Many of us designers (not all) have an artistic bent. I understand that this opinion is a spicy one because the industry zeitgeist is that designers (1) are “problem solvers” not artists and (2) our value is increased when we approach our work with a business lens and not something as frivolous as art. But how many of us started out as a kid with a pencil who just liked to draw? Maybe we were inspired by the connection between album art and music as teens, or saw an awesome scene in a movie and needed to figure out how they did it. Maybe we appreciated a particular graphic and simply wanted to recreate it. Maybe we just always kinda had a creative bent and we slowly formed that nature into a career.
I think this desire to create often goes hand-in-hand with a desire to be seen. While we’re frequently embarrassed of our work, we also desperately want to be praised for it: we want it to resonate with people, to go beyond the surface level and leave an impact on the world. This desire, this hubris, seems to infect most of humanity. It’s been a driving motivation for the creation of great cultural works, technological advances and indeed the progress of humanity over the eons.
Though the average creator may strive to create such a legacy, the desire is rarely satisfied. It’s perpetually out of our grasp. This is in part due to our ephemeral and inconsequential nature in the grand scheme of the universe, for what man can influence the turning of the worlds? All our works will inevitably turn to dust…
Perhaps I am alone in this feeling, a designer whose origin story involves a creative bent and whose career has been spent navigating the tension between the artistic and utilitarian. In which case, please excuse/ignore this post as the personal cathartic ramblings of a digital native trying to make sense of the world. If not, then allow me to turn from my middle-school level philosophical musings and speak towards the intent of this post (which very well may also read as the melodramatic existential journaling of a teenager):
The natural creative bent many of us designers inherit fosters the desire to create something meaningful. Something that communicates a truth or helps move the world forward. We want the things we make to have “Personality,” by which I mean that our creation (product, website, campaign, brand, etc.) is infused with a clearly definable character and set of opinions that elicits an emotional response from an audience.
This desire, however, is quickly frustrated by the mechanics of Scale and business needs. For we all exist within market forces and must create with the intent to make businesses money. And regardless if the goal is money or cultural impact, then to further our goals we need to reach a bigger audience. In other words, you need to Scale, and Scale is inherently opposed to Personality.
Scale opposed to Personality
Systems based opposition to personality
To say it simply, when a business grows, the number of voices and opinions also grows.
Each individual voice is shaped by the circumstances and goals of that individual. Development doesn’t want the extra complexity of a shiny UI because they’re beholden to a timeline and budget they’re responsible for. Legal won’t allow simpler phrasing to protect the company’s trademark position. Account doesn’t want to include a feature because they’re responsible for ensuring the company remains profitable. You can add any number of examples here. Each voice tugs and pushes toward the outcome that works best for them and their specific goals.
“System thinking is simply thinking about something as a system: the existence of entities—the parts, the chunks, the pieces—and the relationships between them.”— MIT Open Learning
As the number of people contributing to design feedback grows, so does the complexity of managing that feedback. Bolder elements of the design are slowly chipped away, competing priorities and desires result in middling compromises. As the product is shaped by the design process its form is slowly molded into a generic conglomeration of ideas. Often the result isn’t something anybody is truly excited about but is something everyone can at least agree to. This is a form of the Condorcet Paradox, summarized nicely by the ol’ maxim, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.”
Design complexity at Scale
A secondary but equally notable reason Scale dilutes Personality is complexity within the design itself. I’m going to use design systems as an example here but this is much more broadly applicable. As a system grows the strings that tie it together become infinitely more convoluted.
Let’s take the case of the humble button: A button that may appear anywhere requires tight padding and a small font size lest the characters wrap when placed in tight areas. This versatile button might need to be placed side-by-side with a secondary button, it might appear within a card, the button’s text length might be long, or all of the above. With all these considerations and constraints it’s just infeasible to have a larger text size or loose padding.
However, a button that needs only exist in the hero of a homepage may be large and attention grabbing, featuring spacious padding and larger font sizes. Or alternatively (in the case of more elegant branding) the button could also be smaller and thinner using whitespace to focus attention on calls-to-action.
So as we can see in this button example: As the number of contexts a discrete component may appear within grows, the possibilities for what that component could be are diminished. It’s an inversely proportional relationship that could apply to any variety of modules and components.
