Taste for Makers

If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

  1. ​You feel this when you start to design things​
  2. ​Good design is simple​
  3. ​Good design is timeless​
  4. ​Good design is often slightly funny​
  5. ​Good design is hard, but looks easy​
  1. ​Beauty in flight​
  1. You feel this when you start to design things

    Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things.

    As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. If so, your old tastes were not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that taste can't be wrong.

  2. Good design is simple

    Good design is simple. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. Similarly, in painting, a still life of a few carefully observed and solidly modeled objects will tend to be more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar. In writing it means: say what you mean and say it briefly.

    When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.

  3. Good design is timeless

    Good design is timeless. Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer: if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself. Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they left little room for those who came after. Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow.

    Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition change with time, so if you can make something that will still look good far into the future, then its appeal must derive more from merit and less from fashion.

  4. Good design is often slightly funny

    Good design is often slightly funny. This one may not always be true. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke.

    I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.

  5. Good design is redesign

    Good design is redesign. It's rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change.

    It helps to have a medium that makes change easy. When oil paint replaced tempera in the fifteenth century, it helped painters to deal with difficult subjects like the human figure because, unlike tempera, oil can be blended and overpainted.

  6. Good design can copy

    Good design can copy. Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it; next he tries consciously to be original; finally, he decides it's more important to be right than original.

    I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that's no reason not to use it. They're confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.

    1. ​Four stages of competence​
  7. I could do better than that

    As a practical matter, I think it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. Most of the people who've made beautiful things seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. Great work usually seems to happen because someone sees something and thinks, I could do better than that.

    1. ​Notes on the Synthesis of Form​

    This is a primary argument of Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form — it's easier to recognize bad fit than it is to produce good fit, and so good design ends up being a process of incrementally smoothing out the rough edges of something that's not quite good enough yet.