Good design

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.

But what makes an interface successful? Beyond speed of performance, cohesive information sequences and anticipation of the human context and need, designing an experience that hopes to create feeling can only be done with feeling. The difference between good and bad becomes a matter of who can bring to bear greater focus and knowhow within the... See more

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

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

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible