Good design

The best design work rarely starts with order. It starts with questions, with play, with a lot of mess. We need tools that make room for that. Because if everything is neatly aligned from the beginning, we may never discover what lies just outside the grid.

Whoever designed this packaging deserves a raise. https://t.co/61IlJaZIbX

One of the most intelligent case studies in design is the Chinese tea cup. They’re made without handles simply because if it’s too hot to touch, it’s too hot to drink.

Humans naturally want to add more. Add a cardboard sleeve, add a warning on the outside of the cup, add a handle. The result of all these things never cools down the actual contents.

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the tools and infrastructure we use to deploy software treat users as passive recipients rather than active co-creators. Software is organized into monolithic applications rather than flexible remixable toolkits.

But there’s a paradox at the heart of design that’s rarely discussed: the discipline that most profoundly determines how lasting and inspiring a work of design can be is a designer’s ability to look away — not just from their own work, but from other solutions, other possibilities, other designers’ takes on similar problems.