On the Art of Brilliant Titles
Mark Morford's SFGate article,
Lick Me, I'm A Macintosh" asks the question,
What the hell is wrong with Apple that they still give a damn about design and packaging and feel?
to which he provides his own answer,
Oh right like you even care.
Sarcasm aside, Morford has a good point: Apple takes a lot of flack for spending time on design and packaging and "feel" (whatever that is). Their products are more expensive. Their niche market means that some good Windows software is never released on the Mac, or isn't upgraded as quickly as its Windows counterpart.
There's something to be said, though, for paying serious attention to design. "Form follows function," as Frank Lloyd Wright (and others) have said. Or to put it more strongly, as Wright did later--there is not a cause and effect system where forms are caused only by functions. Instead, "[f]orm and function should be one."
Good design is not simply an aesthetic issue, or a matter of making the computer look pretty. In some cases, good design is the deciding factor between success and failure. Good design encourages use; good design makes work (and play) more enjoyable.
(See also, Don Norman's forthcoming
Emotional Design: Why We Love or Hate Everyday Things.)
Posted by johndan at October 1, 2003 03:55 PM
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