Prolific designer Michael Bierut blogs honestly about a common unease among designers:

The iterative process, the role of improvisation, the adjustments that are made in response to audience feedback, all of these elements are a part of any design process. And, in a way, they’ve always been the ones that have vaguely unnerving to me.

I’ve mentioned some fear wrapped up in my own process in an earlier post.

Firms tend to market processes as a proof that we’ll be able to replicate past victories — to show prospects our success hasn’t only been through luck. Yet sometimes we break process. I’ve done it over constraints, at the client’s request, and because sometimes the first concept out of the gate is the right one (and all the stakeholders agree). If you’re too rigid in those situations, you interfere with natural momentum.

This is why I’m an advocate of less formality and less bulk in a process.

It seems like a bad idea to hide this.

A firefighter arrives in an emergency, wearing heavy fireproof gear. It may be dark out. People’s lives could be at stake. Because of that, the firefighter will keep looking.

For website users, the threshold for inconvenience is much lower. Many websites hide contact information, hours, and pricing at the bottom of pages, in small type.

Who’s coming to your site that’s in a hurry, and what are they looking for?

Brian Sooy has a great quote, via Guy Kawasaki:

Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.

The quote made me laugh, most designers have issued this complaint at one point. I’ll supplement this with my own statement about good design:

A good designer is one who accepts and integrates this reality into their process to produce a better result with less friction.

A designer can be many of things. I don’t claim to have a monopoly on what it is. The above isn’t an exhaustive definition, but the good ones definitely have this in common.

Catching up on PJ Brunet’s blog, I read an interesting quote, from Cartographic Principles (it’s the third):

3. SIMPLICITY FROM SACRIFICE Great design tends towards simplicity. (Bertin) Its not what you put in that makes a great map but what you take out. The map design stage is complete when you can take nothing else out. Running the film of an explosion backwards, all possibilities rush to one point. They become the right point. This is the designers skill. Content may determine scale or scale may determine content, and each determines the level of generalisation (sacrifice).

Interesting way of putting it.

Catching up on PJ Brunet’s blog, I read an interesting quote, from Cartographic Principles (it’s the third):

3. SIMPLICITY FROM SACRIFICE Great design tends towards simplicity. (Bertin) Its not what you put in that makes a great map but what you take out. The map design stage is complete when you can take nothing else out. Running the film of an explosion backwards, all possibilities rush to one point. They become the right point. This is the designers skill. Content may determine scale or scale may determine content, and each determines the level of generalisation (sacrifice).

Interesting way of putting it.

It had to be said. And Greg Storey (Airbag Industries) said it well:

I’m tired of this nonsense that suggests a “non-designed” site will be more successful because people are sensitive to using applications that aren’t under the thumb of the man. Or maybe I missed the part of human evolution where people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that’s all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers.

Read the whole thing here.

It had to be said. And Greg Storey (Airbag Industries) said it well:

I’m tired of this nonsense that suggests a “non-designed” site will be more successful because people are sensitive to using applications that aren’t under the thumb of the man. Or maybe I missed the part of human evolution where people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that’s all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers.

Read the whole thing here.

Michael Bierut (of Pentegram) talks about the scope of a design blog.

Warning: Similar sentiments found here.

Robert Scoble posted some thoughts on what he calls “anti-marketing design.” Scoble contends that ugly designs make better websites: more sticky, better brands, more fun, and more revenue. He cites Google, Craig’s List, and MySpace as ugly successes.

I disagree with Scoble that ugliness drives the success of these sites (which is an idea he reinforces more in the comments).

Two factors attribute heavily to the success of these sites. This clearer if you divide the sites into two categories: functional and community.

The Functional

The functional sites are Google/Gmail and Flickr (but Flickr is also a community!, you say. I know, but its a task-oriented community). These sites improve on a function. Searching. Emailing. Organizing and sharing photos.

It’s true that these sites have low ornamentation. Is that absence of ornamentation due to a lack of design, or evidence of it?

The design, as I see it, is in the simplicity and ease/speed they let me get things done.

The Community

The community sites are MySpace and Craig’s List.

Criag’s List is clean and easy (once you get past the over-stuffed homepage).

MySpace is “ornamented” with ads, and I think it only overcomes this through communal opportunities for vanity (in web lingo, we call that stickiness).

No, really. What holds these sites together isn’t necessarily their usability. And that’s okay, it’s an important factor but they’re not failing miserably. These two sites are successful because they build communities. You can overcome lots with that (see Metcalfe’s Law).

To argue that these sites are just created for the love of whatever is pushing it. Their goal is stakeholder value, and that’s okay.

To say that these sites succeed just because we perceive them as being “authentic” (in the sense that their built by only one person), and that appeals to us because nobody is real with us in our committee-design driven world, is pushing it. That’s not the only, or even primary reason we use these sites. It’s appreciated, but in the postmodern state, we don’t expect that.

To say they succeed because they make something a little faster, simpler, and easier, or because they connect us to people – that makes more sense.

And in doing so, they’ve acheived good design.