I feel strongly that great design should be understood, not noticed.
You can apply this rule to anything from websites to computer hardware to product packaging to software UI. Literally anything. But for the sake of this example, I want to talk about something pretty straight-forward: making a good PowerPoint slide.
Let's say your boss asks you to make a slide analyzing the competitive landscape of the Windows PC market, and you do all your research, and you throw a bunch of bullet points and graphs and statistics onto a slide. Great. The content is gathered. Now it's time to make the slide.
In doing this, I think a lot of people naturally start with the question, "How can I put all of this into a format that's pretty?" And that won't necessarily lead you down a horrible path because people do like pretty things, but I definitely don't think it leads you down the best path. Because just creating something "pretty" is creating something that categorically gets in the way of what you're trying to communicate. It's creating something that distracts you from the substance of the content and puts more of your attention on how beautiful your choice of SmartArt is.
It's creating design that is intended to be noticed, not understood.
I think the right question to ask is, "How can I put all of this content into a format so that it's understood?" It sounds similar, but it's framing the task in a way that pushes you to use every square inch of the slide a bit more intentionally. You begin to pick colors more strategically so they're not just eye-candy but instead explanatory. You begin to use the negative space in graphics just as much as the positive space to clue your eye in the right directions. You begin to shade and format things in certain ways so that the physical design elements entirely fade into the background and you don't really notice any of it at all. You just digest the information.
You start to really make sure the design serves the content, not accessorizes it.
And that doesn't mean that good design can't be pretty. It's just that being pretty should be a byproduct of it being simple and easy to understand, not a character trait in its own right.
I tend to be pretty good at designing slides and usually get called in at random times by my team at work to redesign slide decks when it's really important. I was asked today, "How did you learn to get so good at this?" And I thought about it for a moment because I had never really been asked this before. And eventually when I didn't have a real legitimate answer, I said, "I think I'm just impatient. I just get annoyed if it takes me more than three seconds to understand a slide."
I think what I said was right. It's important to be a little impatient when you're designing something because you want to make sure your design caters primarily to the person with the shortest attention span. You need to make sure it's designed to be understood, not noticed, because a lot of people don't have the time for anything else.
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