Half-witted Design Arithmetic

Matt Inman, CTO & Web Developer at Somoza.org, discusses How to Ruin a Web Design - The Design Curve talking about the sorts of people who get involved in the design process:

As a professional web designer I've noticed a consistent trend in the majority of the projects I've worked on: The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.

He then discusses what I would term "half-wit arithmetic" and puts up two design curves that he thinks demonstrate the effect of the above [the wrong kinds and the number of people] on the resulting quality of design. It's well worth taking a look at Matt's article!

It reminds me of the old classic ...


SOME DESIGN RESOURCE LINKS:
It's pertinent to mention that I've assembled a page crammed full of links to a wide range of design resources. See either http://asiapac.com.au/Links/Design.htm or http://notestracker.com/Links/Design.htm

In a somewhat similar vein, Reg Braithwaite in his raganwald 2.0 blog discusses What I've learned from failure and gives his views on such things as why failure matters, the four most important causes of failure, and more. Much food for thought here, that should help you avoid being involved in failed projects -- or at least recognizing before too long that you're enmeshed in one!