How do you know what you’ve done is good? This is a pretty serious question for pretty much everyone involved in making things. It doesn’t matter if it’s software or tableware, if you have made something you need some criteria to judge it by. There are a lot of ways to come up with these criteria. At Graphient we view everything we do as Design. This gives us a handy two thousand year old philosophical back catalogue from which to draw ideas about judging the goodness of what we make.

Slightly less than two millennia ago a Roman architect named Vitruvius wrote a guide for building projects called De Architectura. In it he declared that a well made building would have three qualities: Firmness, Commodity, and Delight. This formulation is helpful in understanding how to judge not just buildings, but also smaller things like cars, or more abstract things like software. There is no way to rank these three qualities in importance, they are all equally important and a deficiency in any one can sink a project.

Firmness refers to the stability of a structure and also to the feeling of stability that structure conveys. A well made building shouldn’t fall over and it shouldn’t feel like it might fall over. Similarly well made software shouldn’t crash, and it shouldn’t feel like it might crash. For us, this means paying very careful attention to how control surfaces feel and respond and to how interface elements lay out. If a button renders funny, or seems out of alignment with the rest of the layout, this communicates to the user that the software is not truly firm and worthy of their trust. If they don’t trust the software they won’t enter their precious data into it.

Commodity is a word that has changed in meaning over the years. The original latin word was Utilitas, which should help to point the way. Commodity is the quality of suited-to-its-purposes-ness. It means the the thing you have designed must be made in such a way that it serves a purpose. You could also call this usefulness, or product-market fit.

Delight can also be hard to pin down. A well made thing can be beautiful simply through its firmness, but a delightful thing is fun to use or interact with. It inspires the human heart. Perhaps, it even helps us to be more human. I’ve heard it expressed as “desirability” or even “sexiness” but I don’t think that goes far enough. The delightful thing reaches further into us than desire, it provokes a response.

These three qualities help us frame discussions about Timebinder and Graphient. They are three qualities we know we must aspire to in all aspects of our work. They help us to judge what we’ve done and they help point the way forward.