[danilocampos]

This stuff was bizarre to me:

> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.

> It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful

> If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look.

(my emphasis)

The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be.

For example: how delightful is it to work with a great API? Something straightforward, well-documented, but nonetheless powerful? It's such a joy. But it requires effort: planning, understanding, experimentation, adjustment, refining, etc. In a word, design.

As a test, consider the following:

Is it first engine design or is it engine making? Airframe design or airframe building? Circuit design or circuit assembly? You can't make the engine until someone designs it first. How it looks doesn't much matter – how it works is non-negotiably essential.

Something that works well is said to be well-designed. Something that merely looks nice can be pretty – and terribly designed.

So a startup can't have something be both shitty and well-designed at the same time.

The notion that design is a differentiating characteristic for startups comes from the fact that many incumbent products simply do not work well. By designing a product that addresses a given workflow faster, with greater convenience, with greater fun, you're making something that works better.

We're past the point where you can build technology that fits requirements and stop there. Everyone else has done that already. Now success comes in making things that are satisfying, not obnoxious, that are easily learned, that make users excited to show their friends.

tl;dr: Someone doesn't grasp the difference between design and making nice graphics, throws a tantrum of a non-sequitur.

[joe_the_user]

Your criticism seems to center around your dislike of him using "design" as a shorthand for "graphic design". But this is hardly unique to the author to say the least.

In any case, what you go to say hardly contradicts what the author is saying ... except if you redefine what he's saying as being about you think "design" ought mean instead of how he's clearly using it.

[danilocampos]

(shrug)

Words mean things.

If I cry out, at the top of my lungs, that "Pizza is fucking bullshit!", then go on to say that I hate how pizza kills people, tears countries apart, and delivers atrocities, people will narrow their eyes and say "Actually, I think you're thinking of war." And then they're going to be a little weirded out that I said something so simultaneously bizarre and incorrect just to get their attention.

The thing is, when someone says "design is a differentiator," they're not really talking about how it looks, either. Because appearance is very rarely a lasting means of differentiation.

My criticism is not that he's using the word wrong. It's that he's invested a lot of flaming in the process of misunderstanding people who aren't.

[omaranto]

I don't this is a good analogy except if you cry out about pizza in a place where people are used to using 'pizza' as slang for 'war'. That's the situation here, isn't it? People in the "startup community" already use the word 'design' in the narrow sense of 'graphic design'.

[efsavage]

Well, they shouldn't. I expect far more from someone calling themselves a "designer" than their ability to draw a nice button or pick decent fonts. I expect them to be thinking about interaction, flow, "how it works", and so on.* If not, then they're qualified not as a "graphic designer", but as a "bad designer". If someone only wants to draw, they can call themselves a "graphic designer" and I'll call them when I just need a graphic (i.e. never, since I don't work in print).

* I expect the same from anyone who has anything to do with a UI/UX.

[vacri]

Pizza is a subset of war?

[einhverfr]

No, as per the original post, I guess war would be a subset of pizza.

Remember the Battle of Salamis!

(One blogger took a comment I wrote out of context for humor's sake and asked if we "needed a nice violent movie about Salamis")

[danilocampos]

The competition of building a winning pizza business is as tiny a subset of war as is making pretty graphics a subset of design.

Design is a huge, varied, powerful thing. Design has moved the world forward, ever since the first human reasoned that he could make his stone tool n% more effective by adjusting it just so. Design brought us locomotives, bridges, precision tools, entire revolutions of industry.

In other words, conflating making things pretty with the enormous might of what humans do with the act of design is as silly as conflating pizza and war.

Life is just so much more interesting than that.

[shadowsun7]

It's hardly his dislike - design has meant, for the longest time, how things work, not just how things look (well, to be exact design is a balance between materials, functionality, and aesthetics). Design is more than just art.

Don't believe me? Name me one design award that awards aesthetics alone. You won't find one, unless you're looking for an arts medal (edit: even graphics design awards have some sort of form and function criteria).

[dextorious]

Even if he redefines design to "how things work", the author is still correct.

Who cares 1) how well something looks, and 2) how usable something is, if that thing provides no value to him?

[barrkel]

I think you're being disingenuous and deliberately misreading the OP because you wanted to write what amounts to a pet peeve. It was clear, even to you, what he meant; you admit as much in your last sentence. But you still went ahead and acted like you had not understood.

Had you merely disagreed with his terminology, and left at that - it would be more forgivable. But you're trying to use it to discount what he said by deliberately misreading it, and thereby you're not actually addressing his argument.

[danilocampos]

It's nice to have thoughts.

I, for example, think this has nothing to do with "pet peeves" or deliberate misunderstandings. I think that the broader discussion of the role of design is very important and powerful, and calling design "bullshit" is a profoundly ignorant position to take. I think that building a cute little straw man and then burning him adds very little of the vaunted value the author has described.

One of the beauties of thoughts is that you get to have yours and I get to have mine. The meta stuff, here, eh, not so useful.

