MYP Design Aesthetics and Form Notes

Aesthetics Is a Design Decision, Not Decoration

1. Aesthetics covers how a product looks, feels in the hand and even sounds, and the judgements people make from those things in about a second.
2. Users decide whether a product seems cheap, safe, medical, fun or serious before they ever press a button, and that decision changes how they handle it.
3. You control it through a small set of tools: proportion, balance, rhythm, symmetry, colour, texture and finish.
4. None of that is added at the end, because the shell shape, the parting lines and the material were already fixed by then.

Form is one of the MYP related concepts

1. Form means the shape and structure of the thing, the three dimensional decision, while aesthetics is the effect that form has on a viewer.
2. Two products can share a function and have totally different forms, like a dome kettle and a tall jug kettle that both boil 1.7 litres.
3. In your design folder, talk about form using words a reader can check, such as radius, taper, edge treatment and surface finish, rather than saying it looks modern.

Proportion: The Ratios That Make Something Look Settled

1. Proportion is the size relationship between parts of one object, like the lid depth against the body height of a box.
2. Scale is different, comparing the whole object to the human body, which is why a 2 metre chair reads as sculpture rather than seating.
3. The golden ratio of roughly 1 to 1.618 turns up in classical architecture and in plenty of product proportions, and rectangles near it tend to look unforced.
4. A ratio you can prove is the A-series paper system at 1 to 1.414, the square root of 2, which is why A4 folded in half gives A5 with exactly the same shape.
5. Repeating one ratio through a product ties it together, so matching the corner radius on the screen, the case and the button makes three parts look like one object.

Balance, Symmetry and Rhythm Steer the Eye

1. Symmetrical balance puts equal visual weight either side of a centre line, and it reads as stable, calm and trustworthy.
2. That is why fire extinguishers, defibrillator cabinets and bank buildings are almost always symmetrical.
3. Asymmetrical balance offsets a small heavy element against a large light one, like a small black lens on a wide pale panel, and it reads as active and modern.
4. Visual weight comes from darkness, saturation, detail and edge sharpness, so a small dense cluster of buttons can outweigh a big blank face.
5. Rhythm is repetition at a regular interval, such as the slats of a park bench, the fins of a radiator or the ribs moulded into a rubber grip.
6. Breaking the rhythm once creates emphasis, which is how a single red stop button stands out in a row of identical grey ones.

Colour Does Three Jobs at Once

1. Colour carries a mood, gives a code and shapes how big or heavy something looks, all from the same choice.
2. Describe it with three properties: hue (which colour), tone (how light or dark) and saturation (how strong or washed out).
3. Colours opposite each other on the wheel are complementary and fight for attention, which suits a warning label, while neighbouring analogous colours sit quietly together.
4. Warm reds and oranges seem to come forward and cool blues seem to sit back, so a pale blue box looks smaller and lighter than the same box in dark red.
5. Industrial colour coding is fixed by convention: red for stop and danger, green for safe or go, yellow and black stripes for a hazard you must not walk into.
6. Finish changes the same colour completely, since gloss black shows every fingerprint and scratch while a bead-blasted matte surface hides both.

Form Follows Function, and Where That Rule Breaks

1. Form follows function came from the architect Louis Sullivan in 1896 and was taken up by the Bauhaus, and it says the shape should come from the job.
2. It holds beautifully for a claw hammer, where the head mass, the claw curve and the handle length are all set by the physics of driving and pulling a nail.
3. The rule breaks because most functions allow many forms, and a hundred chairs all hold a person at 450 mm without looking remotely alike.
4. It breaks again when the electronics stop constraining the shape, which is why almost every phone became the same rounded slab once the screen became the product.
5. And it breaks when function is read too narrowly, since a teapot that pours well but looks wrong on the table has failed at part of its job.
6. The useful version is that form should never fight function: a grip shape may be styled, but not so styled that it stops fitting a hand.

Styling Cues and Looking Right for the User

1. A styling cue is a detail borrowed on purpose so a product signals what family it belongs to, like a car brand keeping the same grille shape across every model.
2. Dyson leaves the cyclone visible behind clear plastic, which turns the working part into the styling, and the machine announces its own technology.
3. Cues also come from another category entirely, so a games console styled with vents and angles is borrowing from performance cars.
4. Looking good and looking right are separate tests, and the second one asks whether the appearance suits this user, this place and this job.
5. Bright primary colours and fat rounded shapes look right on a toddler's ride-on toy and wrong on a hospital infusion pump, where users need to read it as serious and medical.
6. Hearing aids moved the other way, from medical beige hidden behind an ear to earbud styling in real colours, because the old look told everyone the wrong story about the wearer.