As humans, we are programmed to be attracted to what we find beautiful. Something shiny and something pretty will always catch your eye and sustain your interest. It’s just our way, we are drawn to things that satisfy our senses. The way we perceive beauty is a concept that designers spend their entire lives understanding. Nail down that understanding and a designer will always have people clamouring for more.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? That’s what we hear so often in life and yes, it’s true, which is why designers think about who are going to behold their designs when they design. The design ideas don’t stop at just the way something looks. Adding appealing aesthetics to design or creating a design with aesthetics in mind means creating in ways that please as many senses as possible.
Know The Senses To Please The Senses
Depending on what a designer is trying to create, he or she will be trying to appeal to a specific set of senses. The senses here relate to our sensory organs i.e. the skin, eyes, ears, tongue and nose. For the purpose of categorisation from a designer perspective, we can put smell and taste together. Let’s observe the organs and what needs to be considered when trying to make a design that satisfies the senses.
1.) What We See:
Our eyes are our most important sensory organs. The eye is the only sense organ that is connected directly to the brain via the optic nerve. Notice how this nerve seems almost separate from the rest of the eye. In this diagram, the human eye looks like a lollipop and the optic nerve seems like the stick it would be suspended on.
Elements to consider when designing visual aesthetics: Movement, Scale, Proximity, Texture, Colour, Shape, Pattern, Line and Balance. Keep these in mind when designing the look of anything.
2.) What We Hear:
Designers who create while keeping the sound of things in mind have to employ a completely different set of skills. Creating with sound in mind requires a designer to understand how sounds influence us. A video by Fast Company takes us through how popular dating app, Tinder didn’t have any sound before but utilised a sound design company to create sounds that suited their app. You can see their video here.
Elements to consider when designing auditory aesthetics: Melody, Pattern, Noise, Loudness, Pitch, Beat and Repetition.
What We Touch:
Our sense of touch is the most intimate of our senses and, arguably, the one that takes the most effort. It’s also the largest of our sense organs. Think about clothes or the way mobile phones are reviewed. There’s a desire to touch the materials used to understand its value. The way an object moulds to fit your touch leaves you with a feeling of integration and completeness.
Elements to consider when designing physical aesthetics: Texture, Shape, Weight, Comfort, Temperature, Elasticity and Sharpness.
What We Smell and What We Taste:
Our sense of smell and taste are extremely powerful when it comes to our memories. Have you ever tasted a particular dish as a child and then only tasted it again years later as an adult? You probably have experienced your memories flooding back into your head when you smelled and tasted something familiar. People in the food industry often have to design with taste and smell parameters in mind.
Elements to consider when designing olfactory and palette pleasing aesthetics: Strength, Sweetness, Sourness, Pungency, Allergenic Properties and Texture (for taste).
Why apply aesthetic design?
Good aesthetics endear people to your designs. While being utilitarian takes a preference above aesthetics most of the time, there are cases where aesthetics trump the function of the product in question. The fashion industry stands as a testament to this. While a lot of fashion was birthed from a need for functional clothing, there are a lot of fashion designers who design clothes and shoes that are downright uncomfortable but look fantastic.
Though if there is anybody who should tell you about why beauty is important and how it remains important, look to this documentary called ‘Why Beauty Matters’.
Ignore the Portuguese subtitles and settle down into this to look at why beauty has always mattered to us. Back in the day and even now, our ideas of what is beautiful and what is pleasing is always changing.
How to balance usability and aesthetics?
Like most things in the design world, it depends on who is using/consuming/viewing your product. UI UX designers have entire careers built around creating the best balance possible. There are cases where we don’t really care too much about how something looks as long as it performs the function needed when it’s needed. Think about a fire extinguisher, it’s quite plain. Usually, it will be in red because that tends to stand out against a wall and it comes with instructions printed about its use which is easy to follow. This is because everyone is meant to use a fire extinguisher in the event of a fire.
However, the narrower your audience, the more complex a design could become. A designer can then create aesthetics that are meant to be understood and appreciated by a very specific set of people who enjoy the complexity rather than be confused because of it. Snapchat exemplifies a design that is understood far more easily by a younger, more smartphone-savvy user than someone who is currently over the age of 35. In this case, the design here defines the audience for the product itself.
Conclusion
We are all subject to a phenomenon known as the ‘halo effect‘, which states that because something looks good, we associate positive attributes with those good looks. We even have a usability bias where we think that the better-looking thing will also be more useful. Designers need to understand this and deliver products that do what they’re meant for while keeping people in appreciation for how it looks.
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