12 ms·

Are Designers Crazy?

198 points by edent 14y ago

ndbos 14y ago
Yes - designers are crazy
kaolinite 14y ago
Just as crazy as programmers are for caring about their indentation or doing things "right". There are times when you need to rush a little and you can't do things perfectly, but it feels good to finish something and know you did it "properly" - whatever that may mean to you. If you have seen Jony Ive's tribute to Steve Jobs, you may recall the part where he talks about "giving a damn". I think that is very relevant here.
- mbenjaminsmith 14y ago
  Writing "good code" is always preferable, especially when you do things "right" the first time. But what happens when you want to refactor something when 1) it's not strictly necessary in terms of functionality and 2) it will cost the client some non-zero amount of money. You easily slip into a gray area that this visual example illustrates well. Sure there are differences but are they material to the overall design goals? It's hard to say yes. There's no such thing as "giving a damn" in an absolute sense. It's hard to say that any software product is ever done. If that's the case then it's the programmer's / artist's responsibility to say when something is good enough for the project's current goals.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    If you had unlimited time and money, what would you do? The higher quality thing is still higher quality, regardless of time or value constraints. If you choose a lower quality path while acknowledging you're balancing time and money, you're still choosing lower quality. Realistically you can't achieve perfection (sometimes even completion) because you don't have unlimited time or money, and there are always new variables. But it is important to strive for that high quality as an ideal, even if you can never reach it. You know it is still better in some absolute sense. It's always out there as an intangible goal, and if you reach for it, you can understand and center on that balance beam even better.
    - nahname 14y ago
      Perfection is unobtainable by it's very nature. If you froze the world and left the designer alone for centuries what came out would not be perfection. Don't kid yourself that it would be otherwise.
      - calinet6 14y ago
        I never said it was even real. All I'm saying is that some things are higher quality than others, and the higher quality things are better. It's a simple tautology. I did say, "realistically you can't achieve perfection" which would appear to indicate that I'm not kidding myself here. Understanding quality in both the realistic obtainable realm, as well as the unobtainable more-pefect level allows you to differentiate the two, and make conscious decisions about the level of quality you're targeting as well as your ability to do so in reality. The higher unobtainable level of quality doesn't even have to be close to the perfect you're talking about—if you have time and money constraints, that unobtainable level of quality might be a lot lower than perfect. If you dismiss all levels of quality above a certain level as being this mythical unobtainable thing before even attempting to think about them in the abstract, then you've cut yourself off from a true understanding of the balance and compromise involved. Of course you can't achieve it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be aware of it. At some point this idea becomes a philosophical discussion and ceases to be useful. Just as at some point, your perfectionism becomes a philosophical endeavor and ceases to be useful. There is a balance where the pursuit is useful and complete.
    - mbenjaminsmith 14y ago
      >> The higher quality thing is still higher quality, regardless of time or value constraints. If you choose a lower quality path while acknowledging you're balancing time and money, you're still choosing lower quality. Framed like that I would say "yes, I never want to deliver something of 'lower quality'", but in this case (the two interfaces) one really doesn't qualify as lower quality. We're talking about the difference between "good" and "slightly, almost imperceptibly better". Having said that I'm not a designer and maybe if I were I would have a different opinion about this particular case. >> But it is important to strive for that high quality as an ideal, even if you can never reach it. No, I think it's entirely possible to deliver high quality. But we do have to deal with the law of diminishing returns and it's up to us (programmers, designers) to know what's best for our client (or ourselves).
  - scott_s 14y ago
    The differences presented in this article, however, clearly fall into the category of "worth it" because of how minor they are. I think it's easy to imagine code analogues - such as coming up with good variable, class or function names.
- ringmaster 14y ago
  Properly indented code is like properly layered design graphics. It should be a habit such that you're unconsciously doing it all the time, regardless of whether you're otherwise doing things "right" or taking shortcuts to be "good enough for now".
  - kaolinite 14y ago
    Of course. There are differing levels of perfection, however. For example, something I despise is when, somehow, spaces are left at the end of a line by hasty colleagues, e.g: "someFunction(); " Their existence doesn't damage maintainability, performance or code readability - yet to me it feels wrong and I can't stand it.
    - nkuttler 14y ago
      Of course it damages maintainability when moving the cursor around becomes erratic. Your colleagues should probably configure their editors properly to remove trailing whitespace.
      - ams6110 14y ago
        Also perhaps they should stop copy/pasting code from websites.
- bgruber 14y ago
  the big difference here is that for a programmer, doing it "right" means making it better for them, not for the end user. it's mostly about things like being able to measure how "correct" the software is, or how easy it is to change things in the future. indirectly, this can make things better for the end user, but only inasmuch as it makes it easier for the programmer to make things better for the end user. the things the OP talks about are things that designers claim make a direct difference to the end user. if you know a programmer who claims that about indentation, he is, in fact, crazy.
edu 14y ago
I'm not a designer but I think that the left one has been scaled down. The borders of the buttons are less crisp than in the right image, that have become pretty blurry. Not a big difference, but it's there.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Right one for me. The shadows aren't "right".
- jimsilverman 14y ago
  the main problem in this example is that the designer is worrying about the scaling of the graphics, rather than the fact that the stadium map and ticket listing are severely lacking any sort of visual association. "pixel perfection" trumped actual ux improvements.
damncabbage 14y ago
The flip-back-and-forth example given in the post: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Design-Difference.gif http://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Design-Di... Notice how the edges are now fuzzy? On the buttons, on the edge just below the map, on the cog. That sticks out to me personally on this monitor here, and I tend to find differences like becoming even more noticeable when looking at the phone with it's hi-res "Retina" display. They may not be crazy; they just notice different things. :)
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Those two versions are certainly different, but better is a difficult call to make. Of course, I still watch analog NTSC on a CRT TV, so what do I know about image quality?
- MaysonL 14y ago
  Notice how the orange button in the one with sharp edges is much uglier than the other one, although the green buttons improve?
hmexx 14y ago
These types of optimizations can be crazy only if they are relevant to a SINGLE INSTANCE. If the designer figured out a better way of scaling an image, that he will use EVERY TIME moving forward, he has just improved himself and/or his trade.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Many designers use repetitive methods and don't capture their processes for re-use. It doesn't make them crazy necessarily, it just makes them not programmers.
  - hmexx 14y ago
    Even if they don't "capture" the process in an obvious way, they will often capture it in the form of experience. In the rare case that it does not lead to a better process or experience AND is not noticed by the end-user AND is not noticed by the employer, then you can argue that it is indeed 'crazy'. Or you can call it self-satisfaction, pride, etc... :)
jkat 14y ago
Currently dealing with design and usability experts that are spending a lot of time building things instead of shipping and trying out different approached. There seems to be an aversion to A/B testing because that would clearly challenge their title of "experts".
- calinet6 14y ago
  There's something to be said for both strategies. Once you get down to a functional and complete design, it's useful to A/B test details to optimize. But it's nearly impossible to design something using an A/B test. Design simply does not work that way—it is not an evolutionary process on three variables, initially whether you believe in it or not, it is an art and as such takes in thousands of variables in thousands of forms and outputs something that works. That's the job of the expert—at the beginning, they are using their internal A/B test to produce something they know will be successful in the grand scheme. Give them a chance, please.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  There seems to be an aversion to A/B testing because that would clearly challenge their title of "experts". A/B testing is useful, of course, but the results can only ever be as good as the options you test.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
sgdesign 14y ago
