# Garry's Channel: How To DESIGN EVERYTHING if you don't know ANYTHING

**Author:** Garry Tan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Jr-garry-s-channel-how-to-design-everything-if-you-don-t-know-anything
**YouTube ID:** K3Ctc1UN0bQ

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Today we walk through 5 steps so that you can start designing anything, anywhere, regardless of whether or not you've
ever done it before.   
  
The fact that you clicked on this video means you don't think of yourself as a designer. **Stop that right now.**

You can use interaction design, UX design, and visual design to reach product market fit. Minimalism is a big piece of
it. Here's how.

## Transcript

- The fact that you 
clicked on this video means you don't think of yourself as a designer. Stop that right now, today we're going to 
walk through five steps so you can start your 
journey to designing software for other people, 
regardless of whether or not you've done it before. And these are the same principles whether you want to make 
something for a few people or make something that 
touches a billion people. But first, if you haven't 
subscribed to my channel yet before you do anything, hit 
that subscribe button now and click the bell icon. I'm going to bring you new 
videos every single week

to help you along on your startup journey. Let's get started. (upbeat music) (upbeat music increases) Here are the five steps you need to design if you're not a designer. First de-label yourself, after that empathize with your user, then you've got to illuminate the path, minimize the non-essential, and finally create something great. If you do all these 
things, you'll be far along

on your journey to create 
amazing experiences. Our gift as creators today 
is we have the chance to make something for a billion people and here are the tools to do it. My first lesson for you and how to design is to de-label yourself. Don't think of yourself as 
a designer or a non-designer you're a capable, smart, human being who's able to learn absolutely anything. Realize that the reason 
why we label ourselves as a specific title, like 
Senior Backend Software Engineer or Associate Product Manager, 
is that capitalism requires

all people to be a very 
specific type of specialized and interchangeable 
washer or screw or spring, part of a vast machinery. Our resumes and our college 
career departments want us to specialize because that's 
what makes it easy for us to fit in the mold, to be replaced easily. The capitalist economic 
system does commodify people into objects of trade, of 
just pure economic value but remember, we're human beings. I'm not a number, I'm a free man. Know that you are a designer 
even if you think you aren't.

There's another reason why you should de-label yourself also, I know a lot of you want to be CEO or the founder of a new 
business or a startup. And if you want that, 
you've got to really know how to do all of these different things. Design is just one of many 
different skills you need so that is actually the 
first step to design for non-designers, de-label yourself. Second, you've got to 
empathize with your user. When you're thinking about 
your interactions, your website and your front end experience 
it's a conversation

that happens a thousand times per day. If you're very successful, 
it happens millions if not hundreds of 
millions of times per day. For example, be polite. When you're having a 
conversation with someone make sure you wait your turn to speak and become genuinely 
interested in the people that are your users. See the other person's point view, be sympathetic and this 
is where design begins. You should read the book, ''How to Win Friends 
and Influence People'' by Dale Carnegie. Don't let the cheesy title fool you, it's a depression era book 
that was written earnestly

to try to help people 
get ahead in society. It's not rocket surgery here, 
these are simple concepts, but the book helps you realize 
that we're building something for other people. It's about feeling their 
pain and their problems. A lot of people talk 
about creating software like it's an incredibly complex 
process like building a car, but that's wrong, it's actually more like throwing a great party. When you go to a party 
there's someone to meet you at the door, they welcome 
you, they take your coat. They say, hey, the bartender 
makes a great Manhattan

and also here's someone 
I wanted you to meet. That's what a great experience feels like. It doesn't matter if you're 
a consumer experience, a SaaS business or an enterprise sale all of those things basically 
resolve back to this idea of treating a great product 
or service like a party. Is it a good experience, is 
it fun, is it interesting? Do I feel welcome, do I 
understand what's going on, do I understand what I 
should be doing next? Another empathic skill you need to learn is to forget what you 
already know as the creator

