David Emery Online

Design Vs Asthetics

6 March 2006

Scoble has posted an interesting piece on anti-marketing design

I think that he raises some interesting points, but really misses a crucial point: design does not equal aesthetics. Google, for example, doesn’t seem to have a competent graphic designer on their staff – just look at their logo, all nasty bevels and garish colours. But boy do they have good interaction designers!

Another important point to ruminate on is whether sites such as Google, MySpace and Craig’s List have succeeded because of their “anti-design”, or in spite of it. All of the above have great, functional design (yes, even MySpace) but look like ass; but if they had great designs, would they really have not been successful? Of course, with a site like Google you’d have to be a pretty darn good designer to manage to get something that looked better without impacting on some of some of the stuff that makes the interface so good, such as the simplicity that focus’s you on the task at hand (searching), and the ultra lean page size.

I don’t think the majority of people really even notice design to a certain extent (otherwise why would anyone buy a Windows PC?), so I don’t think a good aesthetics design makes as much impact as you’d expect with certain demographics; however with other groups of people it means a whole lot more, early adopters being one of those groups. I also think that it certainly doesn’t matter for every site out there – a lot of sites just have great content (such as Scoble’s blog, for example) and the presentation simply doesn’t matter.

Of course, with Scoble’s blog – and all blogs in general – we hit upon the tricky aspect of feeds, and the lack of aesthetic control of them. I think the popularity of feeds really reenforces that presentation is secondary to content, but only when content is the main reason of interest for a site – and even then, you need a good interface to that content (hence the amount of different feed readers).

I’d really like to see a Google redesign soon, though…