Design candies are not for me

An article by King Sidharth    24 Comments

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Design Candies are not for me

OUCH! My eyes hurt! Damn! Damn! Damn!

Damn those designers who make their designs pretty and wow. Screw you guys! Why the hell do you keep adding another beautiful element? Why do you beautify them so much? Why do you make them pretty? So pretty that I forget what I was there for?

Guess what? You guys are doing a great disservice to your clients – their users are lost in your ‘pretty’ design.  You are doing a great disfavor to yourself and designers by calling yourself ‘designers’. You are not f*cking designers!

Design is not web 2.0 or web 0.5.343.343.43.3. It’s not beautiful or ugly. It’s not any of that. When you say all that, it makes me wonder if you even know what ‘design’ means. Let me tell you what design means:

Design is Solving Problem of Effective Communication

Imagine this problem:

A scientist made a kick-ass laser device that he wants to sell to you. Now a designer who is designing the scientist’s website, has got these things to convey:

• What is he Selling?
• Why does his new Laser Rock?
• Who should buy it?
• What can it do for you?
• How much does it cost?
• Where and how to Buy?
• Plus access to further information

And there is more:

He needs to convey all this in 5 seconds, in 900 by 500 pixels and to a specific target audience.

That’s a nice problem – challenge. This is where design starts – with a problem or a target or a thing to communicate. (Whatever you wanna call it). That’s what design is about – that’s when you choose 3 column or 2 columns or shit like that.

And in case you didn’t already guess it – that’s why they say that copy (written words) are part of design.

Design is Functional

You open your car doors every day. Most of you don’t even look at it – while opening. It’s intuitive – it works and doesn’t make you think. It functions – that’s design.

They don’t make it the way it is to make it ‘pretty’.

Alright! Looks pretty - will make a good thing for CSS Gallery. But where do i go from here? Nah! Those blue questions are not clickable! Only the small menu at bottom. Usability fail!

Wow! So retro! Innit? No dude - that super contrast is hard on eyes. I never read what was written in that paragraph. Ouch!

That comes much later. They shape it on how it should function.

You don’t decide the shape of any element, rounded corners-or-not, gradient or not, to make it look pretty. That’s the worst way of doing it – you use it to make that element function in a way. That’s design!

Design is Usable

This is the ‘most’ important and ‘most’ ignored part of design. Wow, I mean, how can you make an unusable pretty site and call yourself a designer? I feel like shooting you dead!

I’ve seen sites and designers so indulged in CSS3 and hip jQuery effect that they forget why they had put them there to begin with. A search bar will expand, glow, wink at you, make your horny and do everything except search – that’s a usability fail.

Many end up putting up sites with equally shouting elements that makes no flow or hierarchy and confused user. Buttons hardly look like buttons, navigation is hidden somewhere in the name of engagement and what not.

Dude, no matter how ‘beautiful’ or jaw dropping your design is, if one can’t do what he/she came to do there, it’s a piece of sheer shit. Take that! If one can’t use a ‘design’, it’s useless. Or may be just good for CSS galleries.

Design is Type

A friend of mine calls himself a designer and doesn’t know a thing about type. It’s like calling yourself astronaut and not knowing what vacuum means.

Usable typography is design, since most of the content on the web, is written. What truly differentiates a great designer from a good designer is his ability to play with type.

That's the power of good type - it designs itself.

Design is Science & Art

Science deals with ‘Why? How? What?’ and Art is power of expression – combine the two and you get ‘Design’.

Expressing all of that with art, is design. It’s a science; it’s an art – best of both worlds. The more I study science – the more I see the great designer – Mother Nature. And the more I see, the more inspired I am, in art. I can’t give you a better example: Look at your hand. Just look at it! It’s a remarkable piece of science and design – latest robotics don’t even come close.

It doesn’t look pretty or ugly – it works and then people form their perception.

Conclusion

Best design is not designed. Best design is least designed. Best design is ugly – and it works.  Please call yourself a ‘digital graphic artist’ or something like that… but don’t call yourself a designer if you don’t understand design. You don’t belong in here, dude!

You are like the ‘Social Media Guru’ on twitter with 10,000 follower and 10,000 following who doesn’t care what others tweet and others don’t care what you tweet – it’s just a number game. Nothing social, no media…!

For all the designers reading this, are you actually a designer?