Drawar

I sometimes think that I have an unhealthy obsession with great design. I’m starting to look at every sign that I walk by to see what font is being used and if the kerning is to my liking. I notice the colors of the clothes that are on a mannequin and question the choice of the person that decorates it. I look at the desktops of my coworkers to see which ones fancy a clean and minimal desktop like myself and a scowl comes across my face when I discover one that is cluttered.

I need to have great design in my life and I never took the time to understand why.

It goes deeper than wanting to always be around pretty things. We all like to see pretty things. We are drawn to objects that we are attracted to so it never made sense to me why any company wouldn’t try their best to make the best looking product possible. This should be the minimum goal. However, it goes deeper than that.

Cavemen

I’m going to pretend that I understand the lives of our ancestors. Life was simple back then. You had to find food because you knew you were hungry. You stayed away from animals that could kill you. You had to reproduce with the opposite sex to continue the existence of your species. By no means am I saying it was easy to acquire all of these things, but life was certainly easier because you already knew what you needed to do and it was on you to figure out how you were going to accomplish it.

Fast forward to today and the same basic principles still apply, but there are a lot more roadblocks thrown in. Now we have so much information being thrown at us from all angles it can be hard to focus. It can be hard to understand what is noise versus what is signal. It is even harder to discern whether or not the message being broadcasted to us is genuine.

Great design helps because it makes life a little less complex. When you are having a rough day the last thing you want to worry about is how to use your computer. When you travel you want the signs giving you directions to be clearly marked and informative. When ordering from a menu at a restaurant you don’t want to be confused as to what is actually food and what is decoration.

They Care

When I see a company that invests in the design of their identity I know that not only are they taking their business seriously, but also that they care about what they are doing. It is quite possible that I am wrong sometimes, but great design helps to build that trust for me that crappy design sometimes just can’t overcome.

Having that small amount of trust from me already is a huge hurdle in helping move forward. Instead of me having to make the decision of whether or not I should try this company out it allows me to simply say that I’m willing to give them a try. It means there is already one less decision in the process that I have to go through. I like that.

Natural

Great design seems natural. Leave the city and go deep into the woods where civilization rarely ventures. Look at what nature has produced. It is always beautiful. Nature always has the best designs. Great human design gets close to that I feel and it makes it seem more natural. Chaos and ugliness never seem natural to me. Order and attractiveness make me feel at ease.

When I buy an object I do so because it seems like it is a natural fit in my life. I wasn’t always afforded this option because companies never placed a high value on design. That is changing.

I read more and more sites that only have one ad because the content is just as good as the sites with a million ads, but also because it seems natural to have content be on its own.

Great design is so natural that it makes me wonder how I lived without it before. I own an Apple Magic Trackpad and it is a beautiful piece of hardware. It looks great next to my wireless keyboard and after using it for a while I question how I got anything done before. If you own an iPhone 4 don’t you feel the same thing?

From Me To You

Whenever I design something for work I have to think about those hurdles I’m removing for a customer. I know they have a million other things in the world to worry about so the last thing I want on their mind is how to use my design.

When you visit Drawar I know you are swarmed with a ton of information daily and you just want to go and read about good design. I’m trying to design an experience around that. When you want to talk about design there shouldn’t be a challenge on where the discussion button is.

Try to understand why you love great design and you will be amazed at how it transforms how you tackle design work in the future. I think so often we get caught up in trying to make a great design because we like it and we think it is the right thing to do, but go a bit deeper than that.

If great design moves you, then you deserve to take the time to understand why that appreciation is there.