This video brings up an interesting question that designers (and other professionally creative people) deal with every day; when is beauty necessary and when is function enough? I deal with this especially often as a web designer since my day-in-day-out experience is dealing with clients who want their messaging prominent and easily navigated without desire for much else in many cases. Actually, the majority of commercial clients are hesitant to move outside of the “normal” (i.e. standardized) user experience at all due to fear that a user will be intimidated by anything that they haven’t encountered a hundred times. So, this brings up another question: does beauty require innovation? Can true beauty be created with used puzzle pieces, or are we just consistently missing great opportunities? Is function EVER enough?

This year I’m trying to make everything I do beautiful. We’ll see how it goes.

Video via Blankenship.