About design:

f you haven't seen the Oatmeal comic  How A Web Design Goes Straight To Hell, you need to go read that first, and then come back here – it's a perfect summary of the problem. The ultimate post on this problem has also already been written, so I'm not going to spend too much time on it – just go read every word in  Why Design by Committee Must Die in Smashing Magazine. I do want to highlight a couple of areas in that article, and add some of my own comments.

One of the main problems we have in web design today is that everyone thinks they're a designer. With coding it's different – not everyone can code. But design is different. Like art, everyone has an opinion on design. You like it or you don't. And because you have this immediate visceral reaction to a design, it's tempting to confuse that with knowing what makes a design good. But that's simply not true.

As posts like  Designing for the Mind and  Gestalt Principles Applied to Design have shown, what makes a design "good" has very little to do with taste, and everything to do with the proven psychology of visual perception. "Pretty" is a small part of design compared to applying the principles of solid user experience design to an interface. So please, let's leave design to the people who are trained in this stuff. Have I mentioned the importance of trust?