It's easy to pick extreme examples to make it seems like designer obsess over unimportant details. But a designer that cares about the exact shade of blue or creating different versions of assets for each sizes will also care about making sure that your brand is used the right way or that your user interface makes sense. Of course, with experience also comes the knowledge of which things are more important, and which can be sacrificed for the sake of saving time. But it's often hard to tell the difference. A lot of details that seemed superfluous at first turn out to be crucial. So if you can afford to, it's safer to bring the maximum level of care to everything you do.
- edent 14y ago
  I think that's the best I've heard it expressed. Thanks.
calinet6 14y ago
No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do. But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see. In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different. But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design. You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice. But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality. If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.
- edent 14y ago
  That makes a lot of sense. I'd not heard about that particular phrase before - but I can see exactly what you're talking about.
- skrebbel 14y ago
loceng 14y ago
Some designers are crazy.
loceng 14y ago
How can you not notice the brighter orange? It draws your attention / jumps out at you / causes you to notice it - when before it was equally as bland as the other colours. The brightness of it comparatively causes you to notice it, note it as more importance, as you skim down to see what action options you have on screen.
- Kiro 14y ago
  "Ok, one button is orange - but that's it.". Try again.
  - loceng 14y ago
    Indeed. I should have just stated the importance of colour ...
madisp 14y ago
aren't both of these sample images scaled down? Unless one sees the actual raw screenshots (640x960 and 320x480) one can't really tell if there are inaccuracies or not. Also, if the @2x version has 1px features then these will definitely become blurry when scaled.
- edent 14y ago
  I think the point is both are displayed as 320x480 but one is designed specifically for that resolution whereas the other is just shrunk. Even so, when held at arm's length I'm doubtful of how noticeable the differences are.
  - jasonlotito 14y ago
    > Even so, when held at arm's length I'm doubtful of how noticeable the differences are. I know of no-one, tech or non-tech, that holds their phone at arm's length. Most hold their phones much closer.
  - rorrr 14y ago
    Pixel fitting can be very powerful, and can make certain things look much sharper. http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting
kybernetyk 14y ago
I've worked with quite a few designers. (Mostly I have hired them for my projects.) And many of them just lack pragmatism. There's a point where stuff is $good_enough and a user wouldn't ever notice that it's not optimal - but still many designer tend not to accept this. They strive for perfection. (Which might be fine if they weren't burning my money.) But that's not confined to designers. Lack of pragmatism is generally a problem. Many engineers I know won't let a problem go until their solution would work for every possible edge case - even if it's impossible for said edge case to happen with the current project.
- jongold 14y ago
  Totally agree; been guilty of it myself in the past. Getting the perfect modular golden-ratio-derived grid is less important than shipping, but being excellent is better than being good. Designer culture in startups is still relatively new; most of us are still relatively recent imports from graphic design & advertising agencies where things are totally different. But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups (namely, premature optimization. overly-ambitious architecture for week-long MVPs, and writing hundreds of lines of Rspec tests for code that is designed to be thrown out after an experiment).
  - kybernetyk 14y ago
    > But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups Yeah, programmers are not immune to that. When I was younger I wanted to be a game developer. So I made games ... well, I rather designed game engines, threw them away as I came up with 'better' designs and threw those away too because I dreamt up an even better system. In the end I didn't ship even one game in my 6 years of being an aspiring game programmer :)
- megablast 14y ago
  I have worked with designers who thought sending me a 500px wide background for an iPhone app was just fine, and I should just scale it on my own.
  - 14y ago
olgeni 14y ago
There are things they cannot ignore once they figure out that they can actually be noticed :)
j4n 14y ago
perfection is the enemy of doneness. I agree that Obsessing over every pixel achieves the highest quality of work, but it carries a high risk of the work never getting finished. I think both designers and developers can obsess over stuff like this Ad infinitum, and if they have the budget to do so, good for them. I however, would much prefer having a project that's finished rather than perfect.
melvinram 14y ago
Design is about empathy. When I design, I am placing myself in the viewer/users shoes and thinking about what it is they are trying to do/understand. The subtile differences may not be critical when viewed at first glance but the designer thought it affected the experience enough when they were thinking about it from the end-user/viewer's perspective, that he/she thought it needed to be slightly different. Sometimes it is just insanity. Yes, I admit it is a bit crazy to spend 30 minutes on something that no one will really look at twice and I'm completely guilty of it. And as a designer, sometimes we can't help ourselves... because "it just doesn't look right." I can't explain what "right" is but I'll know it when I see it... so I'll experiment with a numer of different approaches. Sometimes however, it's a genuine care for the experience and the cumulative effect of sweating the small things showcase a level of polish and care that Apple is/was famous for. You just have to decide whether it matters to you (as a company) or not. Some of the design choices made for the two versions seem like just an evolution in the style for the app that weren't back-ported to the older version. For example, the different colors of orange for the button, gradient shading, etc. Other changes are adjustments that, from his eyes, seemed necessary to make the experience better/acceptable on the 2x version, such as the sizing of the Search button, border bevel, etc.
sublimit 14y ago
The article uses a good example of designing things for other designers. The difference doesn't improve the product in a way that benefits the user. It's why I fail to understand designers sometimes. On the other hand, I'm sure designers would say the same complaints about source code optimizations. But I hope we can agree it's about personal satisfaction, and that there's not necessarily anything "crazy" about it, it's just the sort of passion that results in quality.
- polarix 14y ago
  The examples in the article do benefit the user by reducing fatigue.
  - teamonkey 14y ago
    Fatigue in the short period that the user will have the app open? They'll open it only while they're doing the specific task they opened it for. This app isn't for the gawping.
jcromartie 14y ago
It's about perception. The slightest imperfection can be glaringly obvious to one type of person, while another will never notice. I am not sure if that kind of "eye" can be trained or not, but I know I have it, and that the slightest misalignment or aliasing will jump out at me and I have to fix it (if I can help it).
jimsilverman 14y ago
as a designer, i wholeheartedly agree with his points on the obsessive strive for pixel perfection. no one cares besides designers. or at least no non-designer i've ever asked. it's becoming a problem. look at dribbble. countless designers would be more likely to obsess over a single misaligned pixel rather than focusing on far more impactful improvements to the user experience. a pixel perfect button in the wrong spot will always perform worse than a misaligned button in the right spot.
- Shorel 14y ago
  I write C++ code as a hobby. I have no idea of color palettes or similar design stuff. I will notice pixel perfection every time. So thank you all for the attention to detail.
jongold 14y ago
Are people who think designers are crazy, crazy? Not to be a dick but the other day with the WP-Svbtle thing you demonstrated you don't understand principles of design. That's cool; you don't have to. But this is just trolling man.
nahname 14y ago
Maybe I am the crazy one, but it feels like the real issue is that design practices are just less practical (mature?) than software engineering ones. We both strive for perfection and idealize great work. The difference is that few places allow for that kind of waste in their software departments because history has shown us that endless supplies of time and money just result in waste and churn, not significant changes in quality.
netfire 14y ago
Although these changes may seem like an unnecessary level of attention to detail, its important to keep in mind that this would be a very minor change to make design and engineering-wise. We're not talking about moving around elements or re-doing the entire design, just changing some colors/gradients. In my opinion, the little bit of extra effort required to put this level of polish on a product is completely worth it. Most problems with perfectionism in design and engineering come from people making bad decisions early on in the design/development process and not realizing that something is fundamentally wrong until much later on--when its much harder to fix.
jheriko 14y ago
Not crazy, just deluded. The 'scaling problem' and 'aspect ratio problem' are both ancient and well solved - I can't take anyone seriously complaining about iPhone form factors - its just a new problem for them because they are utterly inexperienced and new. What I find interesting is that the example you give has many more ugly design problems than the minuscule changes from compensating for the scaling. Look at how poorly the text is arranged in the buttons for instance... I also hope the colour banding is an image compression artefact and not in the actual app...
