punched in the face! Designers that change up the UI just to have something to do drive me nuts! And, now it's life threatening because cars now get updates every ~12 months where some designers have decided how to use the car changes. So, things you got used to suddenly change and you have to figure them out WHILE YOU'RE DRIVING! I hope someone manages to sue over these changes when someone inevitably dies, so they'll be some pressure not to make them.
- carlmr 2y ago
  I still think cars need to be controlled through hardware knobs. At least all the normal car functions. GPS and AndroidAuto/Apple CarPlay interaction should be the one exception, but even here you need a volume knob at least, so that if the volume is suddenly too high you can react with muscle memory. Because surprisingly high volume can distract you enough to crash.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
Missing the mark in terms of aligning with user needs
karaterobot 2y ago
Keep in mind that the design team usually doesn't just make up work items, somebody is telling them to work on some product area. That somebody could be a product manager, or somebody higher up. Presumably there's a reason for them to be working on those things, and it's related to creating some sort of value for users and the company. If not, there just won't be a design team there for long.
- 2y ago

strogonoff 2y ago

The interesting thing about design is that once you combine the good parts from preexisting approaches (not least because those are patterns familiar to users already), relevant first principles (visual hierarchy, legibility), forward thinking (sustainable architecture with flexibility in the right places), and the context of your specific circumstances and goals, you most likely will end up with something sufficiently original without making an extra effort in that direction—and, rather than being an artist’s whim, it would be true beauty arising from function.

ErigmolCt 2y ago
I think true beauty in design arises from its function. It’s a beauty that serves a purpose, solves problems, and meets needs

bingemaker 2y ago

In my experience, designers mistake web design with print design. Too often, the focus is on the UI rather than on the UX.

ErigmolCt 2y ago
A common challenge in the design industry

hyperbolablabla 2y ago

At a company I used to work at, the head of design told me that artists work to establish their vision, and designers work to establish the audience's vision - something like that. Made a lot of sense to me!

ErigmolCt 2y ago
It gives a profound distinction between the roles of artists and designers

ErigmolCt 2y ago

Your distinction between designers and artists is particularly compelling. While artists have the freedom to prioritize personal expression and originality, designers usually balance creativity with functionality. Agree.

joveian 2y ago

My sense (and I think this matches what you are saying) is that the best design is to make habits smoother and doing that often involves difficult engineering. We like to think about reasons and meaning and purpose and such but humans are primarily a collection of habits with rare changes in intent and a lot of correcting for stuff that doesn't go smoothly. The best design often becomes almost invisible because it just works, but it takes a lot of design effort and engineering for that to be possible. If you write down the differences between a great design and an ok design they can often sound entirely trivial but aren't if you think from the perspective of habits. I recently found this really excellently designed grain bin from Masuda Kiribako: https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902 https://kirihaco.shop-pro.jp/?pid=181616902 It looks nice but is fairly simple; if you haven't spent a bunch of time looking at available alternatives it might not look like anything special. Keeping grain away from insects and humidity and oxygen (and sometimes rodents, though I'm not sure how well this one would do in that case) while still being able to access it easily is not trivial. Plastic buckets work well and are cheap but don't look as nice and most lids are annoying (I suspect the lid on this one might possibly be a bit annoying as well but likely not as bad). Glass jars are nice to use but fragile and best for smaller amounts. Wood is particularly challenging due to the dimensional instability and they use a particular type of wood with something like eight years of preparation to make durable boxes. (I suspect the magnet on the scoop is pure marketing though, you can't even use it when refilling if you hook the lid on the edge which is the one time it would be really handy). I think low latency is one of the things that makes software and websites feel really nice to use and is often overlooked.

markk 2y ago

Designers should feel the "need to be original", in the sense that every project is different, and can be looked at with fresh eyes. Perhaps a project is 50% similar to existing project A, 45% similar to existing project B, and 5% novel. Finding this correct balance of copies of A and B, and finding a good solution to the novel part - this process feels "original" in many ways.

nashashmi 2y ago

For some reason, I swapped the word designer with artist. Designers are artists first in my head. They adapt off the shelf solutions second.