A designer’s four lessons on design

I. If everything is important, nothing is important

If every sentence in a paragraph is bold, bold stops standing out. Not every idea, or every element, can be the star — and if you try, you get a cacophonous mush.

Often this creeps into a design slowly, without you quite realizing it. And often the impetus comes from the client: they’re too close to the subject, and can’t stand that anything might be left out. Beware efforts to emphasize more.

This is really about contrast, which at root is what gives all visual creations form. Contrast can create hierarchy — and with hierarchy, you can create a beginning, to invite the viewer in, and a center, to anchor the viewer’s experience of the other elements in the piece. These can be themes, ideas, or just pure forms. One technique to remember is…

Detail Creates Focus

With more to look at, and study, the viewer spends longer where there’s detail, and it grows in importance. The corollary is that the wrong detail creates the wrong focus — which usually happens when there’s too much. A lot of big design decisions involve what to leave out.

II. Anything worth doing…is worth doing badly

Try stuff. Mock it up. Fail. It’s not wasted time: it’s doing design, and eliminating possibilities (see lesson #4).

Mock-ups are not for clients

When non-designers looks at a mockup, they will usually say:

This doesn’t look very good. You need to work on it. And I don’t like that color.

Non-designers can’t judge a mock-up. Not because they’re stupid or don’t understand the concept, but because their visual imagination is not trained: they can’t isolate elements of a design and judge them individually. Instead, they react to the whole thing, as though it were finished, or fixate on minor details, like font color.

But a mock-up is not a finished product. It is meant to convey some key elements, in the context of some other elements; to nail down some of the major choices the designer faces, before he delves into the minor ones. It’s for the designer, not the client — show the client something else.

Mockups are iterative testing

Forcing yourself to create mockups is like game-design teams that insist on playable milestones: in ensures that the nuts and bolts are never very far from being used. This prevents you from building shining edifices that don’t work in context. And it forces you to make big decisions, and find an approach, before you delve into details.

A first approximation is 90% of the way there

Mockups are useful because they can be done quickly, and can tell you if an avenue is worth pursuing. This works because mockups are like many first-order approximations in science and engineering: even the most basic model gets 90% of the way to the desired effect. The next pass gets you just a little bit closer, and so on. (But see Zeno’s Paradox, which produces the corollary below.)

You’ll never get to perfection

In the real world, you don’t have time to polish things indefinitely. But there’s also a matter of trade-offs: a design can’t emphasize everything, or be everything, for every audience. “Perfection” doesn’t really even exist.

This means you need to learn when to stop. An outside eye, or deadline, is helpful for this: if everyone else says “Amazing!” you should quit.Two major rounds of design, and a little extra polish, is often enough.

III. Design is a progressive narrowing of choices

Infinite freedom often prevents creativity, while constraints paradoxically help it — especially at the beginning. But I see the entire design process as fundamentally about constraints.

Designing something involves a lot of decisions: big ones about approach, smaller ones about form, and plenty of tiny minutiae too. A good process starts with the biggest decisions and then precedes to the smaller ones: because by answering the big decision, you close off possibly paths, and that makes the details approachable — you don’t have to consider infinite options.

Tools constrain you — and that’s okay

You can make a sign in Photoshop or in Illustrator. But you’d probably do it differently in each case — and you wouldn’t do it in Word. Tools subtly nudge you in one creative direction or another, by making some things harder to do, or even impossible.

But this isn’t a bad thing. Selecting a tool is sort of the first, biggest decision you make in a project. At the least, you can start experimenting in the ways the tool invites. And by selecting an unusual tool, you may challenge yourself out of a rut, or find unexpected inspiration. Witness the Mexican artist who makes Mother Theresa murals only using red and white staples.

If you habitually use the same tools, it’s fine. Just remember that the tool is part of your work. And you might want to shake things up.

Don’t obsess over the perfect tools

I’ve seen plenty of amateurs and non-designers obsess over the perfect tool suite. But tools don’t rescue you from your own stupidity, or make you creative. You also have to learn and manage your tools: if you have too many, it slows you down, and starts to impose an overly strict process — designers need constraints, but they need a process that allows exploration. Good tools matter, but they’re just one part of the process.

Constrain Yourself

One of the earliest things you should do when you get into the meat of a design challenge, is set limitations on how you’ll work out the details; even if these need to be amended later. A color palette with just a few hues. Certain angles, shapes, or patterns that come up again and again. A style or mood for illustrations. Pick them, and then you can solve problems.

IV. Define problems as you solve them

Clients and bosses don’t know what they want to see in a finished product: if they did they wouldn’t need a designer. Rather, they have a problem they want solved…except they don’t even know exactly what the problem is. It’s fuzzier than you might think.

This means a designer’s job is to elucidate the problem as well as to come up wth a solution. This begs for iteration, test-cases, and dialog with the client — who is often confused at the beginning of the process. (See Fred Brooks’ The Design of Design.)

“I don’t care what you like”

You should not care that the client’s favorite font is Eurostile, or that they really like Nike’s new web site. These are answers to unrelated problems, not the design at hand (they’re “not even wrong”). But pick your battles, and work with what you have to. Think of unreasonable demands as creative constraints.

But do have a point of view

This doesn’t mean personal preferences don’t matter at all. They’re essential for any creative endeavor: you need a point of view; you need idiosyncrasy; you need some way of cutting through the myriad choices that exist, and getting down to one result. But it should be a consistent and informed point of view.

The alternative way of getting results is letting focus-groups and middle-of-the-road compromises decide. Obviously, this produces junk that pleases no one — but also offends no one, except maybe designers, which is why it gets made. Fight it if you can.

I don’t always live by these rules, but I often die by them: when a design is foundering, it’s regularly because I’m ignoring one of these lessons — and by remembering it, I can right the ship. Non-designers usually understand nothing here; if you have a client who does, keep them.