of a product or service. You need to run the 
simulation in your head of what your user is experiencing. And when you do that you must 
remove all special information and knowledge you have about 
the product and experience. Especially because you're 
the one creating it and you know all about it. The absolute best product minds have the special power down path, it is one of the most interesting things I got to see firsthand working for Paul Graham at Y Combinator. He could easily simulate the experience of those who had no context 
and give very precise feedback

about what parts of the design 
were going to cause problems. In design we talk about this 
as sanding down the edges, the most meaningful level 
of empathy you could have with your user is when you can 
viscerally feel their needs, their pains and their confusion. Only then can you fix it 
and improve the experience. Picture being a part of 
an architectural firm that designs an airport. You're at once the person 
to design the walls, the windows, the flooring, 
and the layout of the airport, you know it intimately, but 
then you have to place signs

to tell people where 
to go and that's hard. When you're in a familiar 
space you obviously know where everything is, the 
bathrooms over there, I want to go over here, you've got to forget all of those things. And then, and only then 
can you feel the confusion of a person in that space, 
having a motivation like, having to go to the bathroom or getting to the luggage 
carousel as quickly as possible that will tell you where 
to place the signs. Empathy is literally user stimulation, put yourself in the shoes of the user. If you don't empathize, then 
you commit a grave error.

There's actually a Japanese term for this kind of invention, Chindogu, which was created by a 
Japanese artist in the 1990s. Look closely at each of these inventions, if you had a problem and you 
bought one of these inventions you'd have two problems. If you can't empathize with your user, you're liable to create something that doesn't solve a problem 
and creates new problems. Often when founders fail they don't focus on solving other people's problems, they focus on solving their own problem, the problem of needing a problem to solve for their startup. Don't be that founder, 
you're creating more problems

for the world. Feel the pain your users 
have, give them a better way and you will find the path forward. The third step to designing 
anything is to know that it is up to you to illuminate 
the path for your users. You have to be opinionated 
and light the path so that users know where 
they are and how they can get to where they want to go. And the primary way you 
do this is in the text, the type of language you use. Here's a bad example of 
it, it's passive voice.

It doesn't speak directly to the reader, it doesn't show the unfortunate thing as this type of writing 
shows up everywhere and it's a lost opportunity. Look at this in contrast, 
notice how the eye is drawn to specific things on the page, the text is you talking 
to the user directly. A bad sales person 
doesn't make eye contact and makes a vague conversation about something tangentially related to what you're there for. A great salesperson looks you in the eye and sees what you want 
and says, come this way.

That's what you need 
to do in these designs. I recently saw this great graphic created by a founder named Harry Dry 
on the trends Facebook group, and I think it really hammers 
home exactly what I mean by direct command language. In a conversation, you have 
the benefit of back and forth, on a website or mobile UI 
you have no such thing. So it's a great exercise 
when you're designing your UI and you're in user simulator 
mode, try to think through what a user might be doing and thinking. If you ask yourself what is 
the one top objection someone

might have to a call to action button you'll find that you 
can turn a no into yes. If a button says start 
free, you might expect that they're going to 
ask for a credit card. But if the button says it doesn't that immediately lowers the barrier and makes me want to proceed. Be direct, use a number or action verb and be concise. Tell the user what they should do and why, illuminate the path, 
and if you can do that you're already better than 
99% of other people trying to do design. Next, you've got to minimize 
what you put on the page.

The key principle here is 
use only what you need. Edward Tufte is one of 
my favorite pioneers of information design. He talks about this useful 
concept called chartjunk, it's markings and visual 
elements that are not part of the minimum set of visuals necessary to communicate information understandably. Here's an example. A lot of people think of design 
as picking colors and style, and as Steve Job said, ''design 
is actually how it works not how it looks.'' Chartjunk like graphic choices 
are the number one thing

I use to tell if something 
is poorly designed or done by true amateurs. For every color, line, or pattern I want to know there was a 
reason and intention for it. Let's look at this example. So look, all of the stuff on 
the page, that's chart junk. Look at that graph, 
why a green background? What does that pattern mean? Why red for the bars? It's noise and aesthetic 
choice that signifies nothing. For the map on the right, 
is there any reason why there's a radial gradient? Why those colors? If it doesn't mean anything it's junk.

