My former coworker Katie Langerman and fellow designer Anthony Hobday have cofounded a podcast Complementary, "A podcast about the principles and practices of interface design."
Their most recent episode (05) was about "Improving Your Visual Design Skills". One point both emphasized was the knack of "obsessing over details" - both emphasized the importance of doing so, but both seemed doubtful that it was something that could be taught, it seems to be more of a personality trait.
At one point Anthony almost seemed to admit a designer could go too far, after they were talking about the joy of collaborating with fellow detail-oriented types:
Katie: But if somebody doesn't see the details, it can feel like you are nitpicking at their designs, or they don't understand the point: 'Why is that important? We're just trying to ship this thing.'
Anthony: I think a lot of people have experienced that with developers as well, especially if you spend hours obsessing over details, and then you work with a developer who is not as obsessed with details, it can feel like a big slog to get them to notice those details?
Katie: Right.Anthony: It could be - I'm not saying that they're always important details, it could be that the designer has spent TOO long on that and that the developer is in a better place in terms of how much effort SHOULD we spending on this thing. But yeah, I've definitely felt that divide before, and it can be frustrating, because it's not just a switch that people can flip. You know: 'I'll care about details today.'
Now, I have to admit, there have been times when I've struggled with specific kinds of visual detail, I'm a bit face blind and maybe a touch of dyslexia... or maybe it's just a weird synesthesia where I mistype up "b" for "m" and "r" for "4" if I'm going fast - also my reading and writing subsystem lean heavily on the sounds of words, so I suspect it's even easier to make, say, "their/they're" swaps for me than it is for people with a more directly visual form of cognition.
But Katie and Anthony are touching on a more profound split than "perfectionists" vs "sloppy folks who don't give a damn" (or more politely, MAYBE "pragmatists"). The kind of attention a designer like that pays to details represents one side in the great holism/reductionism split that I think is one of the most critical Yin/Yang-ish dualisms - how the quantitative (these tiny details) at some point rise up and merge to become the qualitative (the feel of 'this is good quality' that the final result carries.)
(Also, having worked with many great designers - their tools are often really having to play catch-up when it comes to responsive design and other pieces of the final user experience out of the designer's control. Sometimes, finessing a margin to the last few pixels might be all for nought at a weird screensize - or that precise border might be distorted at a funky resolution - maybe that heading for the section just won't fit with the German translation - or choosing JUST the right shade of magenta that is then viewd on a Mac in ''Night Shift" mode! That's even worse than a poster designer having to sweat CMYK vs RGB or what not! So often tools like Sketch and Figma are used to explore "sunny path" scenarios on the designer's super high quality screen. I guess, good design looks great from the get-go, but great design keeps its looks with different contexts and contents - but with a flexible design the tools aren't always terrific at indicating which details are invariant and which have more "give")
But back to the quantitative details vs qualitative end results... like all great bits of thesis / antithesis=>synthesis, you can't have one without the other, you're not likely to get a good forest if your trees are bad. But sometimes I find myself having to be defensive. The opposite of the "detail oriented" point of view isn't always "lazy and not giving a damn", sometimes the difference is how that kind of perfectionist is zooming in in a context-free way, (according to psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, a highly left-hemisphere activity) while people who are less attuned to that might be more sensitive to how things are working in context. (Akin to the evolutionary older right-hemisphere, which McGilchrist sometimes sees as being shouted down.)
I definitely see rhyming parallels in these splits:
| "detail-oriented" | "eh-whatever-works" |
| Reductionism | Holism |
| Isolated | Context-Sensitive |
| Nouns | Verbs |
| Essence | Surface |
| Unyielding Strength | Flexibility |
| Compile-Time Assurance | Runtime Robustness |
(That last one is related to my new attempts to explain why I wish the industry was less concerned about unit tests vs higher level tests with less-artificial contexts and more comfortable with duck typing than sacrificing concise readability in trying to get JS to behave more like Java or C# via TypeScript.)
Oh and the podcast mentioned some great links I should add into my usual rotation and/or knowledge base:
• https://www.lapa.ninja/
• https://land-book.com/
• https://godly.website/
• https://saaslandingpage.com/
• https://www.siteinspire.com/
• https://twitter.com/awesome_saas
• https://twitter.com/saasshots
Other links mentioned:
• https://open-props.style/
• https://tailwindcss.com/
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