When designing a screen, time is yet another use case to consider.
There’s the design of something for the first five minutes (or maybe even five seconds) of someone’s experience with that thing. That’s usually meant to wow and awe. Those fades and transitions and animations. Those shadows and subtleties. Those surprising left turns. The cool shit.
But then there’s the entire time after that. Minute 6 to year 20. When those once delicious visual artifacts have lost their flavor and now feel like the bubble gum you just gotta chew. Very quickly, what enamored turns laborious. You were happy to see the sideshow stop by the first time, but now you’d just like to eat your dinner in peace.
Certain screens are primed for the excess—the marketing site, the one-time use screen—those pieces that we might only ever use for a handful of minutes at most.
For the rest, good design is something much more restrained.
It’s the job of the designer to know when to swallow the urge to add a little more flair, especially in an age where it is so, so, so easy to do so. It’s the job of the designer to look past minute five, to figure out what touches could be held back, what might be better served more immediate, harsh, and blunt.
The restraint is the skill. Tuning the mixing board of indulgences to the right levels is the craft.