I took my motorcycle out through Sussex countryside this weekend. On the way home I rode past one of my favourite pieces of Victorian architecture — the Ouse Valley Viaduct.
Built in 1841 as part of the London to Brighton Railway, it's an alluring series of thirty-seven semi-circular arches that stops me every time.
Its grandeur is striking from a distance, but what I appreciate most are its intricacies. Tiny details most people never notice:
Repeating modillions, eighty feet high, adorned with rose carvings barely visible to anyone but the craftsmen who carved them.
And eleven million polychromatic bricks — that's eleven million bricks, laid by hand, alternating dark and light, all of which were shipped from the Netherlands by barge up the River Ouse.
These generosities to design and craftsmanship are often, by today's standards, the first to be cut.
The viaduct has been repaired over the years — patches of brickwork replaced, not with carefully sourced polychromatic brick, but with a cheaper red stock. Jarring and an insult to what once was.
From a boardroom, with numbers to be crunched, cutting costs on anything without structural significance might make sense.
But details do matter. Both the invisible and the visible.
Pride in our work affects how we are perceived.
Steve Jobs understood this.
He recalled his father, building a fence around the family home, telling him: "You've got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know."
Jobs carried that into everything he built at Apple, right down to the circuit boards no one sees. As he put it himself:
For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.Steve Jobs, 1985
So what kind of person do you want to be?
The kind that cares about the back of the fence?
Or one that crunches everything down to the bare minimum?
When you put care into details that don't demand it, the way people perceive you shifts. They trust that the same care exists where they can't see it — the structure that lies behind the facade.
And the opposite is equally true...
If you are asking customers to part with their hard-earned cash, they do pay attention. Very closely indeed.
When visible details are treated as an afterthought, it raises questions for those who pay attention. And trust me, if you are asking customers to part with their hard-earned cash, they do pay attention. Very closely indeed.
Details that are unnecessary expenses to the one crunching the numbers, to your customers, they are the qualities that close the deal.
This is something I try to carry into every project at Function & Form. The extra details, the hours spent tinkering with animations, typographic treatments and the little nuances that may only get noticed on the second or third website visit.
The Ouse Valley Viaduct has been carrying trains across the Sussex countryside for over 180 years. Built by people who took pride in details.
That's the standard I aspire to.
The human is in the detail. Not the devil.