quote archives
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill.Theodore Levitt, quoted in The Innovator’s Solution, sequel to The Innovator’s Dilemma, both recommended to me by John as I’m in the early stages of defining what a proposed product should do.
They want a quarter-inch hole.”
Timely reminder that customers “hire a product to do a job,” not to fill a slot on their shelf reserved for an artificial product category. (Of course they don’t really just want a hole; they want to build something, drain something, see through something, etc. We need to get down to real intents and desired outcomes, or we’ll never understand what we should build to meet real needs.)
“Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life—Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition … If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate — Just enough is more.”Milton Glaser
Ten Things I Have Learned
Part of AIGA Talk in London
November 22, 2001
“Less tan is always a good thing.”RMF®
“There is bad taste and then there is this. What was going through the designer’s mind? ‘I’ll scale it a little bit. Hmmm, maybe just a little more. More. More. I have so much power. I’m drunk in scaling power. More. More. Scale it more. Don’t stop. Do it. Okay, that’s enough.’”Brand New commentary on the new Microsoft Bing logo
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”~ Steve Jobs
“How important is the voice of the customer? Very. But discerning the difference between what customers are able to say and what they want, and then acting on those unspoken desires, demands that companies learn to go well beyond listening.”Dorothy Leonard, speaking of the importance of focusing on observation and desired outcomes rather than specific customer-proposed solutions, in “The Limitations of Listening,” Harvard Business Review, January 2002.
“Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful.”Also from the same article by Matthew May.
What, in your experience, fits this definition?
“Complexity isn’t the enemy to a chessmaster—without it they’d be playing checkers. But there’s times when we look at the stuff we buy or experience and we swear that the design and engineering weren’t even playing checkers.A memorable image from a great article on elegant design by Matthew May. (Via Good Experience)
They were playing Whack-A-Mole.”
“In the competitive and sometimes rather commercial world of design, the novel and startlingly different can sometimes stand out and be acclaimed purely for that reason. But being creative in design is not purely or even necessarily a matter of being original. The product designer Richard Seymour considers good design results from ‘the unexpectedly relevant solution not wackiness parading as originality.’”Bryan Lawson, in How Designers Think.
“Any time a bureaucrat (i.e., a custodian of a system) stands between you and something you need or want, your challenge is to help that bureaucrat discover a means, harmonious with the system, to meet your need.”Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball
“Think of it as FFFFound for all things type, typography, lettering, & signage.”The new site from John Boardley ( ilovetypography.com ) looks like it will be a good one. Go check it out: welovetypography.com.
“Digg sends a tremendous amount of traffic to sites that make it to the top of their front page, but it’s the worst kind of traffic: mindless, borderline illiterates. Good riddance, really.”John Gruber, in How to Block the DiggBar
“YouTube is soaring towards the future like a pigeon towards a plate glass window…. Credit Suisse estimates YouTube will manage to rake in about $240 million in ad revenue in 2009, against operating costs of roughly $711 million, leading to a shortfall of just over $470 million…. YouTube is adamant that ultimately they’ll find an advertising solution that will enable the ungainly behemoth to reach profitability. Looking at the math, it doesn’t seem likely.”Silicon Valley Insider, YouTube is Doomed
“Unlike the artist, the designer is not free to concentrate exclusively on those issues which seem most interesting. Clearly one of the central skills in design is the ability rapidly to become fascinated by problems previously unheard of.”Bryan Lawson, in How Designers Think.
“On matters of style, swim with the current. On matters of principle, stand like a rock.”Thomas Jefferson. From 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son, which reads like a memoir and feels like a nice long walk with my boys. I want the book.
“New technology + same old thinking = same old outcome with a buggy interface.”Mark Hurst, in his latest Good Experience newsletter. Some important thoughts here about how a change in technology without a change in commitment to customers simply results in more efficient ways to annoy, frustrate, and exploit people.
“I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”Stop Design Stops Google
“No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No, the most common quality in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.”Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881)
“Because design problems are so multi-dimensional they are also highly interactive… . It is the very interconnectedness of all [of the relevant] factors which is the essence of design problems, rather than the isolated factors themselves. In this respect designing is like devising a crossword. Change the letters of one word and several other words will need altering necessitating even further changes… .Bryan Lawson, in How Designers Think, which I am now finally getting back to finishing. I am encountering this almost every day now. Tweak the background, up the contrast of the text. Up the contrast of the text, fix the associated icon to match. Fix that icon, tweak this icon to better distinguish it. Etc., etc., etc.
If there was one single characteristic which could be used to identify good designers it is the ability to integrate and combine.”
“That kitten was so sad!”Pete