Probably very true, hence my final sentence on balance (admittedly a feeble nod to rationality, but still).

Personally, I believe that much of the value created lies in the final 20% that takes 80% of the time. If what you say is true, near anyone can create something that's 80% of the way there. It's your job to get as close to 100% as you can realistically, while balancing time and money and value. It's not an argument for unlimited perfectionism; it's an argument for quality. The higher you can get, the better you will produce, and the more you will succeed. And don't just limit this to product quality; extend it to everything you do (including customer service, including planning and resource management, including hiring and culture) and you'll create a company that has a chance of being better than the others.

Perfect? No. But if you're not striving for creating something of quality (in other words, of value) then what are you doing, exactly?

Edit: There's a caveat here, I think. It may not be your job to worry about every design detail down to the pixel. It doesn't have to be. You can find someone who can help you produce what you need at the level of quality you desire (like the designer the OP is talking about, presumably) and you can worry about all the little details of running your company. Details that I'm guessing a designer might not understand or care about, but you do.

Why do you believe the value created lies in the final 20%? Very few (though some exceptions are notable) derive their earnings from the value at the 'long tail'

For what it's worth, I, as a programmer, am happiest when working with designers who strive for this kind of excellence.

I feel the same way. When you have a designer who strives for perfection, they seem to think of the edge cases. And when they push you for pixel perfection, it only makes you that much better. Makes me remember how it is not to be "the best" or the one who cares the most in the office

Same here. I usually spend hours going through PSD files and correcting little things like this all the time, and it drives me crazy.

Quantifying gains is beside the point. I don't think anyone became a great designer or a great programmer by only ever striving for "good enough". Yes, at the end of the day you are worthless if you don't ship, but you are half-worthless if everything you do is a hack.

Maybe for this case in isolation going the extra mile to this level of perfection is not justifiable, but if the designer is doing good work and meeting deadlines then you should keep your bean-counting micro-managers far far away. To attempt to quantify everything (even in programming) is to take the human element out of creation, and that runs a severe risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Keep in mind that your angle on this is the design equivalent of "who cares about [source control/code reviews/proper architecture], it works right?"

There are coders out there who strive for absolute, unlimited technical perfection. They rarely if ever ship - and ditto for designers in that boat.

In reality most designers, and programmers, walk a balance between the bottom-line functionality of their work and less concrete (and more subjective) qualifiers like code quality or sub-pixel scaling.

There are many analogues between design and code here. Most people here would agree that sloppy coding standards aren't deadly, but encourage sloppiness on a larger scale over time. Ditto, sloppy design is insignificant in the individual case, but have the tendency to accumulate and lower the bar.

The example OP chose was particularly bad, mostly because as an iOS dev I know for a fact that getting 1x assets right doesn't take that much time. The usability improvement over time invested is not atrocious - certainly nobody spent an extra week just to get some pixels to line up just right.

The major problem with scaling 2x assets down to 1x devices is that thin features become muddy and blurry, while code-wise UI elements may become aligned against half-pixels, resulting in filtering that produces blurriness. Both the design and code elements of this are easy fixes for any competent iOS developer/designer duo, and takes no more than an hour or two at the extreme most. You get a pretty clear legibility improvement for not a lot of man hours.

Not to mention the very noticeable blurriness of the buttons in the "unfixed" versions - things that users do notice. So much so that some of them can actually articulate it (as opposed to merely being a subconscious annoyance).

One of the best ways to balance this is deadlines + a perfectionist mentality. Be obsessively perfectionist while working but commit yourself to shipping. That'll ensure that you also get outside feedback, which in turn will help you produce higher quality work in the long run.

Thats the point. Design is all about unlimited perfectionism according to some imagined idea... and its also the reason that most artists and designers are broke. The pursuit has little to do with the rationality of time management and efficiency, rather, design is about pursuing an idea of perfection that cannot be achieved.

You are confusing art with design (formerly known, perhaps more accurately, as commercial art). If you are creating "unlimited idealistic perfection" you are creating art. If you are selling soap it's design.

While soap may not bring about intense discussions about its design, and one might say that it is less designed than the UI of the app the article talked about, the ideals that art and design revolve around are wholly intertwined. Art and design talk about things that would seem ridiculous and esoteric from an engineering standpoint (thus the primary argument of the article that none of the changes made any difference to the usefulness of the app). These are things that hold little value outside of the face that they communicate the purpose and intent of the app or button better than a different size or proportion. There is a reason that design schools have such a close relationship with the art community, while designers don't always maker art, and a bar of soap may not seem to be art at all, disconnected from its purpose, the design of a simple bar of soap can be put in a gallery and be viewed as art. (see the toilet that started the Dada art movement).

Design is not art in and of itself, but you can't talk about one, without talking about the other.

-- "The fact of the matter is that people usually do notice, if only subconsciously."

SUPER IMPORTANT!

>Perfectionism rocks of you're among the lucky few who're in a situation where you can get away with it.

If you are not in that situation, could it be because you weren't perfectionist enough in the past?

E.g Nokia vs Apple.

I'd say that Nokia is in a predicament partly because their software sucked for a long time, not because they "weren't perfectionist" - their hardware has been very good for a long time, better than most Android manufacturers' and not so far behind Apple.

They just couldn't transform from a hardware company to a software one...

Nokia has thought for a long time that they were a software company. They have been repeating this back in 2005 or 6 (when I was there). I had a colleague who kept saying that this wasn't the case. Me, I don't know. I think it's a different issue. To me, it's about big corp middle and upper management: nobody dares to do big changes. They had a linux based OS back in 2004 or something. But went on with Symbian and NOS, because nobody dared to declare that they should drop Symbian and focus on Linux. So they released a single phone (after 3 series of mini tablets) with their linux based os.

And tried polishing symbian. Which had a number of terrible design decisions at the core (which may or may not have been good ones 15 years ago, when they were introduced into EPOC, the ancestor of Symbian). And those decisions affected everyone who worked with it, both internal Nokia developers and external app developers. It made developing for Symbian a pain. It was natural, that iOS and android (and Windows) passed by.

They managed to transform from a rubber boot company to a hardware one