fredtruman 14y ago
The example about Google engineers "thinking like designers" is actually an example of "engineers thinking like engineers thinking about engineering a color choice" which the author is calling design. This is embarrassing. Engineers shouldn't think about design. Remember Douglas Bowman? http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html People want to use things - i.e. products, digital or otherwise - with style and performance. People, real people, don't give a rats ass about computer science or design - they just want the product to do something for them and they want to look cool doing it. With their expectations of performance aside for the moment, there is nothing cool about engineers "optimizing" style.
- TorbjornLunde 14y ago
  “Engineers shouldn't think about design.” In my experience engineers who think a little bit about design work better with designers than those who don’t.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    In my experience, multi-disciplinary people of any kind work better than those who aren't. Such a rare and precious thing to understand the boundaries between fields and how connected they really are...
  - fredtruman 14y ago
    you're right, and vice versa... I was just a little excited there for a minute
devgutt 14y ago
For me this is not a matter of perfectionism but knowledge. If you know something, you would like to apply this knowledge. If you don't, you wouldn't care that much or will think that is irrelevant.
Too 14y ago
> *"A design can be wrong. The entire thing can be wrong, parts can be > wrong, or even a tiny, 10x10 pixel area can be wrong. Not, "I think it's > good but it needs improvement" but flat-out wrong. 1 + 1 = 3 wrong. A > spelling mistake in a book wrong. A syntax error in a code file wrong. > It's not an opinion, it's not a matter of subjectivity, it's a fact: a > design can be wrong."* http://flyosity.com/application-design/your-design-is-wrong-and-heres-why.php http://flyosity.com/application-design/your-design-is-wrong-... The buttons with numbers in his example are such. There's still the question of whether fixing it is worth it or not though...
tom_m 14y ago
But that's not design. That's technical details. Let's out it this way...we didn't learn how to smooth pixels at my art school which is jsyt about the best place you can go for a degree in graphic design in the country.
- tiredoffps 14y ago
  There are a lot of things you learn on the job that you'll never learn from a university. Retina Design is brand spanking new. You're not going to find it being taught in a university anytime soon.
- alayne 14y ago
  Most people called designers in mobile/web software development produce artifacts/comps in my experience.
- mnicole 14y ago
  A good design school doesn't make you a good designer. I've seen SCAD and RISD grads who couldn't design to save their life. With all design, it's about understanding the medium. For a lot of designers, that technical detail is what makes them stand out from the rest.
mbq 14y ago
I 100% agree that rescaled bitmap will almost always be an ugly bitmap and certainly needs to be fixed, but IMO it is a crazy idea to fix such problem with manual pixel-wise tuning. This something machines should do while rendering vector input, otherwise it will be a pure waste of energy that will never scale.
- alayne 14y ago
  You won't get away from tuning of some sort so it's not like vector images are a panacea. Fonts require "hints" to scale. http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-icons.html http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...
  - mbq 14y ago
    Precisely; hinted, procedural vector graphics are this panacea (see SVG's shape-rendering and media queries). There is significant initial cost to create a library of widgets and icons, but they are perfectly reusable and thus overtake a designer pixel-perfecting every screen to all target devices fast.
    - calinet6 14y ago
      No designer worth his salt would object to a method such as that, as long as it produced good results.
angersock 14y ago
The funniest part to me about this is that it's a free app at the end of the day: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/seatgeek-tickets-concerts/id582790430?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/seatgeek-tickets-concerts/id...
- josegonzalez 14y ago
  Our site - http://seatgeek.com http://seatgeek.com - is free to use as well ;)
  - angersock 14y ago
    I mean no offense! You guys are doing great work! :)
demian 14y ago
You seem to be describing, basically, overengineering applied to visual design. For a developer, an example of equivalent behaviour is being overzealous about a specific programming paradigm. Things that can't be directly quantified in business terms (unlike "response time"). IMHO, it's about pragmatism and business sensibility versus artistic perfection. And it applies for both worlds. An argument from a more business-oriented visual designer could be, for example, about how some button color can affect conversion rate.
89a 14y ago
What a stupid article. Imagine if a designer wrote something similar regarding topics important to developers.
csmeder 14y ago
"Ok... Now I see some differences. On one, the buttons are slightly larger, the colours slightly more nuanced, the shading is subtly different. If I zoom to an extreme level, the font on "ebay" in slightly smoother." I understand the above is frustrating, however, you are missing the main reason the image needed some extra love. The main difference is pixel fitting [1]. The fuzzy border lines on the buttons are like "nails on a chalkboard" to me. "Nails on a chalk board" don't actually bother me that much but I notice it. For many cases I would just ignore it. However, if I am shipping a product that I am hoping will get free advertising from people talking about how beautifully it is designed, I am going to pixel fit the damn thing. In this case, the designer is not being crazy, he is looking out for the the bottom line. Free word of mouth advertising and free blog articles written about the beauty of the pixels contribute to the bottom line much more than the cost of doing a little pixel fitting. Look at the Hulu example below [1] http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting
- malachismith 14y ago
  > Free word of mouth advertising and free blog articles written about the beauty of the > pixels contribute to the bottom line much more than the cost of doing a little > pixel fitting. Really? Give me the data to back up your bottom line claim. Because in my (5 and counting) start-ups I've seen little to no impact on the bottom line from design blog posts.
  - csmeder 14y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean design blogs. I am talking about normal blogs and tech blogs. I believe products that are designed well and polished get more attention from blogs and receive more word of mouth recommendations. I believe one of reasons iOS and the iPhone helped propel Apple into becoming the largest company in the world was Apple's attention to design details. However, I have no way to test or prove this theory. So please disagree if you like.
    - malachismith 14y ago
      1 - the link between blogs of all sorts and the bottom-line is tenuous at best. If you're an ad revenue business, you can make the argument that all traffic has an impact on the bottom line, but suffice it to say that none of the advertising supported start-ups I have been involved in have seen sustained valuable traffic referred in from a blog. 2 - Normal blogs and tech blogs don't write articles that go into detail on the minutae of the design elements in a product's UI. That's limited to design blogs. 3 - Personally, I'm getting kind of tired of the default defense of most designers to this sort of criticism ("because Apple"). Saying that Apple is where it is because of Design not only ignores the market, product and business realities that have lead to Apple's (recent) success - it also ignores the many ways in which Apple's design is sub-standard or even bad (resulting in people copying bad design patterns "because Apple did it").
theDoug 14y ago
Applying Betteridge's Law of Headlines, _no_. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines
mejarc 14y ago
Having literally bruised my fingers trying to appease a visual designer who wanted browser rendering to look exactly like Photoshop (for instance, the CSS-drawn gradients didn't meet her approval, so we had to lard the interface with background graphics), I'm now in the "Put designers in straitjackets until they learn the fundamentals of modern Web application design" camp. It's the year 2013, and your competition is using frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation to release something while your dev team is fussing over bespoke line-heights specified in points. Maybe your app looks better, but how many users are waiting for that placed-just-so button image to download?
- josegonzalez 14y ago
