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What makes you think that clean and creative are design attributes in opposition to one another? I've seen a number of comments like yours on this thread, and t

by ionfish 18y ago

What makes you think that clean and creative are design attributes in opposition to one another? I've seen a number of comments like yours on this thread, and to be honest I'm quite dubious about this attitude. It smacks of the whole "designers are just here to add visual pizzazz" school of thought, which while true of many bad designers, is not true of good ones like Doug Bowman. If you have a lot of information to present to a user, then good design is about presenting that information in a comprehensible way, which often involves creating a pretty spartan interface. Doing this is not easy, and requires plenty of creativity.

radu_floricica 18y ago
I'm an engineer by heart, so I make the same mistakes mentioned in the article :) I respect a large system and all the work that it implies, and I believe in incremental and tested changes where the stakes are so high. Yes, there can be better designs which are just as clean, but to get to the same level with a new concept would take the same amount of work and the same number of mistakes. This I also believe. As for what I think about designers... truth is, not so much lately. In my freelance experience, working with freelance designers, they are the worst when it comes to deadlines (even very loose ones). But the thing I resent them most for is how often they just "add visual pizzazz". Rarely I see a site layout, or worse, application layout which accounts for future development or development ease or changes of any kind. What I really want is a concept which would allow me to do more, not less with my app. And unfortunately I often get one which looks great, but will break if I want to add a couple of controls or filters.
- anatoli 18y ago
  Maybe you just work with the wrong designers... ? No sane, professional designer I know, works like that.
tvon 18y ago
John Gruber touched on a similar point today, quoting from a NY Times article from 2003 (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html): “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs [edited formatting (thanks unalone)]
- unalone 18y ago
  Your line stretches out this page ridiculously. EDIT: That's one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes. When I was younger and making my first web sites, I thought design was all about making things pretty. Turns out, pretty has almost nothing to do with design (and, in fact most of the design I like the most is aggressively minimal and stripped away). Design's about how things flow. (I'd also say, speaking as somebody who takes a lot of interest in design, that this makes design incredibly fun once you figure this out. It means that every page you make, even sign-up pages, are wildly different and interesting. I've made something like 6 iterations of my site's log in page, simplifying and condensing it each time, and I get a thrill out of that similar to the one that comes from making code better and more elegant. Not to speak of the notadouche sign up page, which was very very fun to design.)

by ionfish 18y ago

radu_floricica 18y ago

I'm an engineer by heart, so I make the same mistakes mentioned in the article :) I respect a large system and all the work that it implies, and I believe in incremental and tested changes where the stakes are so high. Yes, there can be better designs which are just as clean, but to get to the same level with a new concept would take the same amount of work and the same number of mistakes. This I also believe. As for what I think about designers... truth is, not so much lately. In my freelance experience, working with freelance designers, they are the worst when it comes to deadlines (even very loose ones). But the thing I resent them most for is how often they just "add visual pizzazz". Rarely I see a site layout, or worse, application layout which accounts for future development or development ease or changes of any kind. What I really want is a concept which would allow me to do more, not less with my app. And unfortunately I often get one which looks great, but will break if I want to add a couple of controls or filters.

anatoli 18y ago
Maybe you just work with the wrong designers... ? No sane, professional designer I know, works like that.

tvon 18y ago

John Gruber touched on a similar point today, quoting from a NY Times article from 2003 (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html): “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs [edited formatting (thanks unalone)]

unalone 18y ago
Your line stretches out this page ridiculously. EDIT: That's one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes. When I was younger and making my first web sites, I thought design was all about making things pretty. Turns out, pretty has almost nothing to do with design (and, in fact most of the design I like the most is aggressively minimal and stripped away). Design's about how things flow. (I'd also say, speaking as somebody who takes a lot of interest in design, that this makes design incredibly fun once you figure this out. It means that every page you make, even sign-up pages, are wildly different and interesting. I've made something like 6 iterations of my site's log in page, simplifying and condensing it each time, and I get a thrill out of that similar to the one that comes from making code better and more elegant. Not to speak of the notadouche sign up page, which was very very fun to design.)