Last night I was reading an article in the superb magazine Fast Company about design. One of the women profiled, Marcia Lausen (a founding member of AIGA Design For Democracy, an outfit seeking to re-design ballots after the 2000 presidential fiasco) had this to say:

Thinking that "design" means "decoration" most election officals do not enlist professional designers in the development process.

I read this and about fell out of bed. She nailed it. And this obviously doesn't just have to do with ballot design.

80% of the "web design" projects I'm involved with start with some form of confusion about this. That confusion comes in one or both of these forms:

1. Clients don't feel that paying for design is worth it. They don't see the point in paying just to make something "pretty" when it "looks" fine as it is.
2. Once they do pay for design, they don't understand why understated, simple, clean and intuitive design is the end result. Many hit me with some form of "is that it?" or "There's so much empty space, it's so plain, I thought you were going to design it."

I have been dissapointingly poor at helping clients understand why good design isn't bells, whistles, swooping, swishing, flashing or twirling. And last night's epiphany finally completed the puzzle for me. Many people, when they think "design" think "decoration." They think that a "well designed site" should resemble an attractive, exciting carnival instead of an elegant, intuitive, simple, clean, usable interface to information.

And now I have better words to make that case. Hooray.

-=Some examples=-

If you design, say, indicator lights that tell you which way an elevator is going, good design gives you something like this:

Instead of something like this (which is quite "decorative" or "pretty" but leaves you wondering, which way is it going?). Bad design:

And good design does not mean ugly design, or "strictly utilitarian" design. Good design is also attractive. Take for example, these 2 MP3 players.

Elegant, notoriously useable, ridiculously popular and very attractive good design:

An MP3 player with exactly no thought put into design, but some thought put into "decoration." It is kind of smooth looking and stuff. But why would they want to create some klunky beast that looks, feels and is heavier than a stinking CD player? Bad design:

One final example for fun: Toilet seats.

Bad, bad, very bad design (don't know anyone shaped quite like that):

Good (ahhhh), good design:

[Update]: Another example here.

Repeating for emphasis: Good design, particularly good web design is about creating an intuitive, easy to use, clean interface to your information. It's about helping the visitor find what she wants (and what you want her to find) as quickly and easily as possible. Good design doesn't draw too much attention to itself, it is happy just to facilitate the delivery of information.

Finally - special thanks to This Is Broken, where I shamelessly stole some of these images, and where they dedicate themselves to highlighting the very issues I've discussed here.

Suggested reading: Don't Make Me Think