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As a coder & semi-pro-designer I reached the conclusion that little bad/ugly things add up (or even multiply!), eventually resulting in something that looks bad
by nnq 14y ago
As a coder & semi-pro-designer I reached the conclusion that little bad/ugly things add up (or even multiply!), eventually resulting in something that looks bad/ugly even to average-joe on a greasy sunlit screen. If a badly scaled rounded rectangle is mixed with bad font scaling/rendering and on the next iteration a bad color-scheme decision, the ugliness of the whole is more than the ugliness of the parts added up. It sounds vague and artsy but that's how I find it: "harmless" little ugly things add up to an aesthetic carnage. Yes, it's "premature optimization" if you look at things like a programmer, but the "designer mind" can't really separate "optimization" from "just getting things to work".
- ProblemFactory 14y ago> It sounds vague and artsy but that's how I find it: "harmless" little ugly things add up to an aesthetic carnage. Yes, it's "premature optimization" if you look at things like a programmer, but the "designer mind" can't really separate "optimization" from "just getting things to work". The same sort of technical ugliness and lack of optimization happens in plenty of programs. In theory, one should never optimise prematurely, and get the application working first. Only at the end profile the speed, find the one single slow loop or algorithm, and optimise that. But plenty of applications acquire slowness not due to one core slow algorithm, but a lack of concern for even trivial optimisations everywhere. You end up with something like Eclipse where a keypress can take multiple seconds to appear, or a "cancel" button might take minutes to stop whatever task. And there is no place to optimise, because the inefficiencies are spread out by tiny bits everywhere.