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Design should help make words shine! To a designer, this might be obvious but it was never this clear to me.
I care about design a lot but have come to realize the purpose of design is to highlight the beauty of content, not mask it.
Some experiences:
Blogs I love 37signals blog because the writing is the highlight of everything. I have tried to achieve the same here.
Restaurants The service, menu, ambience are a part of the design to enhance the person's experience, but if the food doesn't speak for itself, then it looses it's substance
Similarly, a salespersons job is not to mask the value of a product. It's to match the required needs with the product or service. The job entails digging in to find the person or companies' greatest needs and only then to see if you have a product or team that can address those.