“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.”

Paul Rand

I’ve always loved this quote. When I was primarily a graphic designer, it was a reminder that originality is not job number 1. In graphic design, communication is usually job number one, and everything else is in service to that.

When I transitioned into primarily UX design and got to spend time in a usability lab, I got to see first-hand how novelty, even if it’s just novelty within a certain context, could seriously harm usability. That’s when it became a mantra. In UX design, usability is job number 1 because usability is the foundation of delight.

Suddenly, books like Homepage Usability, which I found infuriating as a graphic designer because they were so prescriptive, made perfect sense. They were still too prescriptive, but at least they gave me a metric to beat and a method for measuring it.