Good design is harder than it looks

A few months ago I worked a couple weeks on a new website design. Just to be clear website design isn't one of my specialties. Not be a long shot. I'm much more of an engineer at heart. That means I feel more comfortable coming up with solutions I can test objectively. Visual design doesn't fit the bill. It's more art than engineering. Open-ended. A seemingly infinite solution space. No clear fitness function that doesn't involve wishy washy, vague notions like taste and style.

But I approached the problem with my usual can-do, how-hard-can-this-be attitude and came up with a new design I thought was pretty sweet.

Then I showed off my work to a colleague so he could give me an unbiased opinion. This is someone I trust to give it to me straight. A person not known for sugar coating the truth.

Before unveiling my creation I excitedly shared my opinion that the new design was really good. As good even as anything a professional designer would have come up with!

His response was extremely disappointing:

"This isn't very good. The attempt suffers from overly fancy, poorly implemented design. There's nothing uglier than ugly ornamentation. It looks like a hobbyist in a misguided attempt to do professional looking design work, which is in fact, exactly what it is. As a hobbyist, you should try to do as little fancy designing as possible. Complex designs are hard to get right. The simpler the "design" the higher your shot at getting something that looks like well executed minimalism."

That's just a short snippet of course. The gist of it. The full critique described many specific problems by way of example and included terms such as 'ugly', 'clashing colors' and so forth.

Truth be told, I wasn't just disappointed. I was mad. I had put my heart into it. I did my best. Why was he putting me down? In his usual unabashed, direct style he had stomped all over my work with careless disregard for my feelings. Besides, the design couldn't be that bad if it looked good to me, could it? He went on to explain that in his opinion there was nothing to salvage and that it would be better to start from scratch and try something entirely different. How dare he? That wasn't constructive criticism, he was just being mean!

Eventually I calmed down enough to realize what had happened. Having put so much work into the new design I had fallen in love with my work. Like a parent's love for his baby. I wouldn't have reacted so emotionally if this was a critique of somebody else's design work. I was biased. I wasn't looking at things clearly.

I started thinking long and hard about my reaction and about design in general. The specific ways in which my design sucked didn't matter. Those were just symptoms of a much deeper problem. The root cause was that visual design is a really hard, specialized field that you can't just jump into and expect to do professional-level work in. It takes years and years of study and practice to get good at it, just like any other field. Duh right?

That I sucked at web design didn't reflect badly on me personally any more than if someone said they thought I shouldn't start trying to fly a fighter jet because I would most likely crash and burn. Don't kill yourself man. Start with a flying trainer.

So why did I take personal offense at criticism against my web designs? Well, flying a fighter jet looks dangerous and difficult. Anyone can see that. But good visual design looks so deceptively easy. Obvious. Like maybe anyone could do it without any prior experience or training and if you can't then there's something wrong with you.

Since then I've taken my friend's advice, trashed the old "new design" and gradually through iteration came up with a much simpler design that actually isn't half bad, even in other people's opinion. But I have to admit it was extremely hard work. By comparison programming was a piece of cake.

The experience left me:

1. More wary of how bias can unconsciously warp perception
2. A bit more humble in general
3. With much deeper respect for visual design as a field. I'll take my hat off for anyone with a real talent for it. Just because it looks simple doesn't mean that it was simple to come up with.