One of the most confusing things about designing for programmers and other brainy / rational-minded people is, that when you read about it by actual practitioners, you mostly look at post-rationalisations. That means you can't expect to have reproducibly success with applying them. Quite often someone does the opposite of what the rules suggest, and meets much approval.
Designers will tell you about depth, and structure, and rhythms, emphasis, and similar categories. But it is often not obvious how you create these effects with color or shape or other design means. Or when you have them, they don't convince anyone and get scraped, even though fulfilling the formal requirements.
So what you read about design is not really what designers do to achieve great results, it is rather what they like to think about while working. Or that is my interpretation of this process. For a rationally thinking person, it is often just not conclusive and confusing, and you wonder about what you are being told and what it has to do with some specific decision.
The thing is that nobody really knows how to create beauty or good design, mostly because nobody knows what goodness is here. (Some try to sidestep the whole discussion by demanding reduction to functionally essentials, but that yields mixed results.)
For me personally other strategies have been much more helpful:
- expect hard work and some suffering: to create something of great quality, you have to go through a painful process of searching, thinking about meaning, trying different approaches, and learning techniques. Expect it every time anew. (You can vary the same design, or style, though, and thereby "reuse" it.)
- don't expect to be able to synthesize design from principles; it's the other way around: you come up with it and realize it is good. Later you understand that you can find principles that can to some extend explain (but I have always felt they don't explain it sufficiently.)
One great discussion of this for me has been the book 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. I know this has somewhat of a pseudo-philosophy reputation, but I think undeservedly. (Maybe this is just because it is mandatory reading in many undergrad curriculae in the US?)
Designers will tell you about depth, and structure, and rhythms, emphasis, and similar categories. But it is often not obvious how you create these effects with color or shape or other design means. Or when you have them, they don't convince anyone and get scraped, even though fulfilling the formal requirements.
So what you read about design is not really what designers do to achieve great results, it is rather what they like to think about while working. Or that is my interpretation of this process. For a rationally thinking person, it is often just not conclusive and confusing, and you wonder about what you are being told and what it has to do with some specific decision.
The thing is that nobody really knows how to create beauty or good design, mostly because nobody knows what goodness is here. (Some try to sidestep the whole discussion by demanding reduction to functionally essentials, but that yields mixed results.)
For me personally other strategies have been much more helpful:
- expect hard work and some suffering: to create something of great quality, you have to go through a painful process of searching, thinking about meaning, trying different approaches, and learning techniques. Expect it every time anew. (You can vary the same design, or style, though, and thereby "reuse" it.)
- don't expect to be able to synthesize design from principles; it's the other way around: you come up with it and realize it is good. Later you understand that you can find principles that can to some extend explain (but I have always felt they don't explain it sufficiently.)
One great discussion of this for me has been the book 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. I know this has somewhat of a pseudo-philosophy reputation, but I think undeservedly. (Maybe this is just because it is mandatory reading in many undergrad curriculae in the US?)