Steve Jobs famously borrowed this framing from the sculptor Richard Serra: "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." We think about this constantly.
Aesthetics and function are not opposites
There's a persistent myth in tech that beautiful design and functional design trade off against each other. That you can have something that looks great, or something that works great, but rarely both. We reject this completely.
In our experience, when a product is truly well-designed, the aesthetics and the function reinforce each other. Beautiful things often work better because the care required to make something beautiful is the same care required to make it work well. Corners that are cut in one dimension tend to be cut in both.
Design as communication
Every design decision communicates something to the person using your product. The font weight of a heading, the amount of padding around a button, the color of an error state — these are all messages. They tell the user: we thought about this. Or they tell them: we didn't.
When we design at hashpurple, we're always asking: what does this communicate? Not just about the functionality, but about our values and our relationship with the person on the other side of the screen.
The hardest design problems
Interestingly, the hardest design problems we face aren't about visual design at all. They're about information architecture: how do we organize complexity so that it feels simple? How do we give power users the depth they need without overwhelming newcomers? These are genuinely hard problems, and they require the same rigor as any engineering challenge.
