Good Design vs. Great Design

I prefer good design.

The "great" side is very vague - it's hard to tell what the author is trying to say.

Great design sounds awful

Strange figurative wording aside, I think the author is reiterating that, in order to go "above and beyond" and stand out from the competition, you have to create something novel and radical. And directed more towards art and creative fields.

"Good design" is following all the classic design tips. Like a material website that implements material design correctly, is good design. And this is actually OK and better than "great design" for most situations.

"Great design" needs to stand out. And the only way to stand out is to do something weird. Take some fancy website made out of ASCII: not something you should write your IT software in, but maybe good for a portfolio.

Radical "great design" is really good for art and music: almost nobody cares about a beautiful portrait, people want something strange and creative. It's really bad for software architecture "design": when writing code, you practically never want to stray from the obvious, traditional path. For UX design and websites it's somewhere in the middle, and depends on what the software is for (e.g. business solution UX is less creative, video game is more creative UX).

I think the author is confusing art and design. Art is all the things he says are great: challenging, messy, unconvential, etc. etc. But design in a lot of ways is more about empathy and engineering. Someone wants to do something and you're figuring out how to make that as understandable and efficient as possible. You don't need to be super creative to make a great design, you need to understand what the person is trying to do and make solving that as obvious as possible. IMO this guy wants "design" to be Art, and that's just confusing most of the time.

If I'm downloading some app it's probably because I need it to do something. I don't give a shit about the designer's ego, I do not need my mind blown, I just want to do the thing I set out to do and move on with my life.

The problem with most design is everyone thinks they're the next incarnation of Steve Jobs and if they just get rid of more buttons and make their typography really really nice everyone will see their creative genius. So we're constantly dealing with apps and their "bold" redesigns of things that everyone understood perfectly fine before. It's incredibly frustrating. Even reading what this guy is doing on his site, it's like reinventing all the built in apps that work fine with "Bold" new versions. Yeah, I don't really need a bold new calculator or weather app.