There's no shame in looking good

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1247-theres-no-shame-in-looking-good

by brm • 18 years ago

74 80 18 years ago

37signals.com

sdurkin4• 18 years ago

Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way.

If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't.

river_styx• 18 years ago

Right. That must be why Google, Craigslist, and MySpace are such monumental failures.

sdurkin4• 18 years ago

Google is pretty, downright beautiful in fact.

Notice I said that pretty is good, but not the only good.

Myspace and Craigslist 'can't' make beautiful products, Myspace because that would detract from user personalization, and Craigslist because they never hired the design muscle because it works well enough.

ashu3• 18 years ago

The grand-parent is merely suggesting that Pretty is good and ugly is bad. NOT saying that is the only thing that matters. So your comment is not a refutation. (and hence, I see no reason for sarcasm either.)

sc• 18 years ago

Google and Craigslist are minimalist relics that do a job and do it well. They're too plain to be _ugly_.

MySpace is popular with the same personalizing crowd that would put stickers on their MacBooks.

brlewis3• 18 years ago

People don't have an emotional connection to classified ads or search results. This was an epiphany for me which I detail here: http://ourdoings.com/2008-02

unalone7• 18 years ago

Yes. Nobody sets out to make ugly things. It's just that if they CAN'T make it look good, they justify it by saying that it doesn't matter how good it looks.

All due respect to Matt Maroon, as always, but it's SUCH a snotty thing to dismiss a line of products because they're pretty. It's not only backwards thinking, it's snotty, too.

aneesh• 18 years ago

He didn't dismiss a product because it was pretty. He dismissed the people who buy products solely because they were pretty.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

That misses the point. I don't dismiss the Apple product because it's pretty. I just don't think it's style of pretty is the right for its market.

The Lenovo has a better design aesthetic for getting people to pay $2,500+ for an ultra portable laptop.

nonrecursive2• 18 years ago

I'm sure this conversation has been had on news.yc, but how do you account for ugly ass sites like myspace, plenty of fish, and craigslist?

sdurkin4• 18 years ago

Tradeoffs. Pretty has costs, in one form or another, and each of these firms takes these costs into account.

The original walkman was ugly as sin, but it was cheap and reliable. Had it been beautiful, it would have been even better, but it couldn't, without costing more.

brlewis3• 18 years ago

Aesthetics speak. Craigslist says "cheap". MySpace says "My parents wouldn't like this place and I can decorate it how I want". I don't know what plentyoffish says.

omouse• 18 years ago

MySpace allows people to customize their profiles and while it may be ugly, it's only because the people who design them don't really know any better. They're still learning how to design.

Herring4• 18 years ago

Myspace actually looks a lot better these days. Almost normal.

http://www.myspace.com/

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

All three of those are about the network effect. People will choose the site that most people are at.

Facebook has made serious inroads largely due to better design (in terms of aesthetics and usability) than myspace.

Plentyoffish, craigslist, and Wikipedia are ugly ass sites that seem pretty much unassailable though.

william-newman• 18 years ago

"Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way."

Pretty is often good. Ugly is even more often bad. It has often been that way, and it will often be that way.

"If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't."

Or because your product is wooden pencils, or bulldozers, or parachutes, or test tubes, or transistors, or pillows, or ammunition. Various things resist beauty enough that all you get is the elegance of something that's efficient and reliable, which is not the usual meaning of beauty.

(Yes, I remember our host's SR-71 example. And good sailboats look nice too. But efficient submarines and high speed rockets aren't particularly pretty. Once simple design constraints become too extreme --- streamlining in this case --- it can become hard to satisfy the constraints in an interesting way.)

Various other things like books are borderline cases. A well-done book may have more appealing aesthetic touches than a well-done wooden pencil. But not so many more, because mostly its presentation should keep out of the way of the words. A particularly beautiful fire alarm or fire extinguisher is not necessarily a good idea, either.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

One should not choose between great aesthetics and usefulness. One should seek both.

t0pj• 18 years ago

One should not choose between great aesthetics and usefulness. One should seek both.

Sun Tzu, is that you? :)

tel• 18 years ago

Then it's convenient that, additionally, those two tend to go hand in hand.

jrockway• 18 years ago

The key fact that DHH misses is that the Thinkpad and the Macbooks are both good-looking and functional. It's the same hardware. The Macbook has a glossy finish, the Thinkpad has a matte finish and a roll cage.

Let's fight about something else.

jonmc12• 18 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

    "It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
    Of all things physical and metaphysical,
    Of all things human and all things super-human,
    Of all true manifestations of the head,
    Of the heart, of the soul,
    That the life is recognizable in its expression,
    That form ever follows function. This is the law.”

sabat• 18 years ago

Appearance communicates. That's why, for instance, graphic design is not "making things pretty". It's visual communication.

pavelludiq• 18 years ago

Maybe because of my exposure to punk culture and art, i have a very strange taste, i mean just look at this:

http://www.bside-rock.com/IMG/jpg/Sex_PistolsNever_Mind_The_...

i know its one of the ugliest album covers ever made, but its still one of my favorite peaces of design(or absence of design). Being good looking and being beautifull are not always the same thing, sometimes you need substance, and like the punk of the 70's, you can do without the looks(those guys deliberately made everything ugly), but you can't do without the substance. And yes, i like ThinkPads.

dimitar2• 18 years ago

thinkpads are sexy - they are like a lady dressed in a black dress.

subwindow• 18 years ago

> like a lady dressed in a black dress

..with bright yellow recesses and red knobs all over the place.

