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Comment by random3 | Hacker News Reader

(I believe) 80% of design is technical and 20% is creative.

This means developer built UIs, documents, etc. could look waaay better by following simple design (typography! included) guidelines.

I believe these guidelines exist, but there's no well defined, available, or well-known "grammar" (as in this type of grammmar https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.html) and there's no set of rules.

With a proper grammar and rules we could go a very long way. Other examples are

"What every engineer should know about..",

https://12factor.net/,

https://semver.org/ etc.

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> "80% of design is technical and 20% is creative."

Can you provide an example of a 20% creative decision that has no technical aspects?

When/where/if: 1. Illustrations should be used. 2. Photos should be used. 3. IxD (interaction design) / animations. 4. Colour palette selection / creation. 5. Flourishes.

These are the things I struggle with when designing generic corporate marking websites. I'm not a designer but I've worn the designer hat many times. I always warn my employer/client that I'm more of a technical designer than a creative one. Nowadays I just stick to application design since it's 100% technical.

Example: as someone who's more technical than creative I could have come up with the overall layout of the Excalidraw+[0] website but I don't think I would have thought about adding circles around keywords or the dashed line that leads users down the page.

[0]: https://plus.excalidraw.com/

Playfulness, "flair" and other emotive forces guide creative decisions usually, but there's nothing stopping a technical person from arriving at similar outcomes via a more technical process. It will take more time and be less fun, less satisfying, but it's possible.

For example, once the basic IA is worked out, you could have a phase of the project called "flourishes", where your knowledge of illustrative techniques, eye-tracking, colour theory and UX tricks and so on, guides the design. Along with business needs, communication preferences... Another phase could be "product photography" where knowledge of what makes a good photograph comes into play.

But yeh it's usually easier to get a professional designer who enjoys and does these things all day long!

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