SXSW is in March 2021 and so the annual CX.Report is coming soon …

I seem to have drifted away from the space of design in the last few years.

That became particularly obvious to me when I bumped into a collection of my old “design-isms” over on my main site, design.co. There’s a list of my design tweets from the early days of Twitter, before anybody really cared about Twitter too much.

Back in the 00s, there weren’t a lot of @people on Twitter, so it was a productive karaoke mike for me to test out ideas in what I felt was a safe place. But it’s changed as a place to publicly experiment, and for me to think out loud about design. In an unrelated tandem, my curiosities shifted from design to product management, which led me to launch a blog in that vein, maeda.pm, and yet another blog, maeda.dev, to reach backwards into my engineering past. The net result is that today I feel thoroughly uncomfortable, and that’s not just because I bought a lot of expensive domain names to manage my own identity crisis.

Yet at the same time I don’t feel bad at all because the journey has led me across many fields of interest, and I feel better now for having taken it. There’s a certain sense of equilibrium that one can feel when they traverse across solid, liquid, and gas. Maybe this is what a “plasma,” or the fourth state of matter, is like? It’s not a state of nirvana, or anything cool like that.

Meanwhile I feel a renewed pull of gravity back to design. To reconcile that thought, I picked two design-isms from my list that lean closest to my current state of mind. And I’ll attempt to explain where the inspiration came from. Sound good? Okay. Let’s do this.

Design is all too often used as an attractive costume for a so-so idea.

The first time I encountered the commonly pejorative phrase “lipstick on a pig” applied to design was from a design instructor at RISD. My own design training came from an academic program in Japan, so I figured this was a phrase I just didn’t know as a foreigner. I’m terrific at creating metaphors but terrible at reading them so I didn’t get it at first. Let’s decode it:

• The pig is a metaphor for something that an engineering effort has created which works but is unattractive and that nobody would want to kiss.
• The lipstick is a way to express the process of applying makeup to a face to make someone look more appealing and “kissable”.

When the meaning of “lipstick on a pig” started to sink in for me, I realized it was something a man might be more likely to say for reasons that didn’t appeal to me. And since I’d heard it from multiple male designers with strong notes of, “I mean … you would never kiss an ugly woman, right?”, I guess that was the impetus that made me want to rephrase the concept into the form of that Tweet back in 2016 in this form.

Design is all too often used as an attractive costume for a so-so idea.

Design makes what is hard, easier. And makes what is easier, memorable.

It was 2015 and I was getting a feel for how there are really multiple kinds of design in play when you use the word “design.” There’s the functional component that leans towards the engineering needs of “make it work” and the business needs of “make it affordable”, which all have to be achieved alongside the ultimate user’s need to feel like they’re getting something that’s usable. In the design-thinking world this is referred to as achieving a balance between feasible (engineerable), viable (sellable), and desirable (usable).

I realized that there’s also the art of brand making — which has one foot in the graphic design world and the other in the marketing world. Making something memorable is part art and part science, and it’s definitely connected to the act of making and shipping an incredible product or service. But it sits more at the “candy wrapper” level than the actual chocolate bar inside. Thinking that way is different from a pejorative “lipstick on a pig” statement because we need to remember that the “candy wrapper” is often what sells the product.

Think of how people shop for wine. They can’t easily taste what’s inside, and so the main indicator of quality is usually price. But the secondary indicator tends to be the label.

Keep in mind that if the wine, or candy bar, is crap (i.e. the actual product itself), then a fantastic candy wrapper will have done its job once. But you shouldn’t count on the customer coming back. It’s not the candy wrapper’s fault.

The actual product design should have made a positive moment of value creation for the customer — and that happy moment of success for the customer is what they will remember. Branding is powerful when it helps you remember that your successful moment can be attributed to the product that did the job for you. And when you see that candy wrapper out in the world, you’ll feel like it’s well worth another go.

Design makes what is hard, easier. And makes what is easier, memorable.

Interested in learning my dad’s fried chicken wings algorithm? I posted on that here on Medium a couple weeks back. And if the topic of How To Speak Machine interests you, there’s a book for that. Thank you for tuning in! — JM