Aesthetics Are a Moral Imperative
The title of this post is graffiti from the game Bioshock. As an avid gamer, I enjoy the subtle details that their creators place in the game and this is one that I think all designers take to heart. In essence this post boils down to examining the ethics of the aesthetic decisions we make.
Wikipedia defines moral imperative:
“a principle originating inside a person’s mind that compels that person to act.”
This means we do things automatically, as a mental instinct. Instinct has its benefits, one is that we do these things subconsciously. However, instinct can sometimes become out of control, or worse, be ignored because it is instinct. Should not aesthetics be the first instinct a designer has?
Aesthetics are key, without them our designs would be loathed or avoided. So why do we as designers make our aesthetic decisions? I have seen many designs pass where the designer had free reign yet aesthetics have been completely ignoring for the sake of visual experimentation or lack of experience. Certainly visual experimentation cannot be faulted nor lack of experience, however we as designers have an ethical obligation to anyone who would encounter our products to make them aesthetically pleasing.
What happens when someone sees something that is hard on the eyes, difficult to read, or otherwise not pleasant? They leave. Plain and simple. The person simply should not have to put any additional effort into dissecting a design to make sense of it. Not only are we doing them a disservice by implementing designs that fall short of acceptable, but we do a disservice to ourselves and indeed our industry in the process.
Aesthetics are also not merely picking colors that work well together. Ok, so you’ve mastered the color wheel, but have you thought about composition? Composition is a complex topic (perhaps for a later post) and there are aesthetics in composition as well. Having your design crammed so tightly into its space makes the elements blur together and has a similar effect to mixing all the colors together.
In summary, take some time at every state of your design and remind yourself that aesthetics are a moral imperative. Am I really making every aspect of design work together aesthetically? Does the composition make certain colors dominate too much? Is asymmetry making my design too unbalanced?
It’s not all about pumping out pixels en masse, every pixel should be a masterpiece in the collection.