Why I stopped trying to make things beautiful.

For a long time I judged my own work by how it looked.

It is an easy trap. Beauty is the part people compliment. It photographs well, it wins the awards, and it is the bit you can post.

It is also the bit that arrives last.

The things I have made that people actually kept were not beautiful first. They were clear first. They did one thing well, in a way that made sense the moment you picked them up.

The beauty came afterwards, almost as a side effect, because a thing that works properly tends to look like it does.

This is not an argument for ugly.

Craft matters. Proportion matters. The weight of a button, the radius of a corner, the exact grey of a label. I care about those more than most people I work with.

But I care about them at the end.

When I start with beauty I end up defending decisions I made for the wrong reasons. When I start with clarity, beauty becomes the last problem I get to solve, with everything else already holding it up.

So I ask a different question first now.

Not whether it is beautiful.

Whether it is obvious.

If it is obvious, I can make it beautiful.

If it is beautiful and not obvious, I have made something harder to use and easier to like.