The Secret To "Great" Design Is Simpler Than You Think

what separates good designers from great designers I'm curious first before I try to figure out how to possibly answer this question is what is your intention by asking this question to kind of Step Up the game for yourself if you want to be an overachiever and do great things does anybody have any clue on how to answer a question like this maybe the difference is that a great designer does more than design in addition to being a good designer okay this is going to get real interesting I love where we're going with this so you

need to do more than design so you have to transcend being a designer okay Ming you have the mic now I guess having the capacity or willingness to push yourself to failure in order to achieve whatever the success that you're defining we as faculty we have these discussions sometimes with students how do you become better doing creative strategies and things like that can you step out of that that realm and get into other things that you might be interested in and expand upon that and then some of those indirect insights can actually Channel back in

thank you Ming as a practice a of critical thinking is whenever I have an idea I try to disprove the idea as soon as possible so I'm going to try that with patrulla statement so patrulla I would just ask you do you know great designers that only do design yes okay so that would just disprove that right there see how that works I'm often misquoted on this that people think that Chris you just poo poo and you look down on people who just do a thing that their masters at craft and I do not think

that at all I think this world works better when there are people who put in their 10 or 20 000 hours just to master something there's actually a series of videos and accounts online that showcase people who do the most mundane things really well are you familiar with the pizza box guy he just sits there and folds a thousand pizza boxes at a time or the guy's a mix none and he just throws it across or the six guys who Hammer a spike into the ground in perfect Unison in the book The obstacles away there's

a quote there in Latin that I don't remember my son would probably know it which says something to the fact of there's nobility in doing humble things well and I really believe that and when I got to travel to Japan I got to see that philosophy manifested in the people there they take so much pride and just making sure the table is clean or to take out the trash or prepare a piece of fish or whatever it is and I think there's something really beautiful about that so I think in our culture we feel like

we have to do more and more and more I think the way to achieve Excellence is to do less but to do better I'm not saying that those of you that have the capacity to do more should not do more you don't totally should but I think you should try to master something first before you move on there's a tendency in our culture because we get to see examples online of people who seem to have a lot of success they have all the material social proof and they're very young and it starts to create this

very unreal narrative about what can be done in what period of time and I promise you probably unscientifically ninety percent of them are scammed and it's just a matter of time before they get arrested so it's this kind of narrative that we get fed into our brain that seeps into our subconscious and why there's such a high rate of depression amongst young people and why they're so anxious right now that's one of the questions because we're being fed a false narrative about what can be done so I'm going to be a proponent for you just

focusing on being good because it's freaking hard to be good I think it's really hard to figure out on a gradient on an objective level that we can get 10 people room to even agree what is great design it's very hard to figure out what good design is as it relates to what great design might be but I think we can pretty much figure out what is bad versus great that's there's a much bigger contrast between bad and great so I'm going to assume Mimi that you know what bad design is right but let's just

say you don't know what bad design is many years ago when I was teaching here I had this really amazing super smart Student's name is Daniel and Daniel when I was talking during my critique I said that design isn't elegant it wasn't his work I was just like that's not elegant and I kept using that word over and over again and and Daniel you know raises his hand he's like uh Chris I know there's a really obvious question and I'm kind of embarrassed to ask you but what is elegant it's like um oh what is

Elegance I don't know I've been throwing around words that I don't even Define and there's no shared definition so I'm going to present to you one way of looking at information to help you get clarity so let's try this with bad to good design we don't even need to go great okay just the difference between bad and good so Mimi you said you know what bad design is right yes okay what is a trait of bad design so let's try to use something much simpler something that's easy like just let's get a base hit here

and let's not go for the Home Run just yet it's not using or I guess not using the design principles what are those design principles that you speak of just give me one contrast contrast what about contrast is contrast good or bad uh in general it's good all right so we'll write contrast I mean everybody should know this right I mean I agree you're safe here on one side if you have lots of contrast the more contrast the better the less contrast not so good what we want to do is we want to keep doing

this we want to find one parameter that we think is good or bad and then we contrast that so then we can say on some kind of gradient scale like yeah there's lots of contrast and we can talk about how to achieve that contrast so those are all things that designers here know how to do and we can make a long list of them and then we start to get a sense like how we know if our design is good or not Dr Samuel Holtzman he sat in my class one time and I thought it

was a pretty good teacher until he told me what he thought afterwards and then I had to come to Jesus moment and he said you know here's the thing what does it mean to teach things it means that your students can look at the work and make similar decisions without you being there that was so profoundly different than the way I taught and the way I've been taught those of you that are old enough who've been here long enough know pretty much how most teachers here teach which is this is wrong that's stupid you're terrible

and this is all right that's usually how it is but then you walk away like I don't know how you made any of those decisions so Dr Holtzman told me when you're looking at a piece of work what are the five things you're looking for and break those down and then write them down and put it on the board and then ask your students when they're looking at that work to go down the list to critique it themselves if they can make it down to the bottom five while surviving the gauntlet of five they got

a shot of it being pretty good so when wherever we have run into problems like like this that are kind of very nuanced and very difficult to Define I find that using some kind of slider like this helps out a lot those of you who work with clients who get really broad briefs where you can't really tell what's what they want I'm gonna tell you right now here's my tip to you here's tip number one do not walk away from a client afraid of asking what it is that you need to know to do your

job stay in that pocket of discomfort for long enough so you get clarity my business coach who who passed away last year he told me this before he says tell him up front it's going to be grueling that you're gonna ask lots of questions and they're gonna get annoyed and they're gonna feel like it's a waste of time but then to promise them that you don't want to run off and do something without clear understanding of what the problem is and more importantly what it is that they want they're like um make it Epic make

it clean and modern make it organic they use these words and we think we know what that means but it's dangerous to walk away and make that assumption but if we can just work on the fundamentals and keep executing on the fundamentals and practicing articulating that to others it will further cement and clarify in her mind which allow us to make the decisions even faster foreign