  Disclaimer: I work on Operations at SeatGeek We take design very seriously, and thats because better designs have been quantifiably proven to have a meaningful impact on our bottom line. That means sometimes we try and polish something for the first release, but we always set a limit to that - if it's not in production, it's not shipped, and we will forget about it amongst the 23524 other things going on in a given week. Therefore, we usually set at least some internal goal of "good enough" and then ship. It just so happens one of our founders really likes digging into design. Also note, this is an iPhone app, not a web application. Very different rules apply here, so you can't just slap Bootstrap on your UI and hope for the best :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Interesting screed. I've observed that some folks "see" more than others (my daughter for example notices very minute details in things I completely miss) which may explain most of the observed 'crazyness'. There seems to be something similar to the 'uncanny valley' where something nearly complete becomes more obviously incomplete before being complete. (I know how crazy does that sound!) But an example might help, if you straighten up a room, it goes from fully chaotic to less and less messy until the 'organized' parts start dominating the scene with respect to the messy parts. Than as you approach completely organized a small bit of chaos sticks out more and more. Until that is eliminated and everything is in its place. Different folks have different tolerances (I know, Doh! right?) People who consider themselves designers have worked hard on being able to see where something can be improved visually, so they are much more likely to see issues that detract. Non-designers just don't see things the same way.
knitting 14y ago
This really hits close to home because I do often wonder if it does "matter". When the audience do not appreciate the three hours I spent on the title's kerning or decision on the thickness of the boarder or the difference between ultramarine to navy, I do feel a sort of defeat that can result in a "why do I bother" attitude. But the next time, I would still put in the effort because as insignificant as it is, I do notice it and I believe it does make an impact in the viewer's pleasure. Design is a lot of the time a struggle between satisfying the employer and holding onto the designer's own concerns. And even though most, like the author, might not see a difference or even undermine what the designers hold dear, there are people who will notice, if not appreciate the details.
robomartin 14y ago
Well, on mobile it can be hard to quantify and connect design to value. On the web it's a different story. There's nothing wrong with beautiful design as long as you are willing to accept the fact that at one point it is serving art and not business needs. And that's OK. If the requirement is to strictly serve business needs, then you have to A/B test, generate numbers and go with what optimizes conversions or whatever you are after. People react to what they see in amazingly different ways. I don't think anyone has a canonical "manual" for what will please most people or what will compel most people to take a given action. I mean, look at Craigslist!
surrealize 14y ago
I'm not a visual designer, but I do see the difference in crispness between the two stadium images, and I think the improvement in the sharper one is non-trivial. However, I'm frustrated with designers who associate thoroughness with being "pixel-perfect". Pixels should not be the focus. We live in a multi-res world; different people have differing visual acuity and varying ppi screens that they hold at varying distances. Being user-centered means accounting for all that variation, not optimizing individual pixels for your super-designer-vision. Just use vector art instead. I hoped that the retina iStuff would finally break designers of their pixel-focus, but it seems that it's just become a way to obsess even more about pixels.
- notatoad 14y ago
  That's because pixels are important. The non-trivial blurring you see is the result of the edge of the image not being aligned with the edge of the pixel. the screen has to anti-alias it onto the subpixel, and it looks shitty. High PPI screens mitigate this somewhat, and i'm sure every designer would love to get away from using pixels but the results just aren't good when you do.
- fpal3 14y ago
  Vector art produces bad results. So, no thanks. The problem is the ridiculous number of varying Android resolutions. There, we have to be flexible. But still not going to use vectors.
groue 14y ago
I haven't read anyone noticing that developers lose countless hours fighting with badly crafted PSDs like the one shown in the article, just to extract proper assets that keep their code tight. Think pixel fitting, but also dimensions consistency, color consistency, etc. Off-by one/three/eleven pixels are a plague. Save money on the design: you may well increase your development costs.
adamkochanowicz 14y ago
While I have some disagreements, I think it's great you bring this up. You're addressing an elephant in the room.
amadeus 14y ago
This may have been said before, but I am posting anyways since there's so many comments here and I don't have time to read them all. I think I have a way to explain why pixel perfection is a very good optimization that caters to more of a a developer mindset like yourself; it comes down to image compression, and specifically PNG compression. When it comes to UI elements, the fewer colors you use, the better. This means avoiding things like gradients, or unnecessary colors can have a major impact on file size. It's also the 'art of design' to manage to create a beautiful design without a lot of crappy and needless 'veneer'. I don't know the specifics of the PNG algorithm, but it can do an amazing job at compressing an image if it's made up of few and often repeating colors (typically it's terrible at photographs, however). When you apply a scaling algorithm (as exemplified by the post) other than nearest neighbor, it tends to create a lot of intermediary colors that end up hurting the size of the image. Looking closely at the borders of those buttons, that blur is going to end up adding to the file size because it adds colors that didn't exist before. If you properly 'scale' (which sometimes requires a redraw at a smaller size to get it right), it can have a huge impact (sometimes as much as 2x or 3x). Oftentimes you can get away with it from a 1/2x scale fairly easily, but you have to remember there are many android devices at a 1.5x scale, and that can sometimes require completely new rounded corners that take advantage of that pixel density. This is of course anecdotal, but it's not as simple as 'looks' even though I could immediately see the differences between the properly and unproperly scaled images.
ThomPete 14y ago
Think about it as code formatting. In order for your code to be extensible and readable you need to make sure that you are using the right fundamental indentatation, naming convention etc. Where you look at the buttons individually, the designer looks at the style. The sum of all the items styled in a certain way. The real question is not whether designers go too much into details but rather when they should and when they shouldn't.
gnarbarian 14y ago
YES some designers are crazy divas, rigid, and unwilling to compromise or see the big picture.
- ZephyrP 14y ago
  I think this is the real crux of the article
3rd3 14y ago
Envy.. This rant obviously shows that the author doesn’t get along with his artistic inabilities.
malachismith 14y ago
A plea to designers.... Read the original piece carefully and try to avoid being defensive. This is an important post for all of you. I've been a defender of Design and designers for 2 decades now. But you all are your own worst enemies. This post should serve as a chance for all of you to learn why you are often Balkanized in business decisions and business structures. It should serve as a chance for you all to show that you actually understand business realities and can propose rational arguments. Instead, reading through these comments I see pretty much nothing but personal opinion, vigorous hand-waving, very poor and stretched-to-breaking analogies and the usual "because it means this to me" and "because I say so" and "because... Apple" arguments. I'd suggest reading again with the mindset of "this is the way non designers think about us" and then come back and (with facts this time) explain your perspective. And remember... this is Hacker News. We work at Start-ups. We believe in shipping early, shipping often, and iterating to improve. Your answers and perspective MUST work within this construct or we will ignore you (and you will thus teach all of us that designers are, in fact, crazy). Ball's in your court.
- malachismith 14y ago
  Oh... and as a hint, if your response includes ".. you don't understand .. " at any point... please understand that you are insulting the person you speak to.
- fpal3 14y ago
  > This post should serve as a chance for all of you to learn why you are often Balkanized in business decisions and business structures. It should serve as a chance for you all to show that you actually understand business realities and can propose rational arguments. Heh. Because "business decisions" are always so rational, demonstrating a genuine understanding of the product and what the people that actually are going to use it will want from it? > And remember... this is Hacker News. We work at Start-ups. We believe in shipping early, shipping often, and iterating to improve. Your answers and perspective MUST work within this construct or we will ignore you (and you will thus teach all of us that designers are, in fact, crazy). Sigh. Some of us want to ship genuinely high-quality products, not ship whatever we manage to shit out every other day. If my users are noticing my bugs (or design faults), that adds up to an aggregate middling opinion of my product. One thing you got right -- I do want to be Apple, not Time Warner Cable. > Ball's in your court. Not really. You sound like someone that will willingly produce mediocre products, and I don't really know why anyone interested in excellence (and the rewards that it brings) would want to work with you. So this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for yourself.
philfreo 14y ago
The quality of _both_ images in the animated flipping version is greatly reduced from the original, making it not a really fair comparison.
sevenupcan 14y ago
Sure understanding the relationship between good design and how it applies to different technologies takes time. Whether that be resolution independence or color correction, but once you've got your head around the "working out", there's no reason why you shouldn't strive for perfection. Achieving pixel perfect design nowadays doesn't mean you have to go insane in the process.

