The Myth of Perfect Web Design

September 22, 2005 | 13 Comments

Orignally written August 4th, 2003.

“Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

I overheard that in a meeting recently and I wholeheartedly agree with it. It’s obvious to me that it can be meaningful to many endeavors, but I think it has a particularly strong meaning when applied to Web design and development.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as a perfect Web design. I’m surprised how many people don’t agree with me on this. I’ll take it a step further, striving for perfection in Web design, while admirable, can actually end up having an adverse effect on your projects.

The meaning of perfect and Web design

To understand what I mean let’s define what perfect is and what it implies. Perfect has many meanings, the main meaning, according to Webster’s, is “being entirely without fault or defect.” It doesn’t take a perfect genius, pardon the pun, to understand what that means in terms of Web design.

For practical purposes two things should be noted about “perfect” and Web design:

It’s subjective. What one person might see as perfect, another might see as mediocre, for example.
It implies that there is only one way of doing things.

Based of those two fairly obvious assumptions there is no such thing as perfect design, or a perfect solution on the Web. That is ok, we don’t need a perfect Web, in fact I’d settle for a pretty good Web at this point. But is there anything wrong with striving for perfection? On the surface the answer quite obviously is no, but expecting perfection can cause you problems.

The problem with perfect

A good Web design or solution is based on solid goals. How you achieve those goals and the process you take in getting there is very important. The expectation or illusion of perfect can, and often does, get in the way of getting to those goals in the best possible manner.

Solid goals very rarely, if ever, line up. What I mean to say is that you usually have to balance one goal against another. A perfect solution to one of your goals may have (and often does) an negative impact on another goal. It’s next to impossible to do the right thing all the time.

It’s also important to understand that when designing for the Web often times there is no one right way of doing things. Most times there are multiple ways of getting something done, and most of these ways have various pros and cons. Lots of times there are lots of very good ways, and very different ways to achieve your goals.

Be wary of the one who tells you there is only one way to do something. With any Web project, you’ll have multiple competing goals that in turn have multiple competing solutions. If you think you don’t, it’s time to have another look at your goals.

Get to very good

So what are our options, now that we’ve ruled out perfect? Well, the good (or bad) news is that most Web design and most solutions you see out there are just plan bad. I’m sure someone thought many of these solutions we’re perfect. Perfect can be subjective, remember, and that’s pretty scary.

To be better than most what you need to do is decide upon what would be very good, stick to that, and strive for what are the best possible solutions. They won’t be perfect, but they’ll be in the realm of the realistic and very good if done right.

Starting with solid goals and devising a realistic plan and solution to implement those goals is the key to very good Web design and development. If along the way a perfect solution is stumbled upon? Hey, bonus! The key here is to not let unattainable goals, or unrealistic expectations keep you from attaining the best possible solution.

Hey, it’s not perfect, but it’s good, and that’s better than most.

Filed under: Web Design
Keyword Tags: web+design

Comments

1. nortypig said:

This is so true you’ve hit it right on the head. Its a fault I’ve fought in my obsessive perfectionist nature every minute so I know exactly what you’re saying. How many days have I spent even on a free less important job looking for the perfect palette, the killer image, the perfect text. Perfect doesn’t exist. I hope I’ve learnt but its been the hard way.

Posted on September 22, 2005 04:23 PM | #

2. Nollind Whachell said:

I couldn’t agree more. Perfect equals rigid. An “effective” site however gets the job done and is much more flexible than rigid perfection.

Actually I’m wondering if that is why I’m seeing more and more simpler sites lately. The more people add to a site the more focused and rigid it seems to be with a certain style, mood, or feeling (which is probably why people redesign so often). Yet, we ourselves are never that way. Our moods and tastes are always changing.

I’ve always wished someone would create a site that had multiple coordinated designs that shifted slightly based upon the current style and feeling of the site’s author (i.e. slightly darker one day, bright and sunny another day). Would be tricky to do though because everything in the site would have to be quite flexible. :)

Posted on September 22, 2005 05:23 PM | #

3. Danny Foo said:

The thing of web design in my country; Malaysia, is that clients do not take it seriously. As much as I’ve tried persuading them that the proposed design might not be as fancy as Template Monsters, it achieves their goals almost perfectly.

The subjective manner of design here is a very huge flaw because here they hire you not as a professional but as one of their employees.

Anyway, very good article written Keith.

Posted on September 22, 2005 06:29 PM | #

4. Shirazi said:

New design. It looks nice.

Posted on September 22, 2005 07:41 PM | #

5. Jens Meiert said:

“most solutions you see out there are just plan bad”

That’s right. While perfection in fact is unachievable, there is unbelievably much room for improvement.

Posted on September 23, 2005 02:05 AM | #

6. Martin said:

I agree with the overall article, so this can be viewed as nothing more than a nitpick: your assumption #2 doesn’t at all follow from the definition of “perfect” or from anything involved with applying it to web design. There may be any number of theoretical solutions that are “entirely without fault or defect”.

Of course, in real life, none of those solutions exist so it hardly matters how many there ‘may’ be. I did say it was a nitpick…

Posted on September 23, 2005 06:51 AM | #

7. Keith said:

Martin – Well, I guess there’s no such thing as the perfect article either. ;0)

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:16 AM | #

8. Jennifer said:

“Perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Voltaire must have been at your meeting. I have had this quote taped to my monitor for some time now to remind me not to kill myself for perfection.

My perfectionist attitude is feed by coding. Design is another story altogether. There I strive for constant improvement, continually trying to move forward without losing site of the overall goal.

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:39 AM | #

9. Onno said:

I think it is in Malaysia where the people believe that only the gods are perfect, so everything man makes has to have at least one little imperfection in it.

But more specific on web design: only the designers tend to see the little imperfections in designs, most users are perfectly happy with a nice looking readable design.

I have spent way too many hours fixing those small 1 pixel differences during the NN4 era. I certainly go for ‘pretty good’ these days :)

Posted on September 26, 2005 05:27 AM | #

10. ExcitedEYE said:

I agree with you there is no such thing as a perfect web design, as the search engines keep changing their algorithms and web designers keep finding new ways to get better search engine ranking, it seems like the definition of perfect web design has been lost in the race with getting seen. Along with the fact that seen perfection is only in the eye of the beholder so what is good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander…

Posted on October 17, 2005 04:47 PM | #

11. Dan, web designer said:

Ok, I agree with you. But is there anything perfect in the world? Everybody sees the world in his own way. It’s proven that if some people describe the same event, their stories are a little bit different. So… what’s perfect?

Posted on October 24, 2005 12:50 PM | #

12. Maj said:

The last thing that I can think of coming close to being perfect, was Nadia Comaneci and her 10 at the olympics in 1976.

As for web design like anything else it is in the eye of the beholder. I have done websites as a novice and thought it was the Mona Lisa. As I look back on that work a couple of years later with a little more knowledge and talent I say ugh!

I was once in a community college class on desktop publishing (some 15 years ago). The instructor had us take some copy a logo and picture and told us to make a one page newsletter. Well a week later when we got together it was amazing how many different ideas everyone came up with. Alot of them were creative in different ways and right there it told you there was more than one way to do something good, but not perfect.

Posted on January 29, 2006 06:43 PM | #