There are sites, books, feeds, magazines, and movies about “design.” Thousands of people call themselves “designers.”
But have you noticed … “design” never means the same thing?
When I click on some “design” link, I feel like I’m spinning a roulette wheel. Will it be about:
- Grids and Helvetica?
- Typography?
- How to balance trade-offs?
- Applying engineering capability to a non-engineering problem?
- Gradients?
- Producing emotions?
- Solving a business problem?
- Posters?
- Products?
I just saw a cool link on Hacker News. http://color.hailpixel.com/
What is it?
- An interesting implementation because it’s made in HTML5, not Flash.
- A cool style because it doesn’t look like other pickers.
- A novel solution to a problem because the large scale gives access to values you can’t reach in a traditional picker.
- An emotional experience because the immersive colorfield evokes purple twilights and blue-yellow sunrises.
Hacker News played it as an implementation story:
I tried it as a problem-solution performance story:
What do all these angles have in common?
Design is a big word. It means interacting with trade-offs to realize an intention. That may be abstract, but that’s what it is.
All of us advance the field when we try to nail just what it is that interests us about a particular design. We raise the bar when we resist thinking “design” means something more than exactly that abstraction. There are lots of definitions we haven’t defined yet.
Peter R.
on 16 Feb 13Thanks Ryan, that’s an interesting point of view but it’s a great question too because even within each of the categories of ‘design’ that you have in the beginning of your post, there are many interpretations. today ‘designers’ are also SEOs, implementers, and artistic folks but clients usually have other things they lump on the list too. In short, be careful how you represent yourself! Oh, and thanks for sharing the color picker link, we’ll put that baby to good use. Cheers! Inbound Market Link Blog
Anonymous Coward
on 16 Feb 13“The design which can be named is not the true design”
Glenn Meder
on 16 Feb 13Thanks Ryan. Great post. To me, design means getting to the heart of something. Creating it as it wants to be created.
Also, thanks for not using indents. Some of the posts are using indents, and some aren’t. Just kill the damn indents! ;)
Rahul
on 18 Feb 13I’ve always liked this quote I found somewhere (I think Bokardo?) a few years ago, on the difference between art and design:
Rob
on 18 Feb 13Ryan, you make a perfect case for the ambiguity of the term “design.” I deal with this ambiguity directly as an inbound marketer for a local Indianapolis design firm, Miles Design (our site). If you asked what we do, you would expect us to answer “we’re designers, we design stuff.” Alas, to your point with this blog, there’s an enormous world inside the term “design” that I’m trying to explore and communicate to our various audiences. It’s not an easy task, to say the least. Thanks for the insights here in this post.
Mathew Sanders
on 20 Feb 13It’s always frustrating to be on the edge of a design argument when both sides are correct but don’t realize they are talking about different meanings of design.
Interestingly in Dutch and German they have two separate words that both translate in English to design. I wonder how much this impacts their practical design (I am a fan of Dutch graphic design).
I’ve just started blogging after a couple years gap and wrote about some of these ideas last week http://touchpoints.quora.com/Beer-Design.
337design
on 21 Feb 13In design, creativity is everything. All people like something unique, amazing and interesting. Typography, grid view, circles, one page design and many more new concepts are very effective for website design, but the important thing is to make best use of them. Your given link of ‘hailpixel’ includes great colorful design concept. Thanks for sharing information.
This discussion is closed.