What Makes Great Design "Great"?

Everything is designed, but very few things are designed well. —Brian Reed

H ave you ever used a product, stood before a monument, or crossed a beautifully constructed bridge and suddenly felt something profound—an emotion you couldn’t quite name?

A sense of admiration, joy, or calm that seemed to dawn upon you from nowhere. You didn’t analyze it. You didn’t reason with it. You just felt it. That feeling—that spark—is the hallmark of great design.

Take the Golden Gate Bridge for example. The moment you lay eyes on it, you can’t help but be mesmerized. It’s not just steel and cables. The burnt orange against the Pacific, the elegant sweep of the suspension, the sheer harmony of form and function—it moves you. You walk across it, and something shifts in you. That’s not an accident. That’s design doing what only the best design can do.

The Golden Gate—a bridge not just across water, but across engineering, design, and time.

Or consider the experience of holding an Apple product. It’s just a computer, a phone, a piece of glass and metal. And yet, it feels like something more. You notice the weight, the perfect finish, the precision of every curve. You feel the intentionality behind every animation, every sound, every pixel. There’s an emotional connection. It delights. It calms. It inspires. And that’s not because of what it does—but because of how it makes you feel while it does it.

The same thing happens with great clothes. A well-designed coat or dress doesn’t scream for attention—it earns it. You see it once, and it lingers in your mind. You don’t know why, but it made an impression—because everything about it, from the materials, the stitching to the silhouette, was just perfect. It expressed something essential, something wordless, something in perfect harmony. And that’s the power of design done at the highest level.

Now think of the Boeing 747. Just a machine—metal, engines, wings. And yet, it doesn’t feel that way. When it first rolled out, it captured people’s imagination. The scale. The presence. The way it looked on the runway, ready to take flight—it was majestic. It wasn’t just a plane. It was a work of art. Graceful like a bird in the sky, commanding attention wherever it went. People stopped, stared and even took pictures—not because it was loud or flashy, but because it was elegant.

And more than fifty years later, even after countless innovations in aviation, most commercial airliners still resemble the 747. That’s a sign that they got the design right early-on.

The Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental—elegant and graceful as a bird in the sky.

To understand this instinctive pull, consider a fascinating experiment from behavioral biology. There’s a species of bird that cares for its chicks based on a single cue: a red spot on the beak. Researchers discovered that the parent bird would nurture even a lifeless object—as long as it had that red dot. Remove or alter the color, and the response turned hostile. That red spot is a trigger. And great designers? They are masters of discovering and harnessing such triggers—those subconscious signals that speak directly to the human soul.

True elegance lies in restraint. Those who misunderstand simplicity often lack the refinement to appreciate it. —Coco Chanel

The best design doesn’t overwhelm. It doesn’t decorate for decoration’s sake. It feels inevitable. It’s like a perfectly composed piece of music—nothing extra, nothing missing. Just the right notes, in the right sequence, in the right silence.

Even in the most abstract fields—like theoretical physics—design plays a profound, if often invisible, role. Take Albert Einstein. Many brilliant scientists were working on the mysteries of gravity and space-time, but it was Einstein who solved it in a way that was not only correct—but beautiful.

What set him apart wasn’t just intelligence. It was clarity. Elegance. He distilled the vast, invisible machinery of the universe into a single, deceptively simple equation:

E = mc²

That’s it. Three variables. One equation. And yet, it encapsulated the relationship between energy and mass in a way that was so clear, so intuitive, that it changed the course of science forever.

And suddenly, the relationship between energy and mass became graspable—even to someone’s grandmother. That’s great design. Not in the visual sense, but in the structural and conceptual sense. His general theory of relativity didn’t just work—it resonated. It revealed something essential about the nature of reality in a form that felt inevitable, almost poetic.

That’s what great design does. It simplifies without dumbing down. It reveals rather than obscures. It brings beauty to complexity—and in doing so, leaves a mark not just on the intellect, but on the soul.

Good design is as little as possible. Less, but better, because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity. ―Dieter Rams

This post isn’t about a universal formula. Great design isn’t paint-by-numbers. What works in software would fall flat in architecture. The magic lies in understanding the context, the medium, and—most importantly—the audience. Great designers know what chord to strike, and how to strike it. They don’t always follow rules, but they always follow resonance.

Great design makes a lasting impact.

It’s not something you just see and forget. It becomes a reference point. A quiet standard. It lives on in your memory long after the moment has passed…

It is, in a word, timeless.