We all benefit from better design.

The last line of this tweet hit me right in the face today. We all benefit from better design.

I guess I’ve never really thought about it before, but “modern design” or a “modern aesthetic” is like a fluid, always-moving glacier. New stuff and old stuff constantly grind against it, and somewhere in the middle there’s a loose convergence of colour, style, shape, feeling, experience.

What I like most about it is that it enables us to imagine a modern aesthetic. I know that that isn’t an actual thing that you can point to or print off, and you’d probably never get two people to agree on it, but it does provide some weight to your opinions. At the moment, for example, its flat, has muted colours, and often has thin sans-serif type. You can love or hate it, agree or disagree, but it’s true. In a year’s time, it will generally be something different. Again, the older and the newer will still be there, but we’ll still have a new, pervading “modern aesthetic.”

What excites me about this most is the weight it lends to a new design of your’s. When you present a prospective design to a client or boss, and they hate it because it’s “grey” or because it’s “boring” and “flat”, you can point them to something huge like Google and tell them to get with the times.

This excites me quite a bit.