Every few months a new interface, a new typeface, a new gospel of how things ought to look arrives, and is received as though it were the last word. Within a year it is quaint. Within three it is a period detail — a way of dating a website like a haircut dates a photograph.
IThe Tyranny of the New
Novelty is the cheapest kind of value. It costs nothing to be new; you need only be different from what came before, and time supplies the difference for free.1. The half-life of a design trend has collapsed from roughly a decade in print to under eighteen months on the web. The harder, rarer thing is to be right — to arrive at a form so suited to its purpose that it stops looking like a choice at all.
We confuse the two constantly. A studio ships a bold, strange, of-the-moment site and is praised for courage. But courage in design is not strangeness; it is restraint held under pressure — the discipline to leave out the flourish that would win the award and lose the decade.
IIWhat Endures
Look at the things that last — the Braun radios, the Penguin covers, the London Underground map — and you find the same quiet properties. They are legible. They are honest about what they are. They use no more than they need. None of them were trying to be timeless; they were trying to be correct, and timelessness was the residue.
Endurance is not a style you can apply. It is a by-product of solving the real problem instead of the fashionable one.2. Dieter Rams called it as little design as possible — the tenth of his ten principles, and the one everyone forgets. The real problem is usually boring: read this, buy this, find your way. Fashion is the temptation to make the boring problem look exciting instead of making it disappear.
IIIDesigning for Decades
To design for the long now is to make a bet against your own taste. The parts of your work you are proudest of today — the clever bits, the risky bits — are the parts most likely to embarrass you. The parts you barely noticed making, because they were simply the right thing to do, are the parts that will still be standing.
So the practice becomes almost monastic: choose the durable material, set the honest grid, pick the type that was good before you were born and will be good after, and then resist. Resist the flourish. Resist the trend. Resist the version that photographs better but reads worse.
IVThe Patient Object
There is a particular pleasure in owning something that was made to outlive its moment — a chair, a book, a tool that has already survived three fashions and expects to survive three more. It does not shout. It has nothing to prove. It simply works, and goes on working, and asks only to be used.
That is the whole ambition, in the end. Not to be noticed, but to be kept. To make the patient object — the one still worth having when the trend that produced it is a footnote, and the awards are in a drawer, and the only remaining critic is time.
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