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Comment by rantfoil | Hacker News Reader

Hubris? Hubris is a loaded term that is purely subjective. He's one of the most talented designers I know, and he deserves to speak strongly. Humility doesn't need to enter here.

A humble designer is one who affects no change indeed.

Designers should be less humble. When engineers or business guys or management or anyone makes a product lousier, they should get up and shout, and raise hell.

Apple wins because the guy who cares the most about user experience happens to run the show. And last I checked, humble wasn’t really a word you could use to describe him.

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And when Steve Jobs was 30, he was kicked out of his company because it turned out he was an asshole before he actually knew what he was doing. He almost ruined Apple, remember? And people hated him because he talked about things he didn't actually understand.

Twelve years later, he'd matured enough to know what he was doing, and then came back in and blew us all away. But Jobs was a stupid kid too, and arguably he'd have had an easier time in the eighties if he'd known ahead of time just how ignorant he was.

He's talented if you think knowing big fonts are pretty is talent. He's got a good eye for design, absolutely, but I've never seen him design anything with any complexity, and that's where things get tricky. If I'm designing rinky-dinky gadgets and HTML pages I can make them look good too. But the whole point of this post is that when you're designing major things, dumping a bucket of white paint on everything isn't enough.

I think you ought to know that most, Garry, seeing as Posterous is the posterchild (ahem) of web sites that work brilliantly but aren't at all comely. It's hard to make complex things beautiful.

Jobs isn't a designer. That's why Apple hires people like Ives. The best visionaries/CEOs aren't good at everything -- they're good at critiquing others' work and letting the experts do what they do best.

I absolutely agree. But my point was that saying being an asshole is okay because Steve Jobs was an asshole is a bit lopsided. Jobs was an asshole when he was ignorant, too, but he was still ignorant. Similarly, Dustin might be an ass, but that doesn't give his words an instant mandate.

As a designer, I've never found arrogance a good strategy to get people to agree with the reasons for my design.

Design, contrary to popular belief, is not that subjective - there are reasons and explanations for design decisions. Presenting them with arrogance without regard for another person's opinion is not a good way to get consensus. If you are talking to a business person, it is the designer's job to frame the decisions in a context that makes sense to them. Same with an engineer. Defend your decisions, but also know when you're wrong.

Apple wins because they hire great designers. The designers do 10 pixel perfect mock ups, then narrow it down to 3, and then defend and refine the best one. Do you really think the iPhone design was pushed forward by one arrogant designer who had no regard for the opinions of others on the team? It took years to get it to where it is today.

Is Dustin talented? Sure. But I know dozens of designers who could have produced the AA.com comp he did - it's easy to design without constraints.

It goes deeper than the pixel. In fact, I could care less about visual design. I think that's an over-emphasized aspect of design.

It goes to philosophy. Anyone can make pretty things, but it takes a damn intransigent defiance to do whatever it takes to make great experiences.

I mean experience design. And experience design isn't about making everyone happy. It's about firing people when they get in your way, and breaking down fiefdoms that make products crap.

A thousand people all compromising will result in a product or service that dies the death of a thousand paper cuts. This is starting to sound Ayn Randian, but sadly this may be an important aspect to the creation of great things.

There's a reason why it takes a single auteur to craft a masterpiece, whether a movie, a website, or the experience of flying. Too many cooks DO spoil the broth. And it takes a person with the authority to cut things to one's vision to make great consumer experiences a reality.

What people call Dustin's hubris and arrogance is merely his gall to point out the things that someone in control should do. It's something that is not exercised enough, and I think rather than cut down someone who aspires to the best, perhaps we should look to see what really sucks in our lives and focus on ways to make it better.

Please don't talk about what you know nothing about. I'm in college in part for film. It takes hundreds of people to make a good movie. I'm not just talking about technique: Citizen Kane wouldn't have been Citizen Kane if Welles hadn't had a dozen brilliant minds helping him and influencing his style. Similarly: The best web sites on the Internet are designed by multiple people.

It does sound Randian. Like Rand, you're ignoring the sheer enormity of what it takes to make a masterpiece.

Fair enough -- look, the counter point to this is that films constantly get absolutely destroyed by producers. And those are the decisions that matter -- how the movie ends, what gets cut and what stays, etc.

I think again you're getting hung up on the little things -- I'm not talking about how you need great grips and cinematographers and editors, and I'm not talking about how you need pixel perfect comps by 10 visual designers. All of that is micro.

An auteur has final cut, and if even one of those 100 people screw up, then the auteur says fix it or its not ready.

But you're conflating two different roles. Actually, the point you're making works perfectly to disprove what Dustin wrote.

The producer is not an artistic role, he's a business one. Most producers are a lot smarter than you'd give them credit for, but they ignore their artistic sensibilities and focus on the bottom line. Before you get to them, you have lots of brilliant collaboration: Directors and writers and cinematographers and directors of photography and sound editors and actors, of course actors, all dance together and form really incredible things in tandem. Very rarely is a single voice dictating. Even in the case of the great auteurs there's collaboration: See how David Lynch works in tandem with Angelo Badalamenti on most of his projects. So that all works perfectly, right till you hit the business people.

Dustin's writing from the assumption that making a web site is all about the design. He's treating web sites like you're treating film. And, like you, he's assuming that the reason AA's web site sucks is that the artists are terrible at their jobs, and he's railing blindly at them, when in fact the people in charge aren't tasteless so much as they don't care about taste as much as the artists do.

I actually wrote an off-the-cuff post about this a little while ago regarding the music industry, how problems in perception start because we don't realize just how much more important business is than art for most companies/people: http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/200996589/talentless

I actually agree with you there -- the people in charge don't care about taste. But I think one aspect is that experience is the product. And the people in charge should care. They should care a lot, and it's why Virgin and Jetblue and Southwest eat AA's lunch.

