Wed - March 30, 2005
Good design is hard
And hard means just that: hard. Not easy.
Paul Graham's Taste for Makers article about, well,
"taste" becomes a great article about design (and mathematics, science,
architecture, engineering). About how good design is simple, timeless, solves
the right problem, suggestive, often slightly funny, hard, looks easy, uses
symmetry, resembles nature, is redesign, can copy, often strange, happens in
chunks, and is often daring.
Even if much of this seems obvious, it's good to remember (and easy to forget).
I often see young designers searching for the easy way out. Bang!, one version, I'm ready. There is no such thing. If there seems to be, maybe it's not good design and it doesn't solve the problem right. Yes, design has to be simple, and simplicity deceives – it looks easy. But simplicity is the hardest thing there is because it requires focus, sacrifice and experience.
There's always a simpler and more elegant solution – make it too simple and it stops performing well. It takes chronic dissatisfaction to keep looking for simplification. It takes experience to find the right balance. And it's hard to sacrifice fashion and decoration, as they're often cool.
But...
Chatting over lunch with Wally Olins a few weeks ago I was told an astonishing fact: at first his books are big and complex, and then he progressively rewrites them into simpler and simpler forms. Is this hard? Harder than you imagine: many of the chapters are rewritten for 25 times!
Take a moment and think about this. His education is solid, his experience is absolutely tremendous, his age makes him wise. And still, he writes a book over and over again. Not twice, not five or eight times over. 25! Twenty-five times to get to that simplicity that makes people saying — Oh, I knew that.
Good design looks easy – and is damn hard.
Even if much of this seems obvious, it's good to remember (and easy to forget).
Good design is hard. If you look at the people who've done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. If you're not working hard, you're probably wasting your time.
Hard problems call for great efforts. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and those tend to be interesting. Ditto in engineering.
When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he is forced to produce an elegant design. Fashions and flourishes get knocked aside by the difficult business of solving the problem at all.
Hard problems call for great efforts. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and those tend to be interesting. Ditto in engineering.
When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack. And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he is forced to produce an elegant design. Fashions and flourishes get knocked aside by the difficult business of solving the problem at all.
I often see young designers searching for the easy way out. Bang!, one version, I'm ready. There is no such thing. If there seems to be, maybe it's not good design and it doesn't solve the problem right. Yes, design has to be simple, and simplicity deceives – it looks easy. But simplicity is the hardest thing there is because it requires focus, sacrifice and experience.
There's always a simpler and more elegant solution – make it too simple and it stops performing well. It takes chronic dissatisfaction to keep looking for simplification. It takes experience to find the right balance. And it's hard to sacrifice fashion and decoration, as they're often cool.
But...
Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.
In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you?
Some Leonardo heads are just a few lines. You look at them and you think, all you have to do is get eight or ten lines in the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait. Well, yes, but you have to get them in exactly the right place. The slightest error will make the whole thing collapse.
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat.
When people talk about being in "the zone," I think what they mean is that the spinal cord has the situation under control. Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems.
In science and engineering, some of the greatest discoveries seem so simple that you say to yourself, I could have thought of that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you?
Some Leonardo heads are just a few lines. You look at them and you think, all you have to do is get eight or ten lines in the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait. Well, yes, but you have to get them in exactly the right place. The slightest error will make the whole thing collapse.
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat.
When people talk about being in "the zone," I think what they mean is that the spinal cord has the situation under control. Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems.
Chatting over lunch with Wally Olins a few weeks ago I was told an astonishing fact: at first his books are big and complex, and then he progressively rewrites them into simpler and simpler forms. Is this hard? Harder than you imagine: many of the chapters are rewritten for 25 times!
Take a moment and think about this. His education is solid, his experience is absolutely tremendous, his age makes him wise. And still, he writes a book over and over again. Not twice, not five or eight times over. 25! Twenty-five times to get to that simplicity that makes people saying — Oh, I knew that.
Good design looks easy – and is damn hard.
Posted Wed - March 30, 2005 at 10:33 AM
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Published On: Aug 25, 2006 01:48 AM
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Published On: Aug 25, 2006 01:48 AM
