Adrian Hanft, writing for Medium:
A design education begins with a zen-like challenge: place two black squares on a white background.
The professor explains that some arrangements will be dull and lifeless. Those assignments will fail. Other submissions will be dynamic and interesting. Those assignments will pass.
As you set yourself to the seemingly simple task you realize the complexity of the challenge. There are an infinite amount of ways to arrange the squares and you have no crutches because all the other elements of design have been forbidden.
No gradients.
No variation of line weight.
You can’t use the manipulative properties of color.
No shades of gray.
No room for your unique style and personality.
Having never gone to design school, not sure if this challenge is typical, but I definitely found it interesting. Take a look at some of the examples. Some of them clearly “click” more than others. Why?
Design remains an enigmatic mystery to me.
Design with no job to do that gets graded by popularity? Neither design nor art, but populism.
The question is, do “some of them are clearly “click” more than others” for everyone, or just for you?
Are there universal good designs and universal bad designs. As GS says, design is a matter of doing a job (function) but then there’s form which is less about the job, more about the look.
The tension between form and function has been debated for as long as there has been design and in my opinion, there are no absolutes, just designs that work better for a group of folks (and maybe less well for another group of folks).
What Jony Ive has done with both Mac OS and iOS is a perfect example of this. To me, he’s tilted the designs away from function and more toward form with his flatter look. They still work well, but I prefer a bit more three dimensionality. But, that’s just me, others may differ. There are no absolutes, just what works well and looks pleasing with a decent balance between the two.
It’s a design exercise. In the absence of a defined function, the article’s excercise is intended to evoke an emotional reaction. Are you using “populism” as a pejorative?
Pejorative? In what sense? You mean contempt for the average person? Hardly. I do see the emotional reaction part, just not sure how that reveals anything about learning design. For me, it teaches nothing about design. My students ultimately want to make a good living. I am simply making an observation about whether this actually is a useful technique, beyond emotionalism.
I appreciate that Apple did allow some granularity in settings over the form/function dichotomy. Design should never result in “What you see is… well, actually I’m not sure.”
My question for you is, how do people learn what they like? There’s a nature/nurture aspect to this and that’s the part that interests me.
These days, social media and intense interest in popularity and going along with what’s popular makes this question even more interesting.
Noted. Perhaps it’s a good thing, then, that your students won’t be needlessly distracted by the emotional reactions of their future notional users. 😉
I tend to skew towards “nurture.” I think it’s relatively easy to influence anyone who lacks the benefits of an education system that teaches critical thinking, to name but one factor we’re collectively lacking.
People have always gravitated toward what’s popular. We now have better—if more costly—mechanisms to game that popularity.
Our two reactions to that article’s examples are an aggregate of our entire lives’ experiences. What do any of them evoke in you? Do any of them evoke anything in you at all? Do you see a metaphor in the abstraction? And where should we have lunch?
I also tend to learn toward nurture, been fighting talent myths (assumptions about nature) my entire working life.
Left to right, top to bottom, #2 and #3 for me, but that’s me. 😉
In this case, I think any preference is better than none at all.
Naw, they will be 😉