What makes for good design?

Ask five people what makes a design good and you will get five answers about taste. Clean, bold, minimal, beautiful. Almost nobody answers with a question, and I think that is the whole problem.

For me, good is a standard, not a style. Does it work? Does it answer what someone actually wants? Is it honest? Will it last? Is it simpler than what it replaces? Everything else is decoration, however lovely it looks.

I have been turning this over for a while, and three ideas keep coming back whenever I direct creative work.

It starts with the person on the other side

Every piece of design has a user, even when it is a deck that will be looked at for four minutes. The user experience is not a layer you add once the idea is finished. It is the idea, seen from the other side of the table.

When I help shape a presentation or an event experience, the first thing I ask is not what it should look like. I ask what the person walking in, or opening the file, should feel in the first ten seconds, and what they should do next. If I cannot answer that, the design has nothing to be good at.

Let other people own the idea

This is the one I learned slowly. A creative director's job is not to have the best idea in the room. It is to build an idea that other people feel is theirs.

An idea that stays with one person dies the day that person leaves the room. An idea that others take ownership of keeps getting better without you. The designer adds a detail you would never have thought of. The client defends it in a meeting you were not invited to. The team carries it through a hundred small decisions that nobody wrote down.

So direction is mostly this: giving the idea away on purpose, and holding on to the standard.

Aim for something larger than the thing itself

A deck is never just a deck. A booth is never just a booth. The pieces that stay with people point at something bigger, a belief, a way of seeing, a reason to care. When a piece has that essence, even the smallest detail feels deliberate. When it does not, the best execution in the world still feels empty.

So before I approve anything, I try to ask one more question: what is this a part of? If the honest answer is nothing, we are not done yet.

So, what makes for good design?

My answer today, and I reserve the right to change it:

• It works for the person using it.
• It gives its ownership away.
• It belongs to something larger than itself.
• It is simple enough to be believed.

I am sure some of this will look naive in a year. That is partly why I am writing it down. If you disagree, or if I have missed something obvious, I would like to hear it. That is the loop working, and it is the best way I know to make the next piece better.