We’ve gotten really good at making things look good. There’s a template for almost everything now. A nice font, a clean color palette, a few good photos, some nice spacing, and suddenly you have something that looks like it belongs to Pinterest.
But here’s the thing: something that looks good doesn’t automatically make it good.
You’ve probably experienced this yourself. You visit a website and it looks amazing, but you have no idea where to find what you actually came for. You see a beautiful flyer, but you have to read it three times to understand what it’s trying to tell you. Or you come across a brand with a gorgeous Instagram page and still have no clue what they actually do.
And that’s where things get interesting. Because sometimes, in our effort to make things beautiful, we forget that they are supposed to do something. The design can be beautiful and still be confusing. It can be minimal and still say nothing. It can be trendy and still feel completely wrong for the person or business behind it.
I think we sometimes put too much pressure on the word “aesthetic.” We want everything to look polished, but we don’t always stop asking whether it makes sense. Who is this for? What are they supposed to notice first? What are we trying to make them feel? And after they’ve seen it, what do we actually want them to do?
Those questions might not sound as exciting as choosing a font or deciding between two shades of blue, but they are usually where the real work begins.
Because good design isn’t necessarily the design that gets the most compliments. Sometimes it’s the design that makes someone immediately understand something without having to think too hard about it.
That’s the sweet spot we care about at BookKreative. We love beautiful work, obviously, but beauty isn’t the only thing we’re chasing. We want the work to have a reason behind it. We want it to feel like it belongs to the story, the idea, or the person it represents.
So, yes, make it beautiful.
But before you ask, “Does this look good?”, maybe ask, “Does this work?”
Because when the answer to both is yes, that’s when you have something worth looking at.
You can explore some of our work at bookcreative.com