The Thinkpad looks like a sexy lady in a black dress, but one who took meth for 10 years and is now sickly and diseased.

dimitar2• 18 years ago

How about red lips and golden earrings? When I touch the trackpoint - a fully inadequate name by the way, I feel the computer feels me, like touching a living creature. The body also feels like skin.

And when I am not feeling romantic TP are really comfortable to work with..

rbanffy3• 18 years ago

Don´t think about ladies in black dresses. Think about a black Land-Rover. Not pretty, but very rugged and functional. It will take abuse no Macbook could ever tolerate.

The only reason to buy a Mac is to run MacOS (and it´s a good one). But it´s not enough for me: I got used to manage my software with a package manager and Mac software management is jurassic in comparison.

_b8r02• 18 years ago

Like a fat ugly lady who's been hit in the head by a mallet - in a black dress.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

And that's why we won't listen to our users about our applications. Better that they be pretty than functional

froo2• 18 years ago

That line of thinking has worked out real well for some software companies...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/arts/television/04conan.ht...

http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/apples-mobileme-meltdown/...

henning• 18 years ago

37Signals listens, they just act on very little of what they hear. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes not.

Certainly they can't implement even all, or even a majority, of the requests they get.

froo2• 18 years ago

I think perhaps James has missed the point. It's a case of perspective and he's read too much into it.

Last time I looked up this site was called Hacker News, not Hipster Fashion Daily - or any other derivative you care to come up with.

It's nice to have nice things, I don't think anybody here would disagree. It's really nice to have nice things that work really well, but when it comes to these kinds of objects and the primary readership of this site, computers are tools in 95% of situations.

I think sacrificing function over form when you're talking about a tool is plain silly... it would be like trying to compare the pro's and con's of buying a ferrari over a pickup truck. They each have their target customer.

rbanffy3• 18 years ago

It seems pretty obvious DHH uses Macs to impress girls on Starbucks. That is why he finds the Thinkpad comparison so offensive.

Repeat with me: It´s just a computer. It´s just a tool. It´s not a fashion accessory.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

He totally missed my point. I blogged a response.

BrandonM• 18 years ago

Well-written and well-thought-out response. It's definitely worth a read: http://mattmaroon.com/?p=472

DabAsteroid7• 18 years ago

This is what you wrote in your response:

spending large amounts of money on products, be they sports cars or inferior laptops, to impress women is a ... (... not very effective) thing to do

Why do you think so? What would you think of the phrase, "Sexual selection and the Macbook Air?"

http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/08/03/sexual-selection-and-how...

In many animals, sexual selection takes the form of elaborate ornamentation - often in just the male of the species. Two well-known examples are a peacock’s feathers and the brilliant red plumage of the male cardinal. Scientists like Robert Trivers have theorized that in most species it is the male that competes for female access because the female makes a larger contribution to the offspring. In one experiment, scientists were able to vary the relative contributions to offspring in Katydids and they observed that when the males’ contribution was more valuable, females began to compete for males.

However, there is significant cost to these ornaments. So why would the genes that direct the growth of ornamental structures not reduce reproductive fitness? After all, the energy that a peacock uses to produce his tail could be used to find a mate or produce sperm. In this example, there are two hypotheses about sexual selection. One is that the ornament is a signal that the male is healthy. After all, a sickly male can’t produce and maintain the elaborate ornamentation.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

Sexual selection is generally about physical traits, i.e. being taller, having blue eyes. (As Wikipedia says: the theory proposed by Charles Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can be explained by intraspecific competition.)

I'm not sure if purchased items would count, though they might have similar effects. And maybe sexual selection accounts for the gene that people who buy stuff because a U2 song was in the commercial possess that the rest of us don't. Nonetheless, it's still sort of a hack, an easy but very inefficient way to accomplish the goal.

Regardless, even if you wanted to go the hacky route, you'd be better off buying a normal laptop for $1,500 less and spending the money on other things. Get a better haircut (only $30-$40), buy some nicer clothes, get a gym membership (and actually go there), buy How To Win Friends and Influence People, take a photography class, etc. Basically better yourself. You'd be amazed how far even $1,000 can go.

Or spend $500 of it on a nice watch, go to Vegas, find a couple cute girls sitting at a blackjack table, and go start plunking down $200 bets. You've got at least 5 of them if you run bad, and I bet they start talking to you by the third. I'm still shocked at how well that works.

volida• 18 years ago

"If you're buying a laptop to impress girls at Starbucks (in which case, you might want to do some serious self-evaluation) this ain't the one for you. If you want to get things done while traveling, you can't beat it."

Well, that's what you said.

I suppose comments on HN are taken seriously and considered well thought-out comprehensing your complete thought. Ok, that's naive.

But it sounds insulting to say they need self-evaluation (which is what I think sparked the post).

natch• 18 years ago

Assuming that people purchase Macs just as a kind of sexual signal is infantile thinking that projects your own motivations onto others. What you think people think is not the same as what they think.

I buy Macs because they help me get more shit done. End of story.

chrysb• 18 years ago

I think everyone is missing the point here. Macs get people laid. If your face isn't beautiful, accessorize yourself with beautiful things.

There's no shame in looking good

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