When most people talk about design they think of a few common things: Fonts, colours, imagery and branding. We’re commonly talking about how a thing looks and feels.

What is rarely mentioned however, is the “Design” of the product in terms how it solves the problems at hand. This is partly due to the relative success of design: When it’s great it gets out of the way and the barrier between you and the object or content disappears. It just feels right.

Rewind to 2002: Heinz unveils a revolutionary new bottle that (literally) turns the design on it’s head. The new product featured a brilliant innovation that made getting sauce out of the bottle (particularly the last bits) easy and joyful because it’s always right at the lid. Of course this was combined with thoughtful typography on the label and the iconic red colour for the bottle. The design was not just how it looked, but how it worked. And it was just as much a part of the product experience as Heinz’s Ketchup ingredients.

Without this knowledge, it’s sometimes easy to think of design as an unnecessary step in the early stages of building products in Startups — Something we can get to later. But the reality is that any good product is a marriage of technology and design. It’s what amounts to a useful product that people want to invest their money and attention into. So in this sense it’s no less vital to a product’s success than a working Facebook login or speedy database call.

The best validation for this way of thinking is Apple and the late Steve Jobs’ unwavering attention to the benefit of great design. He sums it up neatly:

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

– Steve Jobs

So next time you visit your favourite websites, look a little closer at what feels painless, joyful or something that doesn’t need explaining before you use it. This is what good design is, intimately linked with beautiful colour, typography and image.