good design is something designers could talk about at nauseum and i’m not going to try to answer all the questions and debates in one blog post but i am going to share with you what i find are the most important points in creating a “good design”. lately i’ve noticed that the internet has become filled with sites dedicated to things like logo disasters, photoshop disasters, etc. besides looking at actual studio or company sites it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find good design. now that statement in itself opens up a whole can’o'worms….what is good design?
IT’S GOTTA MAKE YOU THINK:
in my opinion, good design is something that is thought provoking, something that makes you think, “huh, i wonder how that works?” or “how did they do that?” however, by no means do i think that good design should make you question it’s function – for function is one of the fundamental elements of design. how many times have we heard that “design is the culmination of form and function”? good design should clearly have a purpose and function, but the challenge is to create something new, something exciting, something different…this is also getting harder and harder, and like fashion, design trends from the 30′s, 40′s, 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, etc are coming back in.
STRUCTURE, STRUCTURE, ERUTCURTS:
good design needs a certain structure, some reason for the design decisions that are being made, but of course all of the fun comes in breaking the structure, breaking the rules. for instance when designing a newspaper or magazine layout, even a web page, there’s a certain grid to follow concerning type and image placement. But that gets boring pretty quickly and that’s when we decide to break the grid. when done tastefully and judiciously this can create a very interesting composition.
ORIGINALITY:
i’ve touched a little on this topic already in this post, but originality really is key. no one is blown away by something they’ve seen before. people are most exited – obviously – by something new. as a designer it is important to draw on other work for examples and research, but we have to be careful to not emulate it to closely. we have to look for a new way to use something old – we have to let it inspire us, not dictate what we create. it’s a hard line to draw, but we have to do our best to keep working toward something original.
