Developing Designer’s Eye and Mouth

I am doing this practice for six years

We, designers, often hear requests like: “Please, can you make this look beautiful”, “I need you to make our product look great”. When I was an entry-level designer, I was confused because I couldn’t picture what a customer exactly wanted. I wondered what are the things that look great and beautiful?

Through my six years as a designer, which meant being requested to make things beautiful over 6 years, now I understand what those abstract adjectives indicate. Words like beautiful, great, nice, and cool don’t refer to certain styles; rather, they denote the fundamental precondition of all well-designed figures, i.e. visually balanced.

I believe the design language has three categories.

• Style: Classic, Simple, Modern, Vintage, Minimalism, Fun, Natural…
• Substyle adjective: subtle, delicate, strong, elaborate, bold, dynamic…
• Words that come out every time, but actually mean nothing but ‘visually balanced’: beautiful, nice, great, aesthetic, cool…

Of course, some might use the word ‘nice’ to mention a certain style such as classic or simple. However, as a designer, we need to lead our conversation to separate words, denoting style and visual characteristics to communicate…