198 points by edent 14y ago

ndbos 14y ago

Yes - designers are crazy

Just as crazy as programmers are for caring about their indentation or doing things "right". There are times when you need to rush a little and you can't do things perfectly, but it feels good to finish something and know you did it "properly" - whatever that may mean to you. If you have seen Jony Ive's tribute to Steve Jobs, you may recall the part where he talks about "giving a damn". I think that is very relevant here.

mbenjaminsmith 14y ago
Writing "good code" is always preferable, especially when you do things "right" the first time. But what happens when you want to refactor something when 1) it's not strictly necessary in terms of functionality and 2) it will cost the client some non-zero amount of money. You easily slip into a gray area that this visual example illustrates well. Sure there are differences but are they material to the overall design goals? It's hard to say yes. There's no such thing as "giving a damn" in an absolute sense. It's hard to say that any software product is ever done. If that's the case then it's the programmer's / artist's responsibility to say when something is good enough for the project's current goals.
- calinet6 14y ago
  If you had unlimited time and money, what would you do? The higher quality thing is still higher quality, regardless of time or value constraints. If you choose a lower quality path while acknowledging you're balancing time and money, you're still choosing lower quality. Realistically you can't achieve perfection (sometimes even completion) because you don't have unlimited time or money, and there are always new variables. But it is important to strive for that high quality as an ideal, even if you can never reach it. You know it is still better in some absolute sense. It's always out there as an intangible goal, and if you reach for it, you can understand and center on that balance beam even better.
  - nahname 14y ago
    Perfection is unobtainable by it's very nature. If you froze the world and left the designer alone for centuries what came out would not be perfection. Don't kid yourself that it would be otherwise.
    - calinet6 14y ago
      I never said it was even real. All I'm saying is that some things are higher quality than others, and the higher quality things are better. It's a simple tautology. I did say, "realistically you can't achieve perfection" which would appear to indicate that I'm not kidding myself here. Understanding quality in both the realistic obtainable realm, as well as the unobtainable more-pefect level allows you to differentiate the two, and make conscious decisions about the level of quality you're targeting as well as your ability to do so in reality. The higher unobtainable level of quality doesn't even have to be close to the perfect you're talking about—if you have time and money constraints, that unobtainable level of quality might be a lot lower than perfect. If you dismiss all levels of quality above a certain level as being this mythical unobtainable thing before even attempting to think about them in the abstract, then you've cut yourself off from a true understanding of the balance and compromise involved. Of course you can't achieve it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be aware of it. At some point this idea becomes a philosophical discussion and ceases to be useful. Just as at some point, your perfectionism becomes a philosophical endeavor and ceases to be useful. There is a balance where the pursuit is useful and complete.
  - mbenjaminsmith 14y ago
    >> The higher quality thing is still higher quality, regardless of time or value constraints. If you choose a lower quality path while acknowledging you're balancing time and money, you're still choosing lower quality. Framed like that I would say "yes, I never want to deliver something of 'lower quality'", but in this case (the two interfaces) one really doesn't qualify as lower quality. We're talking about the difference between "good" and "slightly, almost imperceptibly better". Having said that I'm not a designer and maybe if I were I would have a different opinion about this particular case. >> But it is important to strive for that high quality as an ideal, even if you can never reach it. No, I think it's entirely possible to deliver high quality. But we do have to deal with the law of diminishing returns and it's up to us (programmers, designers) to know what's best for our client (or ourselves).
- scott_s 14y ago
  The differences presented in this article, however, clearly fall into the category of "worth it" because of how minor they are. I think it's easy to imagine code analogues - such as coming up with good variable, class or function names.
ringmaster 14y ago
Properly indented code is like properly layered design graphics. It should be a habit such that you're unconsciously doing it all the time, regardless of whether you're otherwise doing things "right" or taking shortcuts to be "good enough for now".
- kaolinite 14y ago
  Of course. There are differing levels of perfection, however. For example, something I despise is when, somehow, spaces are left at the end of a line by hasty colleagues, e.g: "someFunction(); " Their existence doesn't damage maintainability, performance or code readability - yet to me it feels wrong and I can't stand it.
  - nkuttler 14y ago
    Of course it damages maintainability when moving the cursor around becomes erratic. Your colleagues should probably configure their editors properly to remove trailing whitespace.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      Also perhaps they should stop copy/pasting code from websites.
bgruber 14y ago
the big difference here is that for a programmer, doing it "right" means making it better for them, not for the end user. it's mostly about things like being able to measure how "correct" the software is, or how easy it is to change things in the future. indirectly, this can make things better for the end user, but only inasmuch as it makes it easier for the programmer to make things better for the end user. the things the OP talks about are things that designers claim make a direct difference to the end user. if you know a programmer who claims that about indentation, he is, in fact, crazy.

edu 14y ago

I'm not a designer but I think that the left one has been scaled down. The borders of the buttons are less crisp than in the right image, that have become pretty blurry. Not a big difference, but it's there.

StavrosK 14y ago
Right one for me. The shadows aren't "right".
jimsilverman 14y ago
the main problem in this example is that the designer is worrying about the scaling of the graphics, rather than the fact that the stadium map and ticket listing are severely lacking any sort of visual association. "pixel perfection" trumped actual ux improvements.

damncabbage 14y ago

The flip-back-and-forth example given in the post: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Design-Difference.gif http://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Design-Di... Notice how the edges are now fuzzy? On the buttons, on the edge just below the map, on the cog. That sticks out to me personally on this monitor here, and I tend to find differences like becoming even more noticeable when looking at the phone with it's hi-res "Retina" display. They may not be crazy; they just notice different things. :)

rachelbythebay 14y ago
Those two versions are certainly different, but better is a difficult call to make. Of course, I still watch analog NTSC on a CRT TV, so what do I know about image quality?
MaysonL 14y ago
Notice how the orange button in the one with sharp edges is much uglier than the other one, although the green buttons improve?

hmexx 14y ago

These types of optimizations can be crazy only if they are relevant to a SINGLE INSTANCE. If the designer figured out a better way of scaling an image, that he will use EVERY TIME moving forward, he has just improved himself and/or his trade.

calinet6 14y ago
Many designers use repetitive methods and don't capture their processes for re-use. It doesn't make them crazy necessarily, it just makes them not programmers.
- hmexx 14y ago
  Even if they don't "capture" the process in an obvious way, they will often capture it in the form of experience. In the rare case that it does not lead to a better process or experience AND is not noticed by the end-user AND is not noticed by the employer, then you can argue that it is indeed 'crazy'. Or you can call it self-satisfaction, pride, etc... :)

jkat 14y ago

Currently dealing with design and usability experts that are spending a lot of time building things instead of shipping and trying out different approached. There seems to be an aversion to A/B testing because that would clearly challenge their title of "experts".

calinet6 14y ago
There's something to be said for both strategies. Once you get down to a functional and complete design, it's useful to A/B test details to optimize. But it's nearly impossible to design something using an A/B test. Design simply does not work that way—it is not an evolutionary process on three variables, initially whether you believe in it or not, it is an art and as such takes in thousands of variables in thousands of forms and outputs something that works. That's the job of the expert—at the beginning, they are using their internal A/B test to produce something they know will be successful in the grand scheme. Give them a chance, please.
Silhouette 14y ago
There seems to be an aversion to A/B testing because that would clearly challenge their title of "experts". A/B testing is useful, of course, but the results can only ever be as good as the options you test.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

sgdesign 14y ago

It's easy to pick extreme examples to make it seems like designer obsess over unimportant details. But a designer that cares about the exact shade of blue or creating different versions of assets for each sizes will also care about making sure that your brand is used the right way or that your user interface makes sense. Of course, with experience also comes the knowledge of which things are more important, and which can be sacrificed for the sake of saving time. But it's often hard to tell the difference. A lot of details that seemed superfluous at first turn out to be crucial. So if you can afford to, it's safer to bring the maximum level of care to everything you do.

edent 14y ago
I think that's the best I've heard it expressed. Thanks.

calinet6 14y ago

No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do. But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see. In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUPwsD64GI This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different. But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design. You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice. But if you go for every detail like it was the most important detail, you have the possibility of reaching a level of design quality that is superlative, and some people will notice. Others will not notice directly, but will see that the piece exudes style and quality subconsciously, due to the attention to small details. If you carry this into other areas of your work—programming, customer service, market strategy, marketing, and more—then you have a chance to create something of true quality. If you don't pay attention to detail at that level, well, you might have the chance to actually get something done. Yes, it's a balance, like everything else. But you have to know that it won't be quite as good, and understand that yes, you are sacrificing something, even if you can't see it.

edent 14y ago
That makes a lot of sense. I'd not heard about that particular phrase before - but I can see exactly what you're talking about.
skrebbel 14y ago

loceng 14y ago

Some designers are crazy.

loceng 14y ago

How can you not notice the brighter orange? It draws your attention / jumps out at you / causes you to notice it - when before it was equally as bland as the other colours. The brightness of it comparatively causes you to notice it, note it as more importance, as you skim down to see what action options you have on screen.

Kiro 14y ago
"Ok, one button is orange - but that's it.". Try again.
- loceng 14y ago
  Indeed. I should have just stated the importance of colour ...

madisp 14y ago

aren't both of these sample images scaled down? Unless one sees the actual raw screenshots (640x960 and 320x480) one can't really tell if there are inaccuracies or not. Also, if the @2x version has 1px features then these will definitely become blurry when scaled.

edent 14y ago
I think the point is both are displayed as 320x480 but one is designed specifically for that resolution whereas the other is just shrunk. Even so, when held at arm's length I'm doubtful of how noticeable the differences are.
- jasonlotito 14y ago
  > Even so, when held at arm's length I'm doubtful of how noticeable the differences are. I know of no-one, tech or non-tech, that holds their phone at arm's length. Most hold their phones much closer.
- rorrr 14y ago
  Pixel fitting can be very powerful, and can make certain things look much sharper. http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting

kybernetyk 14y ago

I've worked with quite a few designers. (Mostly I have hired them for my projects.) And many of them just lack pragmatism. There's a point where stuff is $good_enough and a user wouldn't ever notice that it's not optimal - but still many designer tend not to accept this. They strive for perfection. (Which might be fine if they weren't burning my money.) But that's not confined to designers. Lack of pragmatism is generally a problem. Many engineers I know won't let a problem go until their solution would work for every possible edge case - even if it's impossible for said edge case to happen with the current project.

jongold 14y ago
Totally agree; been guilty of it myself in the past. Getting the perfect modular golden-ratio-derived grid is less important than shipping, but being excellent is better than being good. Designer culture in startups is still relatively new; most of us are still relatively recent imports from graphic design & advertising agencies where things are totally different. But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups (namely, premature optimization. overly-ambitious architecture for week-long MVPs, and writing hundreds of lines of Rspec tests for code that is designed to be thrown out after an experiment).
- kybernetyk 14y ago
  > But I've seen programmers exhibit the same deadly perfectionism in startups Yeah, programmers are not immune to that. When I was younger I wanted to be a game developer. So I made games ... well, I rather designed game engines, threw them away as I came up with 'better' designs and threw those away too because I dreamt up an even better system. In the end I didn't ship even one game in my 6 years of being an aspiring game programmer :)
megablast 14y ago
I have worked with designers who thought sending me a 500px wide background for an iPhone app was just fine, and I should just scale it on my own.
- 14y ago

olgeni 14y ago

There are things they cannot ignore once they figure out that they can actually be noticed :)

j4n 14y ago

perfection is the enemy of doneness. I agree that Obsessing over every pixel achieves the highest quality of work, but it carries a high risk of the work never getting finished. I think both designers and developers can obsess over stuff like this Ad infinitum, and if they have the budget to do so, good for them. I however, would much prefer having a project that's finished rather than perfect.

melvinram 14y ago

Design is about empathy. When I design, I am placing myself in the viewer/users shoes and thinking about what it is they are trying to do/understand. The subtile differences may not be critical when viewed at first glance but the designer thought it affected the experience enough when they were thinking about it from the end-user/viewer's perspective, that he/she thought it needed to be slightly different. Sometimes it is just insanity. Yes, I admit it is a bit crazy to spend 30 minutes on something that no one will really look at twice and I'm completely guilty of it. And as a designer, sometimes we can't help ourselves... because "it just doesn't look right." I can't explain what "right" is but I'll know it when I see it... so I'll experiment with a numer of different approaches. Sometimes however, it's a genuine care for the experience and the cumulative effect of sweating the small things showcase a level of polish and care that Apple is/was famous for. You just have to decide whether it matters to you (as a company) or not. Some of the design choices made for the two versions seem like just an evolution in the style for the app that weren't back-ported to the older version. For example, the different colors of orange for the button, gradient shading, etc. Other changes are adjustments that, from his eyes, seemed necessary to make the experience better/acceptable on the 2x version, such as the sizing of the Search button, border bevel, etc.

sublimit 14y ago

The article uses a good example of designing things for other designers. The difference doesn't improve the product in a way that benefits the user. It's why I fail to understand designers sometimes. On the other hand, I'm sure designers would say the same complaints about source code optimizations. But I hope we can agree it's about personal satisfaction, and that there's not necessarily anything "crazy" about it, it's just the sort of passion that results in quality.

polarix 14y ago
The examples in the article do benefit the user by reducing fatigue.
- teamonkey 14y ago
  Fatigue in the short period that the user will have the app open? They'll open it only while they're doing the specific task they opened it for. This app isn't for the gawping.

jcromartie 14y ago

It's about perception. The slightest imperfection can be glaringly obvious to one type of person, while another will never notice. I am not sure if that kind of "eye" can be trained or not, but I know I have it, and that the slightest misalignment or aliasing will jump out at me and I have to fix it (if I can help it).

jimsilverman 14y ago

as a designer, i wholeheartedly agree with his points on the obsessive strive for pixel perfection. no one cares besides designers. or at least no non-designer i've ever asked. it's becoming a problem. look at dribbble. countless designers would be more likely to obsess over a single misaligned pixel rather than focusing on far more impactful improvements to the user experience. a pixel perfect button in the wrong spot will always perform worse than a misaligned button in the right spot.

Shorel 14y ago
I write C++ code as a hobby. I have no idea of color palettes or similar design stuff. I will notice pixel perfection every time. So thank you all for the attention to detail.

jongold 14y ago

Are people who think designers are crazy, crazy? Not to be a dick but the other day with the WP-Svbtle thing you demonstrated you don't understand principles of design. That's cool; you don't have to. But this is just trolling man.

nahname 14y ago

Maybe I am the crazy one, but it feels like the real issue is that design practices are just less practical (mature?) than software engineering ones. We both strive for perfection and idealize great work. The difference is that few places allow for that kind of waste in their software departments because history has shown us that endless supplies of time and money just result in waste and churn, not significant changes in quality.

netfire 14y ago

Although these changes may seem like an unnecessary level of attention to detail, its important to keep in mind that this would be a very minor change to make design and engineering-wise. We're not talking about moving around elements or re-doing the entire design, just changing some colors/gradients. In my opinion, the little bit of extra effort required to put this level of polish on a product is completely worth it. Most problems with perfectionism in design and engineering come from people making bad decisions early on in the design/development process and not realizing that something is fundamentally wrong until much later on--when its much harder to fix.

jheriko 14y ago

Not crazy, just deluded. The 'scaling problem' and 'aspect ratio problem' are both ancient and well solved - I can't take anyone seriously complaining about iPhone form factors - its just a new problem for them because they are utterly inexperienced and new. What I find interesting is that the example you give has many more ugly design problems than the minuscule changes from compensating for the scaling. Look at how poorly the text is arranged in the buttons for instance... I also hope the colour banding is an image compression artefact and not in the actual app...

fredtruman 14y ago

The example about Google engineers "thinking like designers" is actually an example of "engineers thinking like engineers thinking about engineering a color choice" which the author is calling design. This is embarrassing. Engineers shouldn't think about design. Remember Douglas Bowman? http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html People want to use things - i.e. products, digital or otherwise - with style and performance. People, real people, don't give a rats ass about computer science or design - they just want the product to do something for them and they want to look cool doing it. With their expectations of performance aside for the moment, there is nothing cool about engineers "optimizing" style.

