Design Not Decoration
Design has been “misconstrued as decoration or as an embellishment.”
—Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator and Director of Research and Development, MoMA, in an interview.
It happens in many fields—whether in the production of a brochure, the renovation of an interior, or the building of an application feature—that “design” is often brought late to the table to prettify, decorate, or add “touch and feel” to something that was always already designed. Because the moment you begin to lay out the content, structure, and form of something, you are engaged in the act of design whether you know it or not and whether or not you are any good at it.
Bringing someone in later, after key decisions are made, someone with special competence in doing those things, to fix or make look good the outcome of those decisions, will almost always waste time, lead to deep frustration, and ultimately make it difficult to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. Because design is about all those decisions, and making them at the right time—design is not “decorative sauce poured on top of content” (to paraphrase the photographer Stephen Shore).