Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Rob Sutcliffe

Quotes are a really great way of us simplifying a message down to its absolute core. Just like a nice simple piece of design, we boil a thought down to the basic essence of the message to help us remember it and help us spread it. Sadly, like a bad buzzword or piece of corporate jargon, it can lose all meaning as it gets bashed around and misinterpreted over and over again.

Here are three commonly used quotes I believe we need to think about a little more. I keep hearing them misused, so let’s see if we can tune them up a little

Form Ever Follows Function

In the late eighteen hundreds, the USA became rich, and cheap steel made it possible to build much taller buildings. The American architect Louis Sulliva was one of the original designers of grand new building around New York and Chicago. Louis attributes some of his success as an architect to a Roman ideal that form ever follows function, the aesthetic of an object should reflect it’s purpose. A bank should look like a bank, and a house should look like a house, the problem is a house is now 50 stories high, and both might be in the same building! Louis Sulliva would design buildings to be visibly different for different vertical sections of the building to communicate it’s function. Louis Sulliva added ornate features to a building’s design not just to help explain it’s purpose but also to add new meaning. New buildings had a unique set of purposes, and so needed a unique style. Decorative nouveau elements were added to buildings, giving buildings distinct style and laying down inspiration for the art deco architects of the next century. Today people travel to New York because of it’s striking distinct architecture, and it’s seen as a city that works.

Panelák is the name given to those nasty Soviet tower blocks in former Czechoslovakia; it means panel building. These were quickly built post-war to house all the people. Little thought was given to the form of the building, and so form did not follow function… form didn’t come into it at all. These were built this way because they’re cheap and normally they’re torn down as soon as something better can be afforded. People living in paneláks have reported not being able to remember which one they live in on the way home because hundreds of identical building are crammed together.

Czechoslovakia didn’t have the money at the time to make the kind of buildings that were designed and built in New York a hundred years earlier. It’s not just money that makes people mess up this design process, take a look at the failed Bijlmermeer project in Amsterdam. The form of these buildings does not follow their function. Now take a look at your smartphone, almost everyone reading this has a rectangle of plastic and glass with no indication of its purpose. We know it’s a smartphone because this shape and size plastic, metal and glass have added this meaning over time. I’m always a little amused when a new smartphone comes out with some glossy video of the phone from all the angles telling us it’s beautiful as if it isn’t identical to all the other phones. The only real downside to this tho is that sometimes you pick up the wrong phone and go out and start getting other peoples calls, it’s like the residence of a panelák going into the wrong house by mistake.

Your phone does about a thousand things, so it’s just not possible for the form to follow the function. So when you go to a website or an app on your phone, it’s even more critical that the form follows the function of that app. The first iPhone was really into the skeuomorphic design which means the thing should look like what it does, or form ever follows function. Microsoft started designing in flat design, if you regularly read about design, you’re already sick of the argument and well aware of the difference and advantages of each so I’ll leave it at that. But usability tests still report skeuomorphic design to be more usable, even as recently as 2017. Ironically flat design is often used to give an aesthetic of been more usable while actually damaging the user experience. With flat design, the form isn’t following the function.

People often say that form follows function to imply that the form is less important, they haven’t understood what it means. I often think the post-bootstrap/post-flat-design internet looks a little like a post-war panelák. Form didn’t follow the function of either and we’ll tear both down as soon as we can afford to.

The Whole is Other Than The Sum of It’s Parts

Kurt Koffka was observing the lights around a sign, one of those vegas style signs with all the bulbs around the edge. The lights were timed to come on in such an order with such timing that it appeared to be a snake of light moving around the outside of the sign. You used to see them outside casinos and on Broadway sighs to grab peoples attention. Kurt wondered what point two lights seem to move from one bulb to the other and at what point they look like two lights flashing independent. So he did some tests, looking at the proximity of the bulbs and the timing of the flashing, this was the start of Gestalt Psychology. If you haven’t heard much about gestalt psychology, not to worry there is normally a pretty in-depth description of the theories posted on here about every 24hrs. In short tho, it’s about how items in a composition relate to each other because of contrast, proximity, scale repetition and a series of other techniques.

