‘”Usually, when something become useful, it ceases to be beautiful”
Théophile Gautier

I read this quote by Theophile Gautier when I was 6, and it never ceased to haunt me until then. As a child, I thought it was a pretty harsh statement to say beautiful things were useless. Of course I didn’t have, at the time, enough abilities to catch all the subtleties of  this statement. Anyway, I thought that was paying no respect to the spoon designers, cause spoons were a really nice object after all.

As I grew up, I studied fine art and learned a lot about aesthetics over there. I learned that it’s not something we all share equally. I learned that aesthetics were more influences by your education than I primarily thought. I learned that not everybody thought spoons were nice and beautiful.

Today, I work as a designer for the web. My job is to design useless things, sort of. Useless things that are used anyway : people go on those websites. They read them. They navigate through them.
I started questioning myself about the aesthetics of the website I saw. Some were nice to my eyes, other were really not appealing. But in the end, those I came back to more often were not the sexier, shinier website.  And I was not alone. Facebook, Myspace, Amazon, Ebay, Google… all those websites show not that good design when not no design at all. They’re not beautiful, not even slightly.

Aesthetics are a lure when designing interactions and digital behaviors, somehow. The role of a designer is not to design “pretty”, it’s to design efficiency, usability and brand consistency.
Pretty is the cherry on top that proves you’re good at what you do.

And by the way, read some poetry by that good’ole Theophile Gautier. It’s useless and beautiful. Just like he wanted.