Revolutions are hard to come by. Our minds cannot churn out something that makes people go “Wow!” everyday, hence maintaining the novelty of innovation. That doesn’t mean the new cannot surprise or please. Most of the time, evolutionary is much more important than revolutionary. Every revolution starts something new, but it is the small changes made over time that end up creating something memorable.⌘
Gradual improvements are good. In fact, they’re great. They chisel out something that is stable and much more useful, in a manageable way. Plus, it’s just easier to continue on a road than it is to make one. An interesting case study to see the evolutionary process at work is the iPod Classic — a device, whose form factor has remained virtually unchanged for 8 years. There has been almost no change in the size or the design, but there have been small changes every year that keep it looking and working like new. Of course, it has run its course now, with the future of music players being the iPod Touch or the Shuffle. But the popularity of the original/classic iPod is a testament to how well evolutionary design works when it is done right. This concept of evolution of a revolution is ingrained into every Apple product, which makes them such runaway successes.⌘
I want nothing to do with the creationist vs. evolutionist debate at this point.⌘
Evolutionary improvements are like life itself. At birth, we are all weak and fragile. But as we grow, small and gradual changes in us make us into stronger and capable human beings. A new born baby is a wonderful thing, but it is still something that just laughs, cries, eats and poops. Man, is arguably the most amazing product on Earth, but he too took a very long time to become what he is now.⌘
A long time back, Joel Spolsky wrote about programming:⌘
The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive. Au contraire, baby! Is software supposed to be like an old Dodge Dart, that rusts just sitting in the garage? Is software like a teddy bear that’s kind of gross if it’s not made out of all new material?
…
When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
His argument was restricted to programming and why not to start from scratch, but we can extrapolate it to pretty much everything around us. Starting from zero is always a waste of time — just that sometimes it is necessary. Building over something isn’t always glamorous or exciting, but it is definitely the more sensible thing to do given a particular situation. Why try to fix or re-invent something that isn’t broken? By trying to do that, you’re just wasting time.⌘
Although it’s all encompassing, I will stick to design as an art form for my case. But the same thing can be applied to all the forms.⌘
Design uses and implements the idea of evolutionary design the most. May that be web, logo (which is probably the most slow and evolutionary of all designs), graphic, or any other visual form of design. The ones that stick, the ones we remember for a long time and find beautiful, have all been evolutionary. There’s always a theme, a form of continuity that keeps things familiar, while making changes that reinforce the idea.⌘
The purpose of design is to convey a message in a way that is effective and memorable. One doesn’t achieve that by disorienting and confusing.⌘
Evolutionary design is something that I’m trying to imbibe in the way I work. Of course, the way designing for others goes, every new client wants something radically new — hence I can’t apply it there. But I’m trying to make it a part of personal projects. Take Geekaholic as an example. I want to keep this new design in perpetual motion. Unless I keep experimenting, I will not find the correct look. Not every idea can be visualised in the mind; sometimes they need to be executed to see how they fit. I don’t plan to redesign again anytime soon (or even the distant future), but keep making small changes here and there that keeps it looking fresh and interesting. It’s already changed quite a bit from what I initially started with (all the browns and curves are gone, layout is now completely centred and in one column) as I’ve begun using the new CSS3 declarations, along with pushing more focus on the content and keeping the reader’s eyes on one thing at a time.⌘
Same thing applies to my code projects as well. In any case, there are very few new ideas that haven’t already been tackled in some capacity. If I do happen upon one, I try to start with the bare minimum and then slowly build on top of it. Currently, my attention is almost completely diverted to Objective-C and development for Mac. There’s a lot of fantastic stuff out there just waiting to be analysed and learnt from.⌘
In times when everyone is looking for the next revolution that will shoot all those involved to super stardom, building on the existing means actually being productive and achieving something. You know what they say about being slow and steady.⌘