This creates a particularly difficult challenge for more visually oriented designers. Designs and components that have Personality tend to require more space and flexibility, which in turn reduces the number of contexts it may be placed in. At Scale, attempting to create components with Personality would result in both an unmaintainable library of one-off components and a visually cluttered/discordant design. Design systems were invented largely to solve this very problem.
The logic is similar to that of aerodynamics in car design. There is a mathematically optimal shape that maximizes volume and minimizes drag, the water droplet. So naturally, car design would evolve towards this direction.
It is the same with system design. Buttons within large systems tend to be similar because that’s just what practically works. E.g. they frequently use a 14px font size because it’s small enough to fit most contexts but large enough to still be legible.
Money at Scale pushes towards homogeny
The market itself also encourages a trend towards the average.
Apologies for another car reference but they’re so relevant… Mini returned as a small car in the early 2000s. Armed with fresh branding, Mini became a counter-cultural rebel fighting the American trend of supersizing and boldly proclaiming the ethos of smaller living. But over time the Mini’s size grew and it’s now literally as large as an SUV. While I don’t know why Mini went big, it follows that they’re using the same playbook as Porsche:
Porsche’s crossover, the Cayenne, is a complete rejection of its heritage. Why would a sports car company make a crossover? The reason is that Porsche nearly went bankrupt in the 90’s. In order to survive, they hired a new CEO named Wendelin Wiedeking. Wiedeking’s philosophy can be summed up in his own words, “Every product must earn money. Otherwise you are simply pursuing a hobby which is no task for an auto-business.”
Personality is inherently divisive, it will resonate with some people and not with others. To choose to create an opinionated product you are choosing to reject a specific audience. So Personality can’t possibly Scale within the broader market because it limits its audience and thus has a cap on cash flow. This could apply to anything, whether it’s indie games, music or art. The more a product shifts away from the average the smaller its potential audience is.
Even when Scale isn’t an immediate factor for a smaller business, the influence of larger companies pushes towards the average. Smaller companies don’t have the luxury of market research, large quantities of data or teams endlessly A/B testing their products to conversion nirvana. But they can borrow strategies from the rich and powerful in hopes of replicating their success. So, whether it’s a wise decision or not, the temptation to play it safe is irresistible and the generic designs of larger organizations are reproduced in smaller organizations furthering the homogeny of the market.
Pseudo-scaled Personalities
Transient Personalities:
There are a few Personalities that managed to expand their scope and reach the masses. I write this as a perceived general trend and not a universal truth: These large audience Personalities tend toward the inflammatory and/or pure novelty which leads to a lack of truthiness.
We can look at the marketing efforts of Wendy’s, many of Musk’s various projects, Liquid Death, Duolingo to name a few. Wendy’s aggressive Twitter campaign was a darling of marketing circles, circumventing expectations and providing a humorous moment for their audience. Liquid Death pulled the same thing off at a grander Scale. But in the end, Wendy’s sells burgers and Liquid Death sells water. Wendy’s stock is at a 10 year low and Liquid Death’s valuation peaked two years ago. When the novelty wears off, all that’s left is a base product (which in this case are generic burgers and sparkling water).
So these “Scaled” Personalities tend to be flash in the pan marketing (anyone remember ship my pants?) rather than a lasting characteristic of a product or brand. While the audience is broad, its lifetime is limited and thus fails to achieve the label “Scale.”
Luxury Personalities:
There are some bolder brands that have stood the test of time. We can all name them: Rolex, Ferrari, Armani, etc. These brands are household names with strong Personalities. They often create bespoke immersive websites and elaborate marketing campaigns. But they target a small audience, only the wealthy and privileged can afford their products. This is the opposite of Scale, these companies sell fewer products, for more money further validating the claim that Scale is opposed to Personality. While working alongside these brands may satisfy the designers’ egotistical desire to create impactful work, only the lucky few actually get to.
Wait, does Personality even matter?
So I’ve found that Personality cannot reliably Scale and most of us digital designers have difficulties arguing for and creating Personality… but maybe we shouldn’t even bother concerning ourselves with the sameness that exists in the digital landscape. Maybe the pursuit of Personality is merely a futile attempt to appease our own egos. And in fact, many product designers and UX thought leaders have praised the growing homogeny of the web and only recently has there been a negative public opinion on the uniformity of our digital world.
The benefits of homogeny
One of the longstanding arguments for homogeny is the case for a more consistent experience across products and thus a more usable digital world. The more things operate similarly across tools, the easier it will be to use them. You only need to learn once that the logo in the top left corner of a website will take you home. Buttons all have a similar shape and thus you intuitively understand that it’s an interactive element.
