A common misperception about design is that you just sit down, move some things about, make something bland look pretty. Good designers can make things look prettier than poor designers.
Seasoned designers often have a big bag of tricks that we can rely on. Experience tells us what works and what doesn’t before we even start, so yes, we can pull something out pretty quickly that will look good, flow well, and even have some sort of individual hook. In an industry that revolves around needing it yesterday, this type of work is often good enough. The client’s happy–onto the next job!
Unfortunately for everyone involved (other than the client’s bean-counter), this is not how the best work, the satisfying work, the award-winning work gets created. Design is not a eureka moment, but an evolutionary process filled with false-starts, multiple variations, successful directions, and yes, plenty of dead-ends. The more you play with an idea, the more you understand what it’s about, the better feel you have for where it needs to go. But you don’t have a map. You just have a gut feeling.
With my biggest projects, I like keeping all of my sketches. Seeing the thought processes. Realizing that at one point you thought you were close before you tried something new and took off in a whole new direction. The history of a design is often more interesting than the final piece.
So if you want something that does better than merely work, give your designers time to play. Time to get lost, start over, and get lost again. When the old stand-bys and cliches are allowed to fade into the process is when a real winner is allowed to mature. - j
