[IxDA Discuss] The Beautiful and the Useful

[Adrian Howard]

On Jan 31, 2008, at 7:44 PM, Pankaj Chawla wrote:

> On 2/1/08, Andrei Herasimchuk <andrei at involutionstudios.com> wrote:
>> I know of no formalized design profession in existence in this modern
>> world where aesthetics, both material and immaterial, are not
>> integral in some fashion to the practice of the discipline.
>
> Integral, yes; fundamental no.
[snip]

What's aesthetic?

* When I make a visual less ugly by removing half a dozen colours and  
font variations?
* When I simplify a sales process from nineteen steps to four is that  
a more aesthetic process?
* I spent half a day a week or so ago tweaking the words used to  
drive a command-line tool so that they described the task in a nice  
symmetric memorable manner that would be consistent with the users  
understanding of the process, and the conventions of other commands  
in that domain. Aesthetic word choice?
* The book Beautiful Code <http://tinyurl.com/3xxbny> is named that  
way for a reason. Developers describe the internals of a piece of  
badly implemented software as "ugly" for a reason. Aesthetic code?
* Some physics and mathematics dudes that I know describe certain  
equations as "beautiful". Aesthetic equations?

I'd answer "yes" to all of the above myself.

In the larger sense aesthetics seem fundamental to good design to me.  
I can't think of anybody I'd consider a good designer in any realm  
who doesn't have a visceral "got to fix the ugly" reaction to bad  
design.

Good design is beautiful all of the way down.

Does that mean that everybody should have to know the best way to  
kern a heading and tweak the leading of some body text to be an IxD  
(whatever that is :-)? I don't think so myself. They definitely need  
to appreciate folk who do. Knowing how to do it themselves can do  
nothing but help. But they're not completely incapable of good design  
work if they lack that knowledge.

That's what I think anyway :-)

Cheers,

Adrian