The website is only one aspect of a panoply of experiential factors that the management of AA should care about. It is their product. It's their reason for being. But they don't care.

And I think for Dustin, that is the problem he's calling attention to.

That's why I'm sort of conflicted about this argument. On the one hand, I think AA's web site is a shitty mess. On the other, I don't know enough about AA to know that their web site's what's bringing them down, and I wouldn't be surprised if their current site was somehow very effective. Look how many people go to see Michael Bay films. People like bad things. This might be an instance of a bad thing that lots of people for whatever reason use.

The other side of the problem was also illustrated here, which was that Dustin provided a very shallow analysis at first, and that analysis hasn't gotten much deeper. His take on things moved from "the designers know nothing" to "the CEO knows nothing". I suspect he knows even less about business than he does about design. It further irks me that at no point in this conflict has he said "I'm sorry that I said some stupid things; let me rephrase myself." Instead it's "This guy makes some good points but I'm still in the right." It's as smug and insincere as his shallow article designs that get so lauded.

(At that, I think I'm gonna bow out of this argument, at least for tonight. The snippy emails Dustin sent me in response to one of my comments is making me look only at the flaws in his logic, so I don't think I'm being as bipartisan as I'd like to be. Because I won't be able to edit this in the morning, I'm sorry if I came across as a dick in this discussion; I really enjoyed having this debate.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)

Are you arguing that because one person made it, Primer is the greatest film of all time? If not, my point still stands, that people can work together and still create great art.

I'm simply pointing out an easy counterexample to It takes hundreds of people to make a good movie.

It doesn't have to be that way.

I'm sorry if what I said didn't come out right. I was responding to Garry's suggestion that a masterpiece had to be the product of a single auteur's mind, which is an unfortunately common assumption. I thought the same about Citizen Kane, for instance, until about a month ago. After all, Welles wrote/directed/starred, right? But he worked with some brilliant people who had skills he simply did not have, without which Citizen Kane could not have been as good as it was.

Except that wasn't your point... you said lots of people were required to make a great film, which is much stronger than lots of people can make one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranormal_Activity_%28film%29

Keroac wrote On The Road in a single take, but that doesn't mean most books aren't the result of people collaborating, and it doesn't make On The Road any better an artistic accomplishment.

If you want to liken Curtis to Keroac, that's a good comparison. Both make shallow things that appeal to you until your tastes have matured somewhat. I'm not going to say AA is Ulysses, meanwhile, but all of AA's competitors' sites were designed by commitee, too, and it worked great for them.

Apple has thousands of employees. But it's not design by committee. There's a strong drummer in that company that keeps everyone marching in step, so that the entire company adopts and shares that one person's vision, or at least the general philosophy behind it. That's not to say that the drummer has a vision that goes unaltered by interactions with other smart people, but when their vision changes, it propagates.

That's one way it can go. But can also work where the final vision is a collaborative effort on the part of all the people working on it.

Apple's strategy is actually originally inspired by the Beatles, where five people all contributed and the resulting songs sounded nothing like any one of those people in particular. I'm certain if Steve Jobs designed everything on his own, Apple would be different than it is with a dozen people all working on one thing. And Jonathan Ive says this directly in interviews. He refuses credit for his work, because in his mind it's the entire team working together that's responsible for his final work.

Curious about the bit about strategy inspiration - do you remember where you learned that?

Sure, Jobs isn't designing every little piece - it's more that he serves as the dictator. Because he's very unforgiving in design reviews, I think his subordinates start to think like him.

Dictator usually have advisors, but in history, the dictators who are swayed by lots of advisors with strongly competing interests tend not to do too well.

http://cnettv.cnet.com/60-minutes-steve-jobs/9742-1_53-50004...

Thanks for retrieving that. What he says and does may be slightly different (especially in a TV interview), but pretty good video.

You are equating humility to being an ass-kisser. You can be humble and raise some hell; people will respect you for it. If you're a dick about things, people will soon learn to ignore you.

You can dissent and be humble - the two are not mutually exclusive.

In the glory days of Microsoft (circa Windows 95), the company culture was very different than in the Ballmer Administration. There used to be a class called 'Precision Questioning' that was specifically about being very efficient at asking very pointed, very direct questions. To the uninitiated, it came across as incredibly rude and disrespectful.

But it was effective. Things got done fast, and BS was caught immediately, because the questions that got asked were rude, disrespectful, but vitally needed to make the right decisions. It cut through to the truth as quickly as possible.

I think there's something happening here -- being direct and truthful hurts, but to create great things, you have to set aside feelings.

Since Ballmer took over the reigns, Microsoft no longer teaches this course to its managers. Kinder and gentler, he said -- but there's a very real cost to kinder and gentler.

Microsoft's success (and failure in many areas) extends beyond communication styles. In part, Microsoft developed a "we know best" culture that fails to see both opportunities and hazards. Being so inwardly focused creates a low sense of urgency. Obviously AA and other large corps face the same problem.

Still, it is possible have direct/pointed discussions and maintain humility. Take Zappos for example. Two of Zappos core values are 9.Be Passionate and Determined and 10.Be Humble. The two are not in conflict with each other. They've done well, as has Chick-fil-A - another large company that esteems humility.

I agree, direct and pointed questions do come across as rude and people need to learn to deal with them. "Why should I trust what your saying when your last recommendation cost me $100,000.00" sounds rude, but its just direct.

However, if you add "you stupid idiot" to the end, then you've increased the rudeness without increasing precision. This is how a lot of the original post came off.

Hubris was the best I could come up with. Dustin himself describes it as vitriolic below, which is better fit I think.

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