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CHAPTER ONE WHY DESIGN MATTERS
17
Purpose
Every piece of design has a purpose or an intention.  e Pantheon was built as
a temple of the gods, the iPod was built as a portable device for playing music,
and every website or application you create has its own set of purposes.
 e purpose of a design is wrapped up with economic factors as well.  e forms
of letters have been in uenced throughout time by the need for e ciency in
communicating language (see Chapter ). As I’ll explain in Chapter , and as
demonstrated by the skeptical comments toward inappropriately polished
design in Fogg’s study (see the earlier sidebar), these economic factors help
dictate the quality of design that a particular artifact should have.
 e purposes and intentions of a design interact with the characteristics and
needs of a user. In Chapter , I’ll explain how you can better account for these
characteristics when developing the structure of your design. In Chapter , I’ll
talk about how you can account for cultural color considerations.
Every user needs to be able to access information clearly, and this
communication is the very foundation of design. In Chapter , I’ll explain the
di erences between various fonts in historical context. In Appendix A, I’ll
explain how these historical considerations a ect the mood that a typeface
conveys. In Appendix B, I’ll show you how some of the tiniest typographic
details can have dramatic e ects on the information being communicated.
Most important, in Chapter , I’ll illustrate how you can attach the appropriate
amount of importance to various pieces of information within your designs.
Medium and technology
Every piece of design is created by a particular set of materials, with certain
methods of construction that in uence the design.  e limitations of creating a
concrete dome caused the Pantheon to feature recessed co ers throughout the
dome; the latest MacBook Pro is created from a single piece of aluminum, a
production consideration that in uences its design; and, as I’ll talk about in
Chapter , designs created with HTML and CSS tend to have certain
characteristics that lend themselves to the capabilities and limitations of that
technology.
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