The Anatomy of Design: Good vs. Bad

Design plays a pivotal role in shaping our interactions with the world, from the websites we visit to the products we use daily. Understanding what makes a design good or bad is essential to creating more effective, user-friendly experiences. The design team at OSP excels at mastering this balance, crafting thoughtful and innovative designs that resonate with users across various industries and markets. Below, we compare 10 aspects of good design with their bad design counterparts to illustrate the key differences.

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• Good Design: Communicates its message clearly and efficiently, focusing on message hierarchy and essential elements while eliminating unnecessary distractions. It guides the user’s eye naturally through the content, ensuring the most important information is easily accessible and understood. A clear visual hierarchy is established, directing the user’s focus to the key elements first.

• Bad Design: Fails to prioritise elements, leaving the user unsure of where to look, which creates a confusing and disorganised experience. It overloads the user with too many elements, making the design hard to navigate. Attempts to fill all white space, lacks clear distinctions between headings and body copy, and fails to provide a logical reading or viewing order. Remember: white space is not the enemy!

• Good Design: Uses a carefully selected colour palette that aligns with the brand and evokes the right emotions, enhancing visual harmony. For example, a calming blue might convey trust and professionalism, while a vibrant orange could express creativity and enthusiasm. The colours are not just visually appealing but also meaningful — reinforcing the brand's message and emotionally connecting with the audience.

• Bad Design: Employs colours that clash, lack contrast or are too bright, causing visual discomfort and detracting from the user experience. Poor colour choices can confuse the intended message — for instance, using too much red might evoke unintended feelings of aggression or urgency, while an overuse of grey can make the design feel dull and uninspiring. Without considering the psychological impact of colours, the design can feel disjointed and unprofessional.

• Good Design: Maintains consistency in fonts, colours, icons and overall style, creating a cohesive and professional look.

• Bad Design: Lacks consistency, with mismatched fonts, colours and styles, leading to a disjointed and unprofessional appearance.

• Good Design: Puts the user first, considering their needs and preferences, and provides intuitive navigation and easy access to important features. This involves focusing on user research, creating personas, simplifying navigation, prioritising accessibility, using intuitive patterns, testing and iterating, personalising experiences, providing clear feedback, and keeping designs simple to meet user needs effectively.

• Bad Design: Overcomplicates interfaces and disregards user needs and preferences, resulting in frustration and a poor user experience. Remember, you’re designing for users, not just for yourself!

• Good Design: Utilises typography that enhances readability and adds character, ensuring text is easy to read across devices. This includes selecting fonts that prioritise legibility, considering proper spacing, font pairing, and weight to enhance readability. It also involves limiting font variations, ensuring good contrast, avoiding overly decorative fonts, testing typography across devices, staying mindful of accessibility, and choosing fonts that align with the brand’s personality and tone.

• Bad Design: Uses fonts that are too small, not brand-relevant, overly decorative, or poorly spaced — making it difficult for users to read and understand the content.

• Good Design: Adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices, ensuring a consistent and functional experience for all users.

• Bad Design: Neglects responsiveness, leading to a poor experience on mobile devices and other varying screen sizes. Mobile users shouldn’t need a magnifying glass to navigate your site!

• Good Design: Embraces negative space, allowing the design to breathe and making it feel open, organised and aesthetically pleasing.

• Bad Design: Overuses effects like animations, gradients and shadows, creating visual overload and detracting from usability. There’s no need to fill every gap — let your design take a breather!

• Good Design: Prioritises functionality, ensuring that the design works as intended and users can complete their tasks efficiently. Objectives should be discussed with creatives before formats are decided.

• Bad Design: Focuses too much on aesthetics at the expense of functionality, leading to a frustrating and inefficient user experience. Sticking to the mantra ‘I’ve always done it like this!’ isn’t always the best approach — consider alternative formats!

• Good Design: Balances familiarity with creativity, offering something unique without sacrificing usability or user needs.

• Bad Design: Follows design trends without thought, resulting in a generic and unoriginal design that lacks authenticity and purpose. Having an awareness of trends is great, but blindly following them? Not so much.

• Good Design: Embraces user feedback and continuously iterates to improve the design. This approach involves testing with real users, collecting feedback and refining the design to better meet user needs. The iterative process keeps the design relevant and user-centered, allowing for improvements over time.

• Bad Design: Remains rigid and static, resisting feedback or failing to adapt to user needs. A design that doesn’t evolve can quickly become outdated or miss opportunities to enhance user experience, ultimately falling short of its potential.

 

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Good design is about finding the right balance between aesthetics and functionality, simplicity and creativity. By understanding the principles that differentiate good design from bad design, you can create experiences that are not only visually appealing but also user-friendly and effective. Whether you're designing a website, app or product, keeping these comparisons in mind will help you make better design choices that resonate with your audience.