TorbjornLunde 14y ago
“Engineers shouldn't think about design.” In my experience engineers who think a little bit about design work better with designers than those who don’t.
- calinet6 14y ago
  In my experience, multi-disciplinary people of any kind work better than those who aren't. Such a rare and precious thing to understand the boundaries between fields and how connected they really are...
- fredtruman 14y ago
  you're right, and vice versa... I was just a little excited there for a minute

devgutt 14y ago

For me this is not a matter of perfectionism but knowledge. If you know something, you would like to apply this knowledge. If you don't, you wouldn't care that much or will think that is irrelevant.

Too 14y ago

> *"A design can be wrong. The entire thing can be wrong, parts can be > wrong, or even a tiny, 10x10 pixel area can be wrong. Not, "I think it's > good but it needs improvement" but flat-out wrong. 1 + 1 = 3 wrong. A > spelling mistake in a book wrong. A syntax error in a code file wrong. > It's not an opinion, it's not a matter of subjectivity, it's a fact: a > design can be wrong."* http://flyosity.com/application-design/your-design-is-wrong-and-heres-why.php http://flyosity.com/application-design/your-design-is-wrong-... The buttons with numbers in his example are such. There's still the question of whether fixing it is worth it or not though...

tom_m 14y ago

But that's not design. That's technical details. Let's out it this way...we didn't learn how to smooth pixels at my art school which is jsyt about the best place you can go for a degree in graphic design in the country.

tiredoffps 14y ago
There are a lot of things you learn on the job that you'll never learn from a university. Retina Design is brand spanking new. You're not going to find it being taught in a university anytime soon.
alayne 14y ago
Most people called designers in mobile/web software development produce artifacts/comps in my experience.
mnicole 14y ago
A good design school doesn't make you a good designer. I've seen SCAD and RISD grads who couldn't design to save their life. With all design, it's about understanding the medium. For a lot of designers, that technical detail is what makes them stand out from the rest.

mbq 14y ago

I 100% agree that rescaled bitmap will almost always be an ugly bitmap and certainly needs to be fixed, but IMO it is a crazy idea to fix such problem with manual pixel-wise tuning. This something machines should do while rendering vector input, otherwise it will be a pure waste of energy that will never scale.

alayne 14y ago
You won't get away from tuning of some sort so it's not like vector images are a panacea. Fonts require "hints" to scale. http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-icons.html http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector-...
- mbq 14y ago
  Precisely; hinted, procedural vector graphics are this panacea (see SVG's shape-rendering and media queries). There is significant initial cost to create a library of widgets and icons, but they are perfectly reusable and thus overtake a designer pixel-perfecting every screen to all target devices fast.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    No designer worth his salt would object to a method such as that, as long as it produced good results.

angersock 14y ago

The funniest part to me about this is that it's a free app at the end of the day: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/seatgeek-tickets-concerts/id582790430?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/seatgeek-tickets-concerts/id...

josegonzalez 14y ago
Our site - http://seatgeek.com http://seatgeek.com - is free to use as well ;)
- angersock 14y ago
  I mean no offense! You guys are doing great work! :)

demian 14y ago

You seem to be describing, basically, overengineering applied to visual design. For a developer, an example of equivalent behaviour is being overzealous about a specific programming paradigm. Things that can't be directly quantified in business terms (unlike "response time"). IMHO, it's about pragmatism and business sensibility versus artistic perfection. And it applies for both worlds. An argument from a more business-oriented visual designer could be, for example, about how some button color can affect conversion rate.

89a 14y ago

What a stupid article. Imagine if a designer wrote something similar regarding topics important to developers.

csmeder 14y ago

"Ok... Now I see some differences. On one, the buttons are slightly larger, the colours slightly more nuanced, the shading is subtly different. If I zoom to an extreme level, the font on "ebay" in slightly smoother." I understand the above is frustrating, however, you are missing the main reason the image needed some extra love. The main difference is pixel fitting [1]. The fuzzy border lines on the buttons are like "nails on a chalkboard" to me. "Nails on a chalk board" don't actually bother me that much but I notice it. For many cases I would just ignore it. However, if I am shipping a product that I am hoping will get free advertising from people talking about how beautifully it is designed, I am going to pixel fit the damn thing. In this case, the designer is not being crazy, he is looking out for the the bottom line. Free word of mouth advertising and free blog articles written about the beauty of the pixels contribute to the bottom line much more than the cost of doing a little pixel fitting. Look at the Hulu example below [1] http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting

malachismith 14y ago
> Free word of mouth advertising and free blog articles written about the beauty of the > pixels contribute to the bottom line much more than the cost of doing a little > pixel fitting. Really? Give me the data to back up your bottom line claim. Because in my (5 and counting) start-ups I've seen little to no impact on the bottom line from design blog posts.
- csmeder 14y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean design blogs. I am talking about normal blogs and tech blogs. I believe products that are designed well and polished get more attention from blogs and receive more word of mouth recommendations. I believe one of reasons iOS and the iPhone helped propel Apple into becoming the largest company in the world was Apple's attention to design details. However, I have no way to test or prove this theory. So please disagree if you like.
  - malachismith 14y ago
    1 - the link between blogs of all sorts and the bottom-line is tenuous at best. If you're an ad revenue business, you can make the argument that all traffic has an impact on the bottom line, but suffice it to say that none of the advertising supported start-ups I have been involved in have seen sustained valuable traffic referred in from a blog. 2 - Normal blogs and tech blogs don't write articles that go into detail on the minutae of the design elements in a product's UI. That's limited to design blogs. 3 - Personally, I'm getting kind of tired of the default defense of most designers to this sort of criticism ("because Apple"). Saying that Apple is where it is because of Design not only ignores the market, product and business realities that have lead to Apple's (recent) success - it also ignores the many ways in which Apple's design is sub-standard or even bad (resulting in people copying bad design patterns "because Apple did it").

theDoug 14y ago

Applying Betteridge's Law of Headlines, _no_. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

mejarc 14y ago

Having literally bruised my fingers trying to appease a visual designer who wanted browser rendering to look exactly like Photoshop (for instance, the CSS-drawn gradients didn't meet her approval, so we had to lard the interface with background graphics), I'm now in the "Put designers in straitjackets until they learn the fundamentals of modern Web application design" camp. It's the year 2013, and your competition is using frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation to release something while your dev team is fussing over bespoke line-heights specified in points. Maybe your app looks better, but how many users are waiting for that placed-just-so button image to download?

