Good Design = Concept + Visual Appeal

User Experience April 01, 2008

Okay, I'm going to amend a post I made a couple days ago on "Understanding Typeface Meaning."

In this post, I said that I felt that learning art history (as far as design goes) would only separate myself from the average person as I design more. I also said that I've seen some artwork that's supposed to be really historically important conceptually and I don't get it because I don't like the visual appeal.

Well, I think I've figured it out.

It's my opinion that designs are made of two fundamental components: the concept on which it is based and the overall visual appeal. Personally, I find most art to be purely conceptual and generally hard to understand. I look at the world from a visual mindset. Some art obviously is good-looking, but there's plenty of esoteric art out there that I don't like but other people love because of its concept and not its visual appeal.

I guess my concern beforehand was that if I were to focus solely on the concept of a design rather than the visual appeal, that I might end up with something that isn't visually pleasing and cut out half my audience. What I failed to realize is that good design is about success in both areas. Having a design that's visually appealing is, of course, very good. But if you can do this while maintaining some underlying concept, then your design becomes that much better. Why only do half of something?

I think the best analogy to this is looking at a popular comedic TV show like The Simpsons or Family Guy. The shows' episodes frequently allude to things in the real world which you'd have to understand in order for the jokes to be funny. As a worldly viewer, the shows become that much funnier when you understand the meaning behind an inside joke. However even if you don't understand the references, the shows are still funny. They succeed in pleasing both a general audience and a smaller, more well-read audience. This is what good design should do.

When I talk about "designing for the average person" I really am being somewhat shallow, in a sense, because even if something looks very good, it may not have any reason. And though this is usually fine if I'm attracting a broad audience, sometimes it's important I have both components and some concept.

In fact, it's really easy to come up with a design that looks good. That just uses all the design principles and techniques that I've outlined in previous posts: color scheme, layout, typography, etc. It's much harder to make illustrating a concept good. Lots of times I'll come up with an interesting idea but have a lot of trouble trying to illustrate it decently.

This is the challenge of a good designer: making something that has a broad appeal but also has some depth and meaning.

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