The Secret To "Great" Design Is Simpler Than You Think
Summary
TLDRThe transcript covers a lively discussion between a design professor and students on what separates good designers from great designers. Themes touched on include pushing creative boundaries and expanding skills into other realms to gain fresh perspectives to channel back into design work. There is debate around mastering fundamentals versus diversifying, with the professor advocating for starting by truly mastering a craft before broadening. Tips are provided for gaining clarity from clients with vague briefs. Overall there is emphasis on defining clear criteria for evaluating design qualities like elegance and principles like contrast.
Takeaways
- 😀 There is nobility in doing humble things well. Mastery comes before expanding your skills.
- 👍 Clarify design principles like contrast so students can make decisions without the teacher present.
- 💡 Use sliders and scales to define vague concepts like good vs bad design.
- 🗣 Don't be afraid to ask clients lots of questions upfront to get clarity.
- 😥 Young people feel pressure today from false online narratives about success.
- 🔍 Achieving excellence means focusing on quality over quantity.
- 🤔 It's easier to define bad design versus great design.
- 🎓 A great designer transcends just designing by expanding their skills over time.
- ❓ Intentionally try to disprove your ideas to strengthen them.
- 👩🏫 Provide students clear criteria to critique their own work.
Q & A
What is the main topic the speakers are discussing in the transcript?
-The main topic is what separates good designers from great designers. The speakers discuss traits of good and bad design, achieving excellence through mastery, avoiding false narratives of success, articulating design principles clearly, getting clarity from clients on project briefs, and focusing on fundamentals.
What does Chris P. recommend as a way to achieve excellence?
-Chris P. recommends focusing on mastery by putting in 10 or 20 thousand hours into a craft before expanding into other areas. He advocates doing less but doing it better.
What does Chris P. say about people who have a lot of online success at a young age?
-He says that probably unscientifically 90% of those people are scammers and it's just a matter of time before they get arrested. He says their success feeds a false narrative that seeps into people's subconscious and contributes to high rates of depression and anxiety.
What system does Chris P. recommend using when a client brief is too broad?
-He recommends staying in the 'pocket of discomfort' for long enough to get clarity by asking lots of questions even if it annoys the client. He says to promise the client it's to ensure clear understanding of the problem and what they want before moving forward.
What advice did Dr. Samuel Holtzman give Chris about being a good teacher?
-He said good teaching means your students can make similar decisions to you when evaluating work without you being there. He recommended identifying 5 things to look for in a design and having students critique work by going through those 5 things.
What does Chris say is the danger of not getting clarity from clients on what they want?
-He says it's dangerous to walk away and make assumptions about broad terms like "make it epic" or "make it clean and modern." Even if we think we know what those mean, it's important to get specifics from the client.
What is an example Chris gives of humble tasks done well?
-He talks about a video series showcasing people who do mundane things very skillfully, like folding pizza boxes or throwing dough. He says this manifests the Japanese concept of taking pride in doing humble tasks well.
What does Chris recommend as a way to determine if a design is good or bad?
-He recommends identifying specific design principles like contrast and mapping them on a scale from bad to good. Seeing clearly where a design falls on spectrums for key principles can help evaluate if it is bad or good.
What does Chris say about people focused solely on mastering one craft or skill?
-He does not look down on people who put in their 10-20,000 hours mastering just one thing. He thinks there is nobility and beauty in focusing on doing humble things very well before expanding to other areas.
Why does Chris think depression rates are high among young people today?
-He believes the false narratives promoted online about extreme early success contribute to anxiety and depression. Young people feel they can't achieve unrealistic levels of success in short timeframes.
Outlines
😅 Defining good versus great design
The first paragraph discusses how to define good versus great design. It talks about whether great designers need to do more than just design, with perspectives from different people. The discussion centers around how difficult it is to objectively define great design on a spectrum, but it's easier to distinguish bad design from great design. There is emphasis on mastering fundamentals before expanding horizons.
👍🏻 Strategies for critiquing and teaching design
The second paragraph provides tips on critiquing design work and teaching design principles. It suggests having a defined list of criteria to evaluate work against, so students can internalize those principles and make good judgments independently. Asking clarifying questions to clients is also encouraged, rather than making assumptions, to deeply understand problems and desired outcomes.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡design principles
💡elegance
💡critique
💡clarity
💡fundamentals
💡false narrative
💡anxiety
💡gradient
💡articulating
💡contextualize
Highlights
What separates good designers from great designers
A great designer does more than design in addition to being a good designer
You have to transcend being a designer
Having the capacity or willingness to push yourself to failure in order to achieve success
I try to disprove ideas as soon as possible to practice critical thinking
There's nobility in doing humble things well
Try to master something first before moving on
Don't know what can be done in a certain time period because of false narratives
Focus on being good because it's really hard to be good
Bad to great design has a bigger contrast and is easier to identify
Use design principles as a base hit first
Don't be afraid to ask clients questions to get clarity
Critique work by going down a list of 5 key things to look for
Practice articulating fundamentals to make decisions faster
Stay in the discomfort zone until you get clarity from clients
Transcripts
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
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