Repeatable patterns such as these have been canonized by the industry as best practices. We will use these patterns (regardless of brand or context) because we know it will be intuitive to the people using our products and there’s almost nothing to be gained by breaking them.
Which, of course, creates another hurdle when trying to create a product with more punch. For the more Personality a thing has, the more it needs to diverge from the mean. To bring character and uniqueness to a product, patterns need to be broken and expectations need to be usurped which is an obvious step away from usability. And while there are some moments where Personality and usability can coexist, digital products should (and do) emphasize utility.
“Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing — design systems must maintain consistency within products (internal consistency) and align with external standards users already know (external consistency), reducing cognitive load through predictable patterns and familiar conventions.”— UXUI Principles
The utilitarian approach
Until recently (and even still) utilitarian design was considered the epitome of design philosophies in tech spheres. This modernist approach came into vogue during the tech boom and continues to be a driving force today.1
Usability has been a tried and true pillar of design for ages. Utilitarian design as a concept existed well before the tech boom. The saying “form follows function” was coined in the late 1800’s and similar themes can be traced as far back as Plato. It’s an obvious truth; it’s much more important that a product work well than that it looks good.
Even so, if we go beyond mere utilitarian design and create a product that “looks good,” we still might not have infused the level of uniqueness and character required for it to achieve Personality.
In the wake of the modernist techno-optimism this industry was built on (and the capital forces driving the market) there’s little appetite or need for something as superfluous as Personality. Despite Design’s best efforts to quantify the value of brand and Personality there’s still little measurable ROI or actionable metrics to pull from. Building with Personality is a heavy, risky investment with very little to gain.
Personality thrives in the small
Despite the challenges of creating Personality at Scale, the pursuit of it and its worth are still deeply valuable. It just tends to be more… personal.
Nothing captures this (and my own design ethos) better than a decade old TED Talk about custom prosthetics. In it, Scott Summit presented on his work of creating personalized artificial limbs for amputees. Each piece is a bespoke creation, custom made for each person.
The value of small
The artificial limbs mentioned above are deeply personal. They are made to reflect the Personality of the individual. In so doing, people receive back a portion of their body image. It’s a deeply edifying, humanizing approach to something that traditionally is a merely mechanical/utilitarian tool.
This would not be feasible at scale. You can’t mass produce designs tailored for so small, so niche an audience and expect a return. The value is in the way an individual can choose to present themselves to the world and in the way that individual can be edified through their prosthesis.
This individualized presentation doesn’t have to reflect a chosen limb, tattoo or clothing. It can be a blog theme, an app, a Winamp player skin. When we choose the aesthetics of our tools we also come to a better understanding of our own aesthetic preferences. This in turn helps us identify the specific reasons we appreciate a thing. And so we come to understand ourselves and our values at a deeper level.2
The preciousness of small things
Additionally, we tend to value Personality in things that aren’t big. The local coffee shop or bar (whatever that may be for you) are irreplaceable institutions in our towns. The copy/paste Starbucks with nominally local themes tends to carry far less meaning to us than the coffee shop whose owner we converse with on the regular. We gladly choose to go to our chosen local joints but we begrudgingly accept goods from chains.
Beauty as meaning
A created thing has the right to exist just because it’s cool.
Personality in product is inherently divisive because it doesn’t appeal to everyone. But it’s also remarkably inclusive in that those who enjoy it find a shared sense of togetherness.
“[W]e desire others to agree with our aesthetic judgments… Harmony that is based on freedom and unity despite diversity marks what makes aesthetic agreement precious. This concord is neither a given nor trivial, since such harmony-in-judgment does not result from a foregoing community (of faculties or interests or tastes), but it may result in a newfound community of appreciation that forges new social bonds as it informs us of hitherto unknown commonalities with those whose tastes we already share.”— Claus Dierksmeier, Why Beauty is Indispensable to the Common Good
I could go on: There are endless writings on the value of beauty in this world. From Kant to Aristotle, it’s proclaimed that aesthetics gives us a sense of meaning and purpose. There are even studies on the positive effects of beauty on human physiology.
And while everyday beauty surrounds us, it is Personality that pulls us out of the day-to-day tedium and brings focus to an object. Personality is the interrupting force that causes us to actually observe and take pleasure in what we’re seeing.
