I've known Scrivs from his days in 9rules, and while I respect what he's doing over at Drawar, I'm beginning to question his focus on design as an answer to ... well, everything.<p>Good design only helps if your site is useful; this in particular applies to both blogs (like his) and webapps. He argued recently that:<p><i>Do you think it bothers the Gowalla people that they put so much care and effort into the design of everything that they do and Foursquare is still right there with them with a significantly worse design?</i><p>That's missing the point. The point is that Foursquare is doing something right, and that something is likely more than just design. I've not looked into the location app space recently, but my guess is that Foursquare reached critical mass before Gowalla did. Connecting an app's value to its design only makes sense when all else is equal.<p><i>When Google is brought up as an example of mediocre design that succeeds, people come out from the woodworks to argue that it is actually great design and base it on the success that they have had. I don’t believe it.</i><p>I think design only gives you an advantage when you're competing in a space with little or no technical differentiation. In this case, Google has had such a huge technical advantage over its competitors that it didn't matter what design they used anyway.
It's well known that Google collects massive amounts of data, and does massive amounts of UI testing (such as the infamous testing between 85 different shades of blue), so I'm somewhat skeptical that it's design is mediocre because this guy says it is and he's a web designer. Data trumps intuition every day of the week.
Design is problem solving. Nothing else.<p>You don't apply aesthetics to a design you apply a style to a design.<p>Whether something is aesthetic i grounded in culture, history and so many other things.<p>The google style is bad by print and 1999 standards, but we have come to like it because judging visual things is not only about how they look but how we feel about them.
Aesthetic is a consequence of good design. A good design is almost a science. If you ask anybody to divide a page in two section, it isn't a coincidence if almost everyone will divided it using the Golden Ratio without even knowing what it is.