How broad are you willing to allow questions to be in order to promote more interesting question content?

Question

A discussion of more interesting question content

I enjoy the deep, difficult questions in Graphic Design. As is obvious in the question lists, Graphic Design is largely used as "Adobe Help Center", and this is a necessary part of the site's traffic right now, and probably always will be.

But it's not the kind of questions that many of us are here to see and answer. Lots of the design enthusiasts here want to see more of those rich design questions, and I'd like to know how deep those of you who agree with me are willing to go with question answers.

To the point

My goal is to reach an understanding of exactly what kind of question we want to see more of.

Please respond with an example (possibly an existing GD question) to accompany your opinion of the kind of question that we should promote on the site.

Here are some questions that I've either posted, answered, contributed to, or chanced upon that might be used as examples in this discussion.

1. How to reinforce intuitive design decisions

2. Why do some logos look.. old? How does design age?

3. Designing around an awful logo

4. Do interfaces really need to look good?

5. How do you break out of current creative mind sets?

All of these questions involve the topic of design, rather than being software-subjects, and they're subjective/broad to some extent.

Your opinion

Users will not always ask the perfect question, especially on this site. It's hard to be objective in the presentation of a design question often times.

I'd like to see the community come to a consensus on how broad we're willing to allow questions to be.

• Provide an example of a question that pushes the limit, but still strikes you as an answerable request.

• Give your opinion on the idea of answering/up-voting big, broad questions like these on this site.

Great example of the kind of issues that arise by our lack of this consensus

In this recently popular question, the OP asks a broad question, but does point out some specific points / areas that he is looking for.

Now, I'm not saying I agree that this question was entirely too broad, or that it wasn't. My focus here is on the point that if we want to promote this kind of question in the right way, we need to determine exactly what is and isn't expected from the question, and what's expected in return from the answer.

If we choose to accept and up-vote somewhat broad questions here, as we clearly have chosen to do, we also need to be prepared to accept answers that are broad to the same extent.

A question should not be up-voted if the very best answer that can be given is "read a book".

Two good answers were given negative votes on this question. If we're going to not close broad questions, we can't down-vote the broad answers that ensue.

So I think a very specific policy on question and answer expectation needs to be put into effect to handle this kind of question that we seem to want to promote and up-vote on the site.

Here is a meta question that sheds some light on the issue in relation to the example question given.

Tl;dr

We up-voted a broad question 6 times rather than closing it, and then down-voted the answers that came as a result.

Answer 1

I just posted what I would consider to be an incredibly broad question; and without the almost explicit definition of what I'm hoping to see in answers, along with the example answer I posted with the question, I think it would be closed as too broad quite fast. It still might. :)

• What are the key principles that effective designs share?

If this isn't closed as too broad or a duplicate, I think it's success will be the attention I focused on defining what kind of answer I'm hoping for, and that answer being realistically deliverable.