Why do so many everyday objects look worse the moment a…
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Why do so many everyday objects look worse the moment a designer gets involved?
There is this pattern I keep noticing where a perfectly functional thing gets redesigned and somehow ends up harder to read, harder to use, or just visually noisier than the original. The classic watch dial is a good example. Someone decides the numbers are too obvious and swaps them for abstract tick marks or weird geometric indicators. Now you have to decode the time instead of just reading it. That feels like the wrong direction.
Same thing happens with signage, packaging, even furniture. The original versions often have this plain logic to them that newer redesigns strip out in favor of something that looks good in a portfolio shot but fails in the actual environment it lives in. The Wired cover situation is kind of the flip side of this, where something hits hard because it did not try too hard.
What I cannot figure out is whether this is a briefing problem or a taste problem. Are designers being pushed to differentiate at all costs, or is there genuinely a gap between designing for aesthetics and designing for how people actually interact with something? Curious if anyone has a specific example where the redesign made the object objectively worse to use even if it looked cleaner.
#art
There is this pattern I keep noticing where a perfectly functional thing gets redesigned and somehow ends up harder to read, harder to use, or just visually noisier than the original. The classic watch dial is a good example. Someone decides the numbers are too obvious and swaps them for abstract tick marks or weird geometric indicators. Now you have to decode the time instead of just reading it. That feels like the wrong direction.
Same thing happens with signage, packaging, even furniture. The original versions often have this plain logic to them that newer redesigns strip out in favor of something that looks good in a portfolio shot but fails in the actual environment it lives in. The Wired cover situation is kind of the flip side of this, where something hits hard because it did not try too hard.
What I cannot figure out is whether this is a briefing problem or a taste problem. Are designers being pushed to differentiate at all costs, or is there genuinely a gap between designing for aesthetics and designing for how people actually interact with something? Curious if anyone has a specific example where the redesign made the object objectively worse to use even if it looked cleaner.
#art
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