Strange figurative wording aside, I think the author is reiterating that, in order to go "above and beyond" and stand out from the competition, you have to create something novel and radical. And directed more towards art and creative fields.<p>"Good design" is following all the classic design tips. Like a material website that implements material design correctly, is good design. And this is actually OK and better than "great design" for most situations.<p>"Great design" needs to stand out. And the only way to stand out is to do something weird. Take some fancy website made out of ASCII: not something you should write your IT software in, but maybe good for a portfolio.<p>Radical "great design" is really good for art and music: almost nobody cares about a beautiful portrait, people want something strange and creative. It's really bad for software architecture "design": when writing code, you practically never want to stray from the obvious, traditional path. For UX design and websites it's somewhere in the middle, and depends on what the software is for (e.g. business solution UX is less creative, video game is more creative UX).