Detail awareness
Apparently, yesterday’s Big Thing was the Awareness test:
Pretty interesting, right? This made me think about the level of thought and craftsmanship we, designers, frequently put into some details. That may be too much sometimes.
Charles Eames said: “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Who am I do disagree with him? Really, how could I ever go against this? The thing is, love details. I truly believe the dedication to seemly minimal things can more than often be the one way to really get a design right; I think the same way when deciding programming approaches to some problems:
But one other thing I do believe, however, is that sometimes designers get to the detail phase before everything else is done. It’s not rare to find a website with great finish, but lacking some essential item in the menu, or perhaps a design that doesn’t make it clear what’s the goal of that site is.
There’s some groundwork that often get left behind in the race for perfect details. And achieving overall beauty should not, under any circumstances, get in the way of detailed usability, legibility and purpose-filling considerations. My point is to suggest that details can and should be prioritized: never ignored, but always contextualized in the flow of a project, coming up when all functionality is right.
Because the result, sometimes, can be in some ways similar to the video: you may do a great job drawing and animating a break-dancing, moonwalking bear, and the user ends up never appreciating the level of work you put into it, because she simply needed to count passes.
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