josegonzalez 14y ago
Disclaimer: I work on Operations at SeatGeek We take design very seriously, and thats because better designs have been quantifiably proven to have a meaningful impact on our bottom line. That means sometimes we try and polish something for the first release, but we always set a limit to that - if it's not in production, it's not shipped, and we will forget about it amongst the 23524 other things going on in a given week. Therefore, we usually set at least some internal goal of "good enough" and then ship. It just so happens one of our founders really likes digging into design. Also note, this is an iPhone app, not a web application. Very different rules apply here, so you can't just slap Bootstrap on your UI and hope for the best :)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Interesting screed. I've observed that some folks "see" more than others (my daughter for example notices very minute details in things I completely miss) which may explain most of the observed 'crazyness'. There seems to be something similar to the 'uncanny valley' where something nearly complete becomes more obviously incomplete before being complete. (I know how crazy does that sound!) But an example might help, if you straighten up a room, it goes from fully chaotic to less and less messy until the 'organized' parts start dominating the scene with respect to the messy parts. Than as you approach completely organized a small bit of chaos sticks out more and more. Until that is eliminated and everything is in its place. Different folks have different tolerances (I know, Doh! right?) People who consider themselves designers have worked hard on being able to see where something can be improved visually, so they are much more likely to see issues that detract. Non-designers just don't see things the same way.

knitting 14y ago

This really hits close to home because I do often wonder if it does "matter". When the audience do not appreciate the three hours I spent on the title's kerning or decision on the thickness of the boarder or the difference between ultramarine to navy, I do feel a sort of defeat that can result in a "why do I bother" attitude. But the next time, I would still put in the effort because as insignificant as it is, I do notice it and I believe it does make an impact in the viewer's pleasure. Design is a lot of the time a struggle between satisfying the employer and holding onto the designer's own concerns. And even though most, like the author, might not see a difference or even undermine what the designers hold dear, there are people who will notice, if not appreciate the details.

robomartin 14y ago

Well, on mobile it can be hard to quantify and connect design to value. On the web it's a different story. There's nothing wrong with beautiful design as long as you are willing to accept the fact that at one point it is serving art and not business needs. And that's OK. If the requirement is to strictly serve business needs, then you have to A/B test, generate numbers and go with what optimizes conversions or whatever you are after. People react to what they see in amazingly different ways. I don't think anyone has a canonical "manual" for what will please most people or what will compel most people to take a given action. I mean, look at Craigslist!

surrealize 14y ago

I'm not a visual designer, but I do see the difference in crispness between the two stadium images, and I think the improvement in the sharper one is non-trivial. However, I'm frustrated with designers who associate thoroughness with being "pixel-perfect". Pixels should not be the focus. We live in a multi-res world; different people have differing visual acuity and varying ppi screens that they hold at varying distances. Being user-centered means accounting for all that variation, not optimizing individual pixels for your super-designer-vision. Just use vector art instead. I hoped that the retina iStuff would finally break designers of their pixel-focus, but it seems that it's just become a way to obsess even more about pixels.

notatoad 14y ago
That's because pixels are important. The non-trivial blurring you see is the result of the edge of the image not being aligned with the edge of the pixel. the screen has to anti-alias it onto the subpixel, and it looks shitty. High PPI screens mitigate this somewhat, and i'm sure every designer would love to get away from using pixels but the results just aren't good when you do.
fpal3 14y ago
Vector art produces bad results. So, no thanks. The problem is the ridiculous number of varying Android resolutions. There, we have to be flexible. But still not going to use vectors.

groue 14y ago

I haven't read anyone noticing that developers lose countless hours fighting with badly crafted PSDs like the one shown in the article, just to extract proper assets that keep their code tight. Think pixel fitting, but also dimensions consistency, color consistency, etc. Off-by one/three/eleven pixels are a plague. Save money on the design: you may well increase your development costs.

adamkochanowicz 14y ago

While I have some disagreements, I think it's great you bring this up. You're addressing an elephant in the room.

amadeus 14y ago

This may have been said before, but I am posting anyways since there's so many comments here and I don't have time to read them all. I think I have a way to explain why pixel perfection is a very good optimization that caters to more of a a developer mindset like yourself; it comes down to image compression, and specifically PNG compression. When it comes to UI elements, the fewer colors you use, the better. This means avoiding things like gradients, or unnecessary colors can have a major impact on file size. It's also the 'art of design' to manage to create a beautiful design without a lot of crappy and needless 'veneer'. I don't know the specifics of the PNG algorithm, but it can do an amazing job at compressing an image if it's made up of few and often repeating colors (typically it's terrible at photographs, however). When you apply a scaling algorithm (as exemplified by the post) other than nearest neighbor, it tends to create a lot of intermediary colors that end up hurting the size of the image. Looking closely at the borders of those buttons, that blur is going to end up adding to the file size because it adds colors that didn't exist before. If you properly 'scale' (which sometimes requires a redraw at a smaller size to get it right), it can have a huge impact (sometimes as much as 2x or 3x). Oftentimes you can get away with it from a 1/2x scale fairly easily, but you have to remember there are many android devices at a 1.5x scale, and that can sometimes require completely new rounded corners that take advantage of that pixel density. This is of course anecdotal, but it's not as simple as 'looks' even though I could immediately see the differences between the properly and unproperly scaled images.

ThomPete 14y ago

Think about it as code formatting. In order for your code to be extensible and readable you need to make sure that you are using the right fundamental indentatation, naming convention etc. Where you look at the buttons individually, the designer looks at the style. The sum of all the items styled in a certain way. The real question is not whether designers go too much into details but rather when they should and when they shouldn't.

gnarbarian 14y ago

YES some designers are crazy divas, rigid, and unwilling to compromise or see the big picture.

ZephyrP 14y ago
I think this is the real crux of the article

3rd3 14y ago

Envy.. This rant obviously shows that the author doesn’t get along with his artistic inabilities.

malachismith 14y ago

A plea to designers.... Read the original piece carefully and try to avoid being defensive. This is an important post for all of you. I've been a defender of Design and designers for 2 decades now. But you all are your own worst enemies. This post should serve as a chance for all of you to learn why you are often Balkanized in business decisions and business structures. It should serve as a chance for you all to show that you actually understand business realities and can propose rational arguments. Instead, reading through these comments I see pretty much nothing but personal opinion, vigorous hand-waving, very poor and stretched-to-breaking analogies and the usual "because it means this to me" and "because I say so" and "because... Apple" arguments. I'd suggest reading again with the mindset of "this is the way non designers think about us" and then come back and (with facts this time) explain your perspective. And remember... this is Hacker News. We work at Start-ups. We believe in shipping early, shipping often, and iterating to improve. Your answers and perspective MUST work within this construct or we will ignore you (and you will thus teach all of us that designers are, in fact, crazy). Ball's in your court.

malachismith 14y ago
Oh... and as a hint, if your response includes ".. you don't understand .. " at any point... please understand that you are insulting the person you speak to.
fpal3 14y ago
> This post should serve as a chance for all of you to learn why you are often Balkanized in business decisions and business structures. It should serve as a chance for you all to show that you actually understand business realities and can propose rational arguments. Heh. Because "business decisions" are always so rational, demonstrating a genuine understanding of the product and what the people that actually are going to use it will want from it? > And remember... this is Hacker News. We work at Start-ups. We believe in shipping early, shipping often, and iterating to improve. Your answers and perspective MUST work within this construct or we will ignore you (and you will thus teach all of us that designers are, in fact, crazy). Sigh. Some of us want to ship genuinely high-quality products, not ship whatever we manage to shit out every other day. If my users are noticing my bugs (or design faults), that adds up to an aggregate middling opinion of my product. One thing you got right -- I do want to be Apple, not Time Warner Cable. > Ball's in your court. Not really. You sound like someone that will willingly produce mediocre products, and I don't really know why anyone interested in excellence (and the rewards that it brings) would want to work with you. So this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy for yourself.

philfreo 14y ago

The quality of _both_ images in the animated flipping version is greatly reduced from the original, making it not a really fair comparison.

sevenupcan 14y ago

Sure understanding the relationship between good design and how it applies to different technologies takes time. Whether that be resolution independence or color correction, but once you've got your head around the "working out", there's no reason why you shouldn't strive for perfection. Achieving pixel perfect design nowadays doesn't mean you have to go insane in the process.