The fight against ugliness

Vignelli said this like a soldier, and he meant it. Ugliness is rarely anyone's decision. It accumulates: one more banner, one more font, one more urgent thing that must go above the fold, each addition reasonable on its own.

Which means the fight is not one heroic redesign. It is a hundred small refusals, made politely, every week. No, the logo does not need to be bigger. No, we will not add a popup that fires before the page finishes loading.

The hard part is that every refusal has a lobbyist and the whole has none. Somebody always wants the extra banner. Nobody in the meeting represents the page itself. That is the designer's actual job description: be the person in the room who answers for the whole.

We find clients are relieved when someone finally takes that role. Most people can't design a clean page, but everyone recognises one, and everyone knows their own site stopped being one a while ago.