[nadam]

"Design is about how things work"

True, but this definition is a bit vague. Even if we think that this is not vague, then people with graphics design background should stop calling themselves designers, and engineers (who have years of training on some aspect of how some things should work) could call themselves designers. There will always be a debate on what exactly 'design' is, and who exactly a 'designer' is, because this is a bit artifical terminology in my opinion. (Long years ago, when engineers created mostly buildings engineers were also meant to be designers.)

I am an engineer/programmer, but I would feel extremely sad, uncreative, and a worthless biorobot if I could not see myself a 'designer' if we take the meaning of design very broadly.

[sbuk]

>>"...people with graphics design background should stop calling themselves designers, and engineers (...) could call themselves designers."

Graphic design essentially concerns itself with how information is presented and consumed. This information can be presented in many different ways; ink on paper as an example or pixels on a screen. Part of the designers job is to solve the problem of how best to present the information, which may take the form of a call to action on a website or a tear-off in a magazine or what weight and style the fonts should be right down to the basic structure of the arrangements of elements on the screen/page/advertising hoarding. I know that most people think of this as a trivial task, but it isn't. It is the fundamental difference between good and great.

Engineers are designers, if one ever tells you otherwise, they don't have an understanding of what it is that they do.

[dman]

When contemporary reviews pan a product for poor design they usually complain about how it looks and weighs. Few reviewers take the effort to dig in and critique what the product does. Given this status quo its hard to blame anyone for equating cosmetics with design.

Fun question - is emacs well designed ? What would a reviewer on engadget etc say if they came across it. Would they concede it has a better design than say - Textmate?

When Apple fans talk about the product being well designed its inevitably about the physical manifestation of the product - how it looks, what its battery life is, its weight etc. I fully concede that apple products are well designed in their own right and have a fantastical attention to detail, but the only details that get covered in the press and by evangelists are the ones that have to do with cosmetics or physical attributes.

Lastly - someone on this thread mentioned craigslist as having bad design. I think that is the classic example of equating cosmetics with design. I have yet to find another website that allows me to finish the task at hand with as little fuss and as few clicks. There are flaws to craigslist - like their ability to curate content in realtime - but their design to me is unobtrusive and efficient.

[sbuk]

>>"When Apple fans talk about the product being well designed its inevitably about the physical manifestation of the product - how it looks, what its battery life is, its weight etc."

Along with terms like "It's really easy to use". The physical manifestation of any product, be it a torch, a pizza or a web based app, is part of it's design, as is the why and how of it's workings.

[dman]

Do you disagree that the why and the how of what a product does are under represented in contemporary reviews?

[sbuk]

Not entirely; it totally depends on the source. I get what you are saying and I'd concur that good reviews/reviewers are thin on the ground. I consider the why and how to be part of the physical manifestation, but then I am an industrial design so probably not best placed to comment! I do think that, as designers, we need to educate people more about what design is. It'd help if the prima donna element weren't so vociferous, but then we could say that about most professions...

[psweber]

Well said. The misuse of the word design is ubiquitous.

I just looked at the Designer Fund thing for a second, but I noticed a headshot of Luke Wroblewski on there. He co-founded the IxDA, wrote the books Mobile First and Web Form Design (both awesome), and then was co-founder and chief product officer at Bagcheck (that got acquired by Twitter). He's creating value as far as I'm concerned.

[gbog]

> We're past the point where you can build technology that fits requirements and stop there. Everyone else has done that already.

You are too quick to close this big door here. You could do them relatively "ugly" and "difficult to use" if you'd do a driverless cars, a plane with real beds, a self-backuped unlimited size hard-drive for music and movies, a viable water desalinisator, a cheap enough 3D printer, a bodyless computer monitor, or even a working dating site.

Not that I disagree with the rest, but let's not say everything is done already and just needs to be done better.

[tompetty]

Graphic design is multi-faceted and isn't just the process of creating pretty pictures. It's a holistic process encompassing form and function

[dextorious]

"""This stuff was bizarre to me: > Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. > It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful > If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look.""" """

Really? Because it seems damn logical to me.

"""The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be."""

Yeah. Only in web design it almost always are. And in the specific "over-designed" startup web services he rants about it always is. We all heard the quote "design is how it works" from Jobs et co. But:

1) In most cases it's 80% graphic design and 20% though of how it works. 2) How it works still means nothing, if WHAT IT DOES does not add value.

Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them.

Example: a well designed and totally usable "social something" site -- and why would I want to use that if no one of my friends is using it?

tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer

[dasil003]

> Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them.

This is a good point; the value proposition is independent of design. And in fact if the value proposition is strong enough than people will fight through terrible design as long as it minimally works. However for most products the value is either middling or else obscured by novelty (often the case with new tech), and this is where bad design can sink a viable product by frustrating too many people, or great design can flip the viral coefficient to positive growth by increasing conversions of casual visitors.

[sbuk]

>>"tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer"

The product (App/Pizza/Car/Suppository/Whatever) still needs designing; i.e. a problem exists that needs solving. However you want to phrase it, a problem is solved by designing, be it using established patterns or generating new solutions. How it looks and how it works should be intrinsic to what a product offers. None of the elements are mutually exclusive.