Tangentially, defining the standards
Every so often something novel is created and it’s a genuinely good and genuinely unique idea. And a fraction of those creations evolve past mere “novelty” and become the new standard by which we operate.
“Instrumentalism spoils not only intrinsic values but also crowds out many of the effects it seeks. Society, modern philosophers concluded, stood to benefit much from the lesson implied therein: that, paradoxically, utilitarianism is not the path to optimal utility, whereas empathy and unconditional commitments are.”— Claus Dierksmeier, Why Beauty is Indispensable to the Common Good
This cannot happen if we only ever produce generic, utilitarian designs.
So then how now shall we design?
The original inspiration for this post came from Rafa’s episode on Dive Club. In it Rafa discusses the tension between designing a unique aesthetic and the practicalities of homogenous design trends. He does not anchor himself in one camp or the other, his view respects the establishment while celebrating personality. On this episode he exudes a mature and responsible relationship to his work.
We can follow his lead and accept that most projects are going to be light on the Personality. Businesses have needs and rare is the project where breaking the mold is actually a feasible path forward. Yet us designer cogs in the business machine are still people with individuality, characteristics and Personality. We aren’t so separate from the work we do and we can bravely seek opportunities to infuse some of that Personality into a utilitarian project—we can create micro moments of joy or “delight” as we say in the biz. I’d encourage us to go further though, Personality is so much broader and has so many more possibilities than the cliché of delight.
Do your own thing
I acknowledge imbuing brief moments of Personality into a corporate project might alleviate some of creative angst but it doesn’t necessarily leave us feeling satisfied.
I also acknowledge the following is a privileged position to take: If you’re seeking to create something with meaning, just do it.
Outside the confines of business needs you can create whatever you want. You can create to send the world a message, to tell a joke, to better the lives of those around you or simply for the pleasure of making something. From Henry Desroches’ seminal piece “A website to destroy all websites”:
“Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.”
While the quote is specific to websites, I see no reason the same notion shouldn’t be applied to any other medium. Remember the reason you became a designer and create.
Question the need for Scale
Tech is built on the idea of Scale and us digital designers have inherited much of that ethos. It’s built on the concept of fixed costs and an unlimited pool of money. Build it once, sell it a million times and then be rich.3 Scale is a good thing… but maybe it doesn’t need to be our de facto pursuit either.
One of my all time favorite apps is Interval Timer. It’s small, it only does one thing but it’s reliable. It’s never posted a notification, never tried to upsell me on anything and looks nothing like a basic Swift app. It’s just a good simple tool and I love it.
I think there’s space for apps like these. For smaller social networks, for more unique and meaningful digital spaces. But you don’t get there by chasing money. You get there by simply creating for the joy of creating.4
Maybe there’s a better world where our digital spaces are more like ethereal bars and coffee shops. Like a place where your barista knows you by name and knows what your order is. Like a website is a place where you’re comfortable with your stream of regular customers. You know who’s coming and how to serve them and don’t feel a need to franchise out.
Maybe sometimes we go to the mall to acquire our mass produced goods on the cheap and other times we go to the grungy local to meet up with our friends for the evening.
1 All that time spent choosing a lock-screen wallpaper, typography for your high school essay, the color of paint for your room etc. is not in vain. In a way, it’s you becoming more of yourself.
2 Rant: The early web 2.0 sought to bring a utopia, a democratic market of ideas, to the world. To get there, we would have to innovate relentlessly holding our attention on utility while relegating beauty and Personality to the back-burner. For in utility, in usability and function, we would increase our adoption rates and bring utopia out of the machine. Despite the visible failing of this dream its ethos is still a driving philosophy today.
3 I’m not super convinced that tech costs are actually as fixed as we first believed. Meta for example, is continuing to spend cash and invest in new products despite having fully functional products in place. And OpenAI’s planned trillion dollar investment in infrastructure is pushing the concept of “fixed cost” to the extreme.
4 “The key lesson taught by modern philosophers? In the same way that love bestows many benefits but cannot spring from their pursuit alone, beauty needs to be appreciated first as such before we can unlock its bounty of treasures. Thus does an aesthetic formation, by the by, teach us how to approach unconditional goods (freedom, for example). Instead of valuing them merely for the effects they condition or the benefits they bestow, we should approach and appreciate them for what they are in themselves. For their fruits are secondary and, what is more, they are most readily available when these goods are pursued primarily on their own behalf.” — Claus Dierksmeier
