Paul Graham's essay arguing that great design — in code, art, or products — shares universal properties: simplicity, timelessness, suggestion rather than statement, and solving the right problem.
Design principles as cross-domain: Graham extracts from painting, architecture, and literature principles that apply equally to software — good design is simple, it makes hard things look easy, it's slightly funny, it copies from nature, it's redesign. The essay is a manifesto for treating programming as craft with aesthetic standards, not merely engineering efficiency. Contributed to the culture of 'design thinking' in Silicon Valley before that phrase became a cliché.
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