Name: The Secret To "Great" Design Is Simpler Than You Think
Uploaded: 2025-06-13T19:05:50.000Z
Duration: 7 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What separates good designers from great designers?

To-infinitive

I'm curious first before I try to figure out how to possibly answer this question is what is your intention by asking this question?

To kind of step up the game for yourself if you want to be an overachiever and do great things.

Does anybody have any clue on how to answer a question like this?

Maybe the difference is that a great designer does more than design in addition to being a good designer.

Okay, this is going to get real interesting.

So you have to transcend being a designer.

I guess having the capacity or willingness to push yourself to failure in order to achieve whatever the success that you're defining.

We as faculty, we have these discussions sometimes with students.

How do you become better doing creative strategies and things like that?

Can you step out of that realm and get into other things that you might be interested in and expand upon that?

And then some of those indirect insights can actually be channeled back in.

As a practice of critical thinking is whenever I have an idea, I try to disprove the idea as soon as possible.

So I'm going to try that with Petrula's statement.

So Petrula, I would just ask you, do you know great designers that only do design?

Okay, so that would just disprove that right there.

I'm often misquoted on this, that people think that Chris, you just poo poo and you look down on people who just do a thing.

I think this world works better when there are people who put in their 10 or 20,000 hours just to master something.

There's actually a series of videos and accounts online that showcase people who do the most mundane things really well.

He just sits there and folds a thousand pizza boxes at a time.

Or the guy who makes naan and he just throws it across.

Or the six guys who hammer a spike into the ground in perfect unison.

In the book, The Obstacles Away, there's a quote there in Latin that I don't remember.

Which says something to the effect of, there's nobility in doing humble things well.

And when I got to travel to Japan, I got to see that philosophy manifested in the people there.

They take so much pride in just making sure the table's clean.

Or to take out the trash or prepare a piece of fish or whatever it is.

And I think there's something really beautiful about that.

So I think in our culture, we feel like we have to do more, more, more.

I think the way to achieve excellence is to do less but to do better.

I'm not saying that those of you that have the capacity to do more should not do more.

But I think you should try to master something first before you move on.

There's a tendency in our culture because we get to see examples online of people who seem to have a lot of success.

And it starts to create this very unreal narrative about what can be done in what period of time.

And I promise you, probably unscientifically, 90% of them are scams.

And it's just a matter of time before they get arrested.

So it's this kind of narrative that we get fed into our brain that seeps into our subconscious and why there's such a high rate of depression amongst young people and why they're so anxious right now.

Because we're being fed a false narrative about what can be done.

So I'm going to be a proponent for you just focusing on being good because it's freaking hard to be good.

I think it's really hard to figure out on a gradient, on an objective level that we can get 10 people in a room to even agree what is great design.

It's very hard to figure out what good design is as it relates to what great design might be.

But I think we can pretty much figure out what is bad versus great.

There's a much bigger contrast between bad and great.

So I'm going to assume, Mimi, that you know what bad design is, right?

But let's just say you don't know what bad design is.

Many years ago when I was teaching here, I had this really amazing, super smart student.

And Daniel, when I was talking during my critique, I said, that design isn't elegant.

And I kept using that word over and over again.

He's like, Chris, I know this is a really obvious question and I'm kind of embarrassed to ask you, but what is elegant?

I've been throwing around words that I don't even define and there's no shared definition.

So I'm going to present to you one way of looking at information to help you get clarity.

So let's try this with bad to good design.

Just the difference between bad and good.

So Mimi, you said you know what bad design is, right?

So let's try to use something much simpler, something that's easy.

Like just, let's get a base hit here and let's not go from the home run just yet.

It's not using, or I guess, not using the design principles.

What are those design principles that you speak of?

I mean, everybody should know this, right?

On one side, if you have lots of contrast, the more contrast, the better, the less contrast, not so good.

What we want to do is we want to keep doing this.

We want to find one parameter that we think is good or bad and then we contrast that.

So then we can say on some kind of gradient scale, like, yeah, there's lots of contrast and we can talk about how to achieve that contrast.

So those are all things that designers here know how to do and we can make a long list of them and then we start to get a sense like how we know if our design is good or not.

Dr. Samuel Holtzman, he sat in my class one time and I thought I was a pretty good teacher until he told me what he thought afterwards.

And then I had a come to Jesus moment and he said, you know, here's the thing.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

The Secret To "Great" Design Is Simpler Than You Think

figure

critical

material

period