On Jan 31, 2008, at 7:44 PM, Pankaj Chawla wrote: > On 2/1/08, Andrei Herasimchuk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I know of no formalized design profession in existence in this modern >> world where aesthetics, both material and immaterial, are not >> integral in some fashion to the practice of the discipline. > > Integral, yes; fundamental no. [snip]
What's aesthetic? * When I make a visual less ugly by removing half a dozen colours and font variations? * When I simplify a sales process from nineteen steps to four is that a more aesthetic process? * I spent half a day a week or so ago tweaking the words used to drive a command-line tool so that they described the task in a nice symmetric memorable manner that would be consistent with the users understanding of the process, and the conventions of other commands in that domain. Aesthetic word choice? * The book Beautiful Code <http://tinyurl.com/3xxbny> is named that way for a reason. Developers describe the internals of a piece of badly implemented software as "ugly" for a reason. Aesthetic code? * Some physics and mathematics dudes that I know describe certain equations as "beautiful". Aesthetic equations? I'd answer "yes" to all of the above myself. In the larger sense aesthetics seem fundamental to good design to me. I can't think of anybody I'd consider a good designer in any realm who doesn't have a visceral "got to fix the ugly" reaction to bad design. Good design is beautiful all of the way down. Does that mean that everybody should have to know the best way to kern a heading and tweak the leading of some body text to be an IxD (whatever that is :-)? I don't think so myself. They definitely need to appreciate folk who do. Knowing how to do it themselves can do nothing but help. But they're not completely incapable of good design work if they lack that knowledge. That's what I think anyway :-) Cheers, Adrian ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
