Design is a tricky thing, and it’s often misunderstood. Most people think of design in terms of “beautiful colors”, but design is less about how something looks and more about how people respond to it.
As he often does, Steve Jobs put it perfectly:
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
If done well, as Don Norman has said, it’s hard to notice. Good design just works, while bad design sticks out. Or, like David Ogilvy famously said:
“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”
Creativity and beautiful design are wonderful things, and we strive to build websites that look amazing. Above that, though, we always try to make sure that design achieves the goals we’ve laid out, so that “creative” and “beautiful” are just icing on the cake.
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