Flea markets tend to be overwhelming. A lot of times, when I go with a first-time shopper, they don't buy anything. The rooms in my new book involved real people with real design dilemmas. They were paralyzed to make a decision.
When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
A design style is defined by a set of microdecisions. A clear style reflects a consistent set. A clear style may not be a good style; a muddled one never is.
Often your 'fixes' are actually removing capabilities that you had, because they were 'too confusing to the user'. GNOME seems to be developed by interface Nazis, where consistently the excuse for not doing something is not 'it's too complicated to do', but 'it would confuse users'.
Making a website is similar to making a movie-hundreds of people work on it, one person makes the final decision, and they make them every minute of the day.
Problems with visual design can turn users off so quickly that they never discover all the smart choices you made with navigation or interaction design.
The hats are tough. I've got a weird head, so believe me, there were a lot of hats. Penny [Rose], our costume designer, who I knew from other jobs said, "Badge, that looks terrible on you. Hold on. No, we can't do that one."
When I was in pre-production for Trees Lounge, I was hearing the cinematographer talking with the production designer about colours and this and that, and feeling like I was losing control.
A good designer has technical knowledge - don't treat her like someone who's there to decide whether something should be pink or orange.
Developing games for the PC and consoles is all about everything and the kitchen sink. In many ways, you don't have design decisions to make. You do it all. So I enjoy going back to making decisions about what's important as I'm working on a game.
The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they're not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.
The problem is, in software design, often the consequences of your decisions don't become apparent for years.
I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.
I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.
I have my own office, and I'm there during the evenings and weekends. But during the week, I'm sitting in the middle of my studio, talking with everybody, deciding together every detail, every pallette, every yarn, every colour.
A Mac is a closed box, so Apple can make decisions about things that they don't include. That makes, it in some ways, simpler for them.
The one question you can't ask is, "Is this feature actually good or not?"
Any set of decisions about design is inevitably influenced by cultural prejudice, no matter how intent an architect might be to avoid it.
I think doing a female Elf in the Woodland realm was a bit safer, because we haven't met one of those yet.
We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.
When the Americans are behind you, they're behind you 100%, and this gives you real confidence as an architect. They expect you to lead a building project - to make the kind of big and costly decisions that, in Britain, have been handed over to project managers and cost-cutters.
