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Creativity can be a double-edged sword. While it’s often a very good thing, if used excessively or carelessly it can lead to trouble. As David Ogilvy has said:

“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

This came up when I saw the “Bay Area Deathfest” promotion (a death metal festival in San Francisco). All death metal bands have almost indistinguishable logos; as Creative Bloq says, “Generally, they’re a veritable smorgasbord of tattoo-ready spikes and gothic typography – the harder to read, the better.“.

I said “all of the bands”, but there was one exception that you might notice…

While being creative for creativity’s sake can be bad, there are times when a bit of “let’s just try to stand out” can be a good thing. As user “JosebaZilarte” mentioned on Reddit, “For a music genre that presents itself as subversive, there is a lot of conformism.“

It seems to me that pretty much every death metal band has found a logo designer and said “we need a logo that looks like this”, and they all got it. It’s generally important to stay close to your genre so that you can be easily identified, but when that goes too far it leaves a great opportunity for someone else to stand out.

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When it comes to design and marketing, being able to explain and justify your decisions is a good thing. You shouldn’t be creating anything that just “looks nice”, and everything should have a purpose. At the end of the day, though, you’re not going to be able to explain things to your end user — they’ll need to be able to understand on their own.

This is something that Steve Jobs was famous for doing. Once in a meeting, where he was going to be shown an upcoming commercial that Apple was going to run, the staff wanted to explain what they were trying to do with the ad. Steve refused and just wanted to see it without context, because that’s how their users were going to see it.

For something like your website, users need to be able to understand how to use it without any instruction. You should be able to explain your design decisions to your boss or client, but the user is going to visit the site without any context and it needs to work for them.

Whatever you’re building, think of the state of the user that will be interacting with it and keep it as simple as possible.

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Design is a tricky thing, and it’s often misunderstood. Most people think of design in terms of “beautiful colors”, but design is less about how something looks and more about how people respond to it.

As he often does, Steve Jobs put it perfectly:

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

If done well, as Don Norman has said, it’s hard to notice. Good design just works, while bad design sticks out. Or, like David Ogilvy famously said:

“When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

Creativity and beautiful design are wonderful things, and we strive to build websites that look amazing. Above that, though, we always try to make sure that design achieves the goals we’ve laid out, so that “creative” and “beautiful” are just icing on the cake.

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There is a fine line between a design that is clever and one that is self-indulgent, and they often fall to the latter. As Don Norman said in “The Design of Everyday Things“:

“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter which it is. Most designs that are clever fail to achieve what they were meant to do. Also from Don’s book:

“The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things.”

When building something, good design is intentionally hard to notice. There are places where a clever design can help, but clever usually is the opposite of beneficial. Being clever simply for the sake of standing out is of no value to anyone but the designer.

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A few days ago I shared the concept of Norman Doors, which are doors that can be confusing to open. When you come across a typical door and push the flat plate to open it, it just works and you don’t really notice it. However, when you come to a door with a handle on it to pull (but you were supposed to push instead), you notice right away.

This is true for most kinds of design. In “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman puts it this way:

Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.

This applies to menus in restaurants (“why is the font is so hard to read?”), website design (“where on earth is the contact information?”) and even things like flashlights (“how do I turn it on?”).

Good design blends in and does its job, whereas bad design stands out. In a way, it’s kind of like the IT department at your company; they only are noticed (and appreciated?) when things are going sideways.

If you’re a designer and people don’t comment on your work too often, that might be a very good thing.

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I recently finished reading Don Norman’s excellent “The Design of Everyday Things“, and I highly recommend it. He mentions in the book something I’ve heard about a bit before that he coined decades ago call “Norman Doors”. As he explains:

Somehow, when a device as simple as a door has to have a sign telling you whether to pull, push, or slide, then it is a failure, poorly designed.

When you approach a door, it shouldn’t need a “push” or “pull” sign on it. If it has a handle to grasp, expect to pull. If he has a flat bar or plate, expect to push. As you’ve undoubtedly seen hundreds of times, this is often not the case.

In an article about this a few years ago, 99% Invisible shared this excellent example:

His book goes far beyond doors into pointing out ways that so many other things in life could be designed in better ways.

Some things have improved greatly, such as the ease of cell phone use after the iPhone came out in 2007, and some are still lacking, like the ability to set the correct time of day on many appliances in the kitchen.

The book is excellent, and will really open your eyes to the world around you. More posts from it will be here in the coming days, and I strongly encourage you to add it to your reading list.

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For an official Type 2 tennis ball, which weighs between 1.975 – 2.095 ounces, dropping it from a height of 100 inches should bounce back up between 53-58 inches. If you take the same tennis ball and do the same test, you’re going to get the same result.

People are quite different than that, which makes human-focused design very difficult.

On a recent episode of Guy Kawasaki’s “Remarkable People” podcast, he had Don Norman (author of “The Design of Everyday Things“, among others) on the show. The entire episode was fantastic, but my thoughts on this post come from something Don said on the show.

He said:

And the physical sciences, look if I pick up something and I drop it, and I pick it up again, and I drop it, the fact that I dropped it once before doesn’t change the way it falls a second time.

That’s called path independence. People don’t have that. Whatever I do to you affects what’s going to happen the next instant. And that’s what makes it so hard to design. In fact, I once argued that you can’t ever make the perfect design because if you made the perfect design, people would use it in ways you’d never thought of. And then in those new ways, it wouldn’t be perfect anymore.

There have been thousands (millions?) of examples of this over years, summarized in fun pieces like this:

To me, this is why things like user personas are so important. You’re never going to get a design perfect, so you need to work hard to get it as close to perfect as you can (and keep adjusting to make it “more perfect” over time).

As Michael (Ted Danson) said once in the show “The Good Place”, anything can be up to 104% perfect. While that was just a funny line, it’s a good target and a reminder to keep iterating and improving as time goes on. Users will still find unique ways to break your interface, but the more perfect you can make it, the better.