So if that's chartjunk, 
how do we avoid it? Here's the simple principle. If it can be removed without taking away 
any meaning, remove it. ''The evolution of culture 
marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.'' That's what architect Adolf Loos said. Ornament is not signal, as Tufte notes, it's junk. Here's another example of minimization. Colons are stupid, why even have them. Notice if you remove it there's no change

in the content at all. It's subtle, but when you do 
this across your whole product it adds up to an unobtrusive 
and clean design. Finally, you've got to create and the best way to do that is be very very crisp about contrast. Contrast is how you as a 
designer confer to the user what is important. Notice how obvious it is, what 
your eye is drawn to in this. But then look, at what happens when I make it all the same contrast, the differences disappear 
and they become equal.

This leads us to something 
every one of you should try to remember very clearly, 
if everything is bold, nothing is bold. Ah, you say, well, what about color? Color absolutely drives 
a lot of attention. Again, contrast is king. Let me share with you one more useful tool that you can put in your tool belt. And that's the squint test, 
when contrast is not obvious just by looking at it, 
squinting at a page allows you to see what you are emphasizing.

The details fade away and the blobs that really jump out at you are what you specifically 
are instructing the user to pay attention to. After contrast the next most 
important design concept you need to know is closeness. You want related concepts together. I can't tell you how often 
it is that I find mistakes like this in amateur designs 
and here's the pairing that actually makes sense. Closeness is so important that one level of organization up from 
that is actually a grid, a systematic way to organize any layout.

Here's one from the original Bootstrap CSS that shows how contrast 
and closeness combine to create a visual hierarchy. Notice how the headers are so prominent they allow for a really quick scanning and scanning headers in a 
visual hierarchy allows the user to drill down to the body text 
quickly and find the thing that they were looking for. Here's another example of no hierarchy. In this example, the text 
in the middle is drawing way more attention when I probably 
should be paying attention to the top part.

Without visual hierarchy, 
the user gets confused and can't tell what they 
should be looking at. Remember, you've got 
to illuminate the path without visual hierarchy the user is lost. If you want some concrete layout rules, here's my simple advice. Remember contrast is how you 
determine what is important, group related items and 
first use padding or margin to give separation. Next, you can use a grid 
to put related items next to each other. As you add more content 
or functionality as needed you might need more ways to 
separate or nest concepts

and you can use a line for some of that. And if all else fails and you must a box is your friend. The funniest thing is I 
learned all of these things in high school newspaper. Luckily you don't have 
to go back to the tyranny of my California public school education to learn the things we 
just talked about today. So that's it, I've taught 
you in as few concepts as possible the bare 
minimum of what you need to be able to start your design journey. First, de-label yourself. Know that you don't need a permission slip or stamp on the forehead to do design.

Then empathize with others. If you can walk a mile in 
the shoes of your users you'll understand their 
wants, needs, and motivations and you'll be able to 
make their lives better. Third, illuminate what's important. Be opinionated and have a firm handshake, show the path forward and 
your users will be happy instead of frustrated. Next, minimize what's not important. Get rid of ornamentation so that the things that truly matter can rise to the highest 
levels of attention.

And finally, create, create 
great UI, create great layouts. Use contrast closeness and 
grids to translate how it works or interaction design into a visual design that supports your goals. Being a designer isn't anything 
fancy it's if anything, just applying simple proven 
principles to your life and your work. If you like this video, please 
click like and subscribe and click the bell icon to 
be notified of future posts.

I'm also answering your 
questions by Instagram DM. Find me on Instagram at, @garrytan. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music)
