“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

R. Buckminster fuller

I love this quote because it gives me a constructive way to work with beauty as a strategic imperative. Beauty is, after all, subjective, so designing for it as an outcome can be really challenging. Beauty is also not the primary objective of most design projects, but it is an unspoken expectation of hiring a designer.

Beauty, as a concept in design, is somewhat fraught because many (most?) stakeholders think that it is explicitly what we do, to the detriment of all other positive outcomes of a good design project. It’s tempting to rebel against beauty as an objective, but at the end of the day, it is a huge and wildly strategic way that designers create value, so we have to figure out how to integrate it into our practices. This quote reminds me that, while beauty may not be the explicit goal of the project, it is often a mark of quality (not coincidentally, this is why consumers prefer beautiful products) and that good solutions will often have an inherent recognizable beauty.

I also use this as a framework for other indirect objectives and I particularly like to mix it with the previous quote I wrote about from Paul Rand. Swap out Simplicity for Beauty. Swap Beauty with Intuitive. Try Delightful. It gives me a healthy way to relate to any attribute that is a mark of quality but not the actual objective.