Gestalt psychology is essential knowledge for anyone working in visual design and pretty useful for people in any design field. The issue I have with this quote is people often miss-quote and say “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. This is less of a miss-quote and more of a miss translation from German to English. Kurt saw those lights flashing and saw a light snake, something completely different to the parts that make it up. Not more or less, but different. It’s often possible to combine elements together and for them to be less than the sum of their parts. Check out the footage of football hooligans on the streets of Marseille in 2016; lot’s of people one very idiotic whole.

I’d happily argue that the most important thing in aesthetic design and usability design is keeping it simple. I believe it’s one area that aesthetic and usability are firmly aligned that the worst thing to do to design is to overcrowd it, to cram too much in. It hasn’t always been that way, back in the early days of web design news editors were so use to talking about the fold that they thought it applied to websites. The fold in a newspaper means you can only see a handful of new stories without picking it up and opening it. Obviously, you don’t see a news website on a shelf next to all the others when you load it so the competition isn’t there, but also it’s about as hard to scroll down as it is to look down. Basically, there isn’t a fold on a website but it did take a few years before digital design was mature enough for people to actually do the user testing to find that out. Another old wives tale online is that everything needs to be x clicks away, it’s not important as long as people feel they know where they’re going as they navigate the site, the x clicks myth also forces us to cram stuff in. These old wives tales lead people to cram stuff onto their site. If you go to a website and there are too many things trying at the top of the homepage with no hierarchy (visual hierarchy is one of the gestalt psychology theories). I believe it’s like going to a conference and putting two speakers on the stage at the same time, however good each speaker is their talk is ruined by someone else speaking at the same time. Having two people give a speech at the same time is a whole that is less than it’s parts. Having a website with everything crammed ‘above the fold’ is a website with a whole that is less than it’s parts.

Our goal with design is often to simplify and minimise as much as we can, it’s often said that it’s all about what we get rid of, rather than add. There is a sweet spot somewhere, and it depends on the exact industry, but it’s always true that beyond a point the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steel

This famous Picasso quote is obviously stolen, but did it retain it’s meaning? According to the ‘Quote Investigator’ website, it was 1892 when William Henry Davenport Adams wrote: “Great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.” W.H Davenport Adams died in 1891 so this was probably written just before his final days and printed a year later.

Did Picasso improve when he imitated W.H Davenport Adams quote? In a way, he did! If you take a poem and steel each word of it, you plagiarised the poem, there is no value in what you just did. You can change the font and the letter spacing but the actual poem is stored digitally the exact same. Now try taking a Picasso painting, get a colour palette, mix your paints on the palette and make a copy of that painting. Do this ten times and you have ten different paintings! Each one unique, each one has some value.

Picasso had painted incredible classic paintings from a young age. At the turn of the century interest in African culture spread to Europe, the book Heart of Darkness (more recently made into the motion picture Apocalypse Now) helped people see the damage being done to the continent and humanised the inhabitance. Picasso was living in Paris when art from Africa first started been displayed in galleries. The bold shapes and bright colours of African art was in complete contrast with his current style but Picasso copied them all the same. It was his experience copying such a range of art that allowed Picasso to create something truly unique, using inspiration from many places. Everything he copied encouraged him to experiment with new colour combinations and new brush strokes.

Often overlooked by art and design students is the importance of imitation and remixing. Try recreating Apples website and advertising but using the brand guidelines from Nickelodeon. This exercise introduces you to other ways of seeing the world and other techniques to create a great design. It gives you a few more techniques in your design tool belt and gets you a little closer to becoming a Picasso of design. But you’re not mixing paints here; you’re not making actual brush strokes. The design is digital; it’s closer to a poet choosing the exact words of a poem than a painter making marks on a canvas. So as a designer or digital artist we don’t want to copy or steel another design, adding the blandness of the internet. We want to imitate and improve. Here is a quote I made myself taking inspiration from both:

The great designer imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.

So form follows function means the form should indicate what it does, not that form is less important. The whole isn’t more than the sum of its parts but different. And great artists can steel, but great designers should imitate and improve. Three quotes that we might want to think about what they need a little more before our next great design.

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Design Quotes We‘re Still Getting Wrong was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design Quotes We‘re Still Getting Wrong

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