The real value of the ‘craft’ comeback in design

“Care ruthlessly about the details.” — Jenny Wen, design leader at Anthropic

In this increasingly artificial world, we are witnessing a glorious return of what we call ‘craft’ in design.

It isn’t literally about ‘handmade,’ but something made with a high degree of human technique and sensibility. Sometimes, almost handmade indeed. For the new Apple TV opening, the brand took shape in real glass and was filmed under different colored lights, rather than being computer-generated.

The most incredible identity I’ve seen in a long time is TIEN’s, a secondhand clothing store in the Netherlands, built from used letters that are cut out and combined into countless looks.

Hand sketching is making its way back into architecture.

Not Boring Software is a radical protest against the sameness that digital product design has become.

The Problem
If, with the advancement of technology in recent years, we managed to monitor user behavior and meticulously uncover the best practices for a seamless experience that drives maximum conversion, today we realize there’s a problem. Everything looks the same.

When everything looked the same over a century ago, due to industrialization and the assembly line, Art Nouveau emerged as a response. An excess of organic forms, inspired by nature, and a rejection of classical symmetry. The honest imprecision of human hands, not machines

Jenny Wen, the author of the quote that opens this essay, was Design Director at Figma and is now design leader at Anthropic (at Claude’s house, if you will). In her talk at Hatch Conference, she stomps on the design process as it has been packaged and sold since design thinking. Now: start with the solution, not the problem. Don’t research with users first. Trust your intuition. Skip some steps and invent others along the way. And the best one of all: doing something just for the sake of making people smile.

As designers, we are living through a dazzlingly terrifying, and terrifyingly dazzling era. (Would an AI come up with such an awkward sentence? It suggested a version with an em dash. I swear.)

The Shake
I’ve been finding refuge in studying art. Do you know how the Dadaists wrote poetry? They cut loose words from newspapers and magazines, threw them into a bag, and shook them. Then, they pulled the words out, one by one, discovering sentences. Giving randomness and ‘accidents’ a chance.

TIEN’s identity started as a joke over dinner with friends, with beer and whiskey. Not in a design sprint.

For Apple TV, “…the team embarked on a weekslong series of experiments with light angles, diffusion, movement, and color, refining exactly how each shot should reflect and refract on camera.”

In all these cases, the execution process made room for the unexpected to happen.