# aesthetics are secondary > The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the problem. > > — Charles Eames > Thinking of how a chair looks comes pretty far down on the list of things I worry about when designing. I only think about how they look in relation to how they are doing their job. They must be comfortable—comfortable for the kind of use they're going to get. > > — Charles Eames We want things to look good. We want everyone to think our work is cool (although how do you define cool?). How something looks and the style it has are mostly surface decoration. How well the design functions and how well it solves a particular problem are better questions to ask. If you can find the correct answers then the decoration and style take care of themselves. Function comes first. That being said, beauty is important and worthy of consideration. > … we call something beautiful when we gain pleasure from contemplating it as an individual object, for its own sake, and in its presented form. > > — Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction > Effective visual design consists of selecting—for each part and for the whole composition—the visual treatment that most effectively realizes the communication goal. Visual design, however, is lifeless when its only concern is for communication efficiency. > > — Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano, Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques > You have to search long and hard to find a simple, functional and beautiful chair, beautiful crockery, a functional, all-purpose door handle, a functional and beautiful lamp. It has become clear to us that beauty can no longer be developed out of function alone; instead, the demand for beauty has to be set on the same level as a functional demand, as it is a function too. > > — Max Bill, Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt > The main interest lies in giving an aesthetic shape to the functional form, or rather, perhaps, in shaping the form in such a way that it does not run counter to function but is as practical and as beautiful as possible. This is a matter of experience and judgement; it's about the harmonious line of a curve and the exact balancing of volumes and proportions, which are just as important as the pure function. > > — Max Bill, Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt --- tags: #creativity #process home: [[! creative process]]