127 - Every Design Isn't Solid Gold

What this episode covers

Sorry. Every design you make isn't going to be amazing. Subscribe: ITUNES | ANDROID | STITCHER | RSS FEED Music and links from this episode Creative Destruction by Nihilore Slow Nights by Sro Synthetic Feels by Sro Line-by-line notes No matter what your job is When you do it every day of your life When you create stuff every day It's not always good In fact, most of what you do isn't good And every thing you do isn't solid gold This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess MUSIC Let me clarify what I mean when I say most of what you do isn't good Unless you're really lucky I mean, really lucky 90% of what you create isn't good It might be average It might be better than average And some of it that you never show anybody will be absolutely terrible Some of it will be good But most of it won't be solid gold It's hard making stuff that's good, and especially solid gold design work It's a sad and inevitable fact of design Sometimes Whether it's the client's fault, your fault, or you just run out of time The design work you make won't be amazing It'll be passable And sometimes good enough is...good enough Sometimes, and I don't want to sound snobby about this but I guess I'm going to Sometimes a company or a client deserves just good enough Not every company in the world should look amazing You wouldn't make a scrap yard look like a perfume brand A perfume brand should look elegant and usually high class But the same isn't true for a scrap yard, and it shouldn't look...amazing And yeah...I know that sounds snobbish But it's true Not every brand should look amazing, because it isn't appropriate As a designer, it's OK to sometimes be bad In my last episode, I spoke about creative block And learning to appreciate that it's OK to sometimes run out of ideas It's also OK to sometimes make bad design work So long as you have an internal barometer to know that you should never show it to a client Because I can guarantee that the client will pick your worst design if you show it My sketchbooks and my rough logo documents are full of things that look like they've been designed by a 2 year old But nobody ever sees them You've got to get past all of the bad ideas before you can get to the good ones Sometimes you get lucky, and the first thing out of your brain is amazing But that's rare And it takes persistence and consistency to find that solid gold idea amongst all the dross Sometimes you can start to feel a little self conscious about this though If you go through a couple of hours or even a couple of days And everything you've designed or the ideas that you've come up with are all rubbish You start to wonder if you're rubbish Am I rubbish? Is that it? Am I past it? Have I got no more good ideas in me? It's hard to stop thinking that But you've got to Because bad ideas never last for a long time Unless you let yourself start to believe that you're a bad designer Just like creative block You've got to understand That as a designer, your job is to come up with ideas And as your job is ideas Not all of them are solid gold And you've got to be OK with that Because as soon as you are And you can dismiss the bad ideas easily The good ideas suddenly start appearing And then you get to the solid gold ones MUSIC This was AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess Music featured in this episode was Creative Destruction by Nihilore Slow Nights by Sro Synthetic Feels by Sro  For a line by line rundown of this episode go to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep127 I'm back tomorrow Support Ask a Designer Anything Ask a Designer Anything Website Twitter (@craigburgess) Ask a Designer Anything on Facebook Leave me a review on iTunes