November 29, 2011
Jason Fried, Founder of 37signals and Co-Author of “REWORK”: “Coming to know the difference between obvious, easy, and possible takes a lot of practice, deep thinking, critical analysis, and, often, debate. It’s a constant learning process. It helps you figure out what really matters.
But once you’re able to see the buckets clearly, and you begin to think about things in terms of obvious, easy, and possible instead of high, medium, and low priority, you’re on your way to building better products.”
Source: “The Obvious, the Easy, and the Possible”
Labels: Designing
July 17, 2011
“It’s true that various media require differing degrees of commitment—releasing files to a printer is a nail-biter of a moment for many of us; the same with anything relatively permanent such as signage. There’s a retail store on Broadway that makes me cringe every time I walk by: Damn, I should’ve made that logo a little smaller; definitely should have tightened up the letterspacing between that I and A. And perhaps it’s because most of my projects of late have been web-based products that I find myself missing the idea of designing in a way that involves some degree of …
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Source: “The Merits of Commitment” by Mimi O Chun
Labels: Designing
December 15, 2009
Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive, economic way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is not a matter of facade, of mere external appearance; rather it is the essence of products and institutions, penetrating and comprehensive. Designing is a complex and intricate task. It is integration of technological, social and economic requirements, biological necessities, and the psychophysical effects of materials, shape, color, volume, and space: thinking in relationships. The designer must see the periphery as well as the core, the immediate and the ultimate, at least in the biological sense. … The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning. … that design is indivisible, that the internal and external characteristics of a dish, a chair, a table, a machine, painting, sculpture are not to be separated. The idea of design and the profession of the designer has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness which allows projects to be seen not in isolation but in relationship with the need of the individual and the community. One cannot simply lift out any subject matter from the complexity of life and try to handle it as an independent unit. …
There is design in organization of emotional experiences, in family life, in labor relations, in city planning, in working together as civilized human beings. Ultimately all problems of design merge into one great problem: ‘design for life’. In a healthy society this design for life will encourage every profession and vocation to play its part since the degree of relatedness in all their work gives to any civilization its quality. This implies that it is desirable that everyone should solve his special task with the wide scope of a true ‘designer’ with the new urge to integrated relationships. It further implies that there is no hierarchy of the arts, painting photography, music, poetry, sculpture, architecture, nor of any other fields such as industrial design. They are equally valid departures toward the fusion of function and content in design.
László Moholy-Nagy
Painter, Photographer and Professor, Bauhaus
Source: Vision in Motion (1947)
Labels: Designing
November 22, 2009
Tweet by architectural studio superkül
Source: @superkül
Labels: Designing
March 26, 2009
Designers decide and design the flow, the copy, the structure of the page, the programmers make all of it come to life by plugging it into the backend. All along both parties trade concessions on how to get the feature done as fast possible by grabbing the easiest value.
So stop thinking about designers as artists who work in a different universe of neat graphics and start thinking of them as someone who decides what goes where, which form elements to use, how to split features between screens, what words to use, and how everything fits together in a coherent experience.
David Heinemeier Hansson
Programmer
Source: Ask 37signals: Do I need a designer to make pretty?
Labels: Designing
