Good design

Ambiguity in visual design ultimately leads to a greater variety of functions than designs that are functionally fixed.

Despite hundreds of features, the navigation bar at the bottom of the WeChat screen is four icons: Chat, Contacts, Discover, Me. Zhang: “I told the team to establish a rule that WeChat shall always have a four-icon bar, and never add anything to it.”

“Limit everything to the essential but do not remove the poetry.”

— Dieter Rams, quoted in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

While AI can generate endless “perfect” outputs, the crucial design decisions are innately human: which questions to ask, guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and aligning execution against context and strategy. AI might generate hundreds of landing page variants, but it takes design sensibility to know which will genuinely... See more

As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks,

I could do better than that.

The more senior the designer, the more abstract the problem they should be solving.

To break it down more tangibly, let’s look at some examples of levels and appropriate responsibilities:

Designer Lvl 1: Design a form that lets people edit their profile. Pretty scoped—assumes there is a profile, and that the solution takes the shape of a form.

Design... See more