brainstorms

Friday August 26, 2005

road to zen of design

zen of design has a charming slogan:

Challenge everything. Especially silly catch phrases.

there is the obvious self-reference, but i think the qualification stops the self-reference. some people would not consider challenge everything [for some fruitful range of everything] a silly catch phrase, especially in design. here is an exercise to put this in perspective: consider challenging these conventional wisdom bits extracted from paul graham's taste for makers or how you can make great things [i omitted the mind-numbingly boring bits like good design is redesign and so on]:

good design is simple

good design is timeless

good design is suggestive

good design is hard

good design looks easy

good design uses symmetry

good design resembles nature

good design is often strange

good design happens in chunks

[i will present my thoughts on these bits in another blog essay sometime soon.]

related reading: don gentner and jakob nielsen, the anti-mac interface, cacm aug 1996. [one of my favorite papers about challenging design assumptions]