A few days ago, John Maeda, Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic, shared this tweet:

Good design is about clarity over style, and accountability over ego.

— John Maeda (@johnmaeda) March 14, 2019

He is right. We are all responsible for what we create and the ego of a designer should never influence the design in a way that it negatively affects quality. But it was primarily the first part of the tweet that got me thinking because it touches on something quite important.

There is much truth in this statement, yet it is something that still isn’t well understood, it seems. Good design has intention and it has to communicate something, often on many different levels, to be effective. This makes clarity essential: The purpose of a design has to be clear, the functionality has to be clear, and the message has to be clear.

Style, though, in the sense of a distinctive aesthetic appearance, might appeal to the eye and thus successfully deceive people for a little while if a design lacks clarity. But taken all by itself, style is not enough for a design to be effective. If the message isn’t clear, making it look pretty will only get you so far. Style in the sense of appearance is not sustainable. It is volatile.

Yet, many designers seem to still favor style over clarity quite often. Why? It might well be that, sometimes, designers are themselves deceived by style, by an extraordinarily well-crafted sensual appearance. Sometimes, designers also simply fall in love with the artistic side of design so much that they get lost in it and forget to look with a beginners mind. Sometimes, designers deliberately use style to “seduce” clients and stakeholders to get approval or to gloss over certain shortcomings. Style certainly is powerful and seductive. But maybe the primary reason why so many designers prefer style over clarity is: Styling something is easy. Making something crystal clear is hard.

Making something crystal clear requires straightforwardness, consistency, and perseverance. It requires advocating for something and at the same time being open to change your mind. To achieve clarity, you need to be willing to ask questions, to challenge every detail, and to reduce something down to the essential. Clarity is when you communicate exactly the right amount of something, not too much, but at the same time – and this also often gets confused – not too little. Only because we make something less complex, it doesn’t automatically get more clear. Sometimes, you have to add the right amount of complexity to make something clearer. Maps, for example, can be exceedingly complex yet still strikingly clear.

Making something crystal clear also means knowing not only how to say something and how much of it but, first and foremost, what to say and why. And for this, it isn’t enough to simply slap some lorem ipsum text into your design and wait for someone else to fill in just the right words later. You need to know how to encode your message so that the right people are able to decode it. This is standard semiotics but it requires a deep understanding of the people you want to reach. You need to understand your audience, their needs and wants, what drives them, and the context in which they might interact with your design. You need to work with content first – maybe not the final version of it but already on point regarding the message – and design with this material, the real material, all real materials, constantly prototyping, observing, and improving every aspect of your design until you know it works.

And this is where style comes in again. Because, of course, style has its place. Which is also why John wrote “clarity over style” and not “clarity instead of style”. There is still an and. Style can be what sets you apart from the competition. Style can create identity and convey emotions and atmosphere, even a feeling of familiarity. Style can support your message by further improving clarity.

Good design is about clarity over style. Combining clarity and style so that they complement each other and the design reaches another level of fidelity is mastery.

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