Design Thought Leader » Good Design

Matte Stephens on Work(room)

Nate Burgos — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:42:08 +0000

To me it’s the most important thing when working at home to have an inspiring workroom. I spend a lot of time in the room so I have tried to make it as inspiring and comfortable as possible. As you can see I love mid-century design and I feel its one of my main influences. Being able to live with and work with good design makes everything more efficient and it’s just great stuff.…

Pere Alvaro on Good Design

Nate Burgos — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:58:25 +0000

Good design must become an essential value. Good design permeates society spontaneously, often anonymously and without paraphernalia. It becomes vital, essential for the society that uses it, whether in the form of a typeface or a chair.

When we refer to design as an added value, we are focussing solely on the aspect of profitability, ignoring its social value.

It is clear to see that we designers, and the institutions that represent us, have fallen into the trap of an unconscious use of the term ‘added value.’

What happens with design, with good design, is that it becomes what in medicine is the autonomic nervous system: in a nutshell, it operates without having any apparent consciousness, automatically, like the heart or the kidneys. And we only become aware of its existence when it suddenly goes missing. In the same way as we only realise how vital a kidney is when it fails, we only appreciate the importance of design when it doesn’t work, when, for instance, an airport has no direction signs, a chair is impossible to sit on or a book is illegible. If we take it for granted that a signposting system has to be infallible, a chair comfortable or a publication intelligible, then we cannot talk about design as an added value: we have to talk about it as a value in itself.

It may now be time for all of us to search for other ways of asserting our presence in a society that is already complex enough without having to assimilate still more ‘added values.’ Design will be essential, or it will not be.

Chip Kidd on Good Design

Nate Burgos — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:46:09 +0000

What makes the speed bump a good design? It’s a simple but highly functional object that’s foolproof. It’s not what you would call decorative—but it doesn’t need to be. There’s a purity of design to it, based on plain common sense. Often, the simplest and the most effective solutions aren’t dictated by style. In fact, the only real piece of dogma that I was ever taught in school was that form is strictly determined by the function it needs to perform. Accordingly, the generic parking-lot speed bump is a supremely elegant solution to the problem of getting people to slow down. … Still, when we’re out driving around, and we come up against a speed bump, it can be a jolting surprise. Which suggests another important point: Design isn’t always a pleasing part of our lives. But as the speed bump teaches us, design is necessary—and it can be extremely practical.

Paul Graham on Good Design

Nate Burgos — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:30:14 +0000

Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. (Ornament is not in itself bad, only when it’s camouflage on insipid form.) Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modelled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly.