Design is hard

I find at times people can be quite dismissive of what I do. Everyone can design these days. There are plenty of tools to bring ideas to life, you can install templates and get a decent looking website up in minutes and we all know a nephew who dabbles in Photoshop who can do your wedding invites if you want.

Being a designer is hard. What makes it hard is often not the process of coming up with the ideas or getting them onto canvas so to speak, it’s not mastering Figma or whatever tools we use. It’s getting the buy in from others.

When I was developing, I didn’t have anyone telling me that my code indenting was rubbish. Well actually I did… but the point is, nobody really cared about the code I was producing as long as it worked and was tidy enough to pass some code standards. I didn’t have a client messaging me to say her nephew does a bit of code and has come up with something that might work better or asking me to use a different class name on the button. Of course there were different problems to face if the functionality didn’t work right or if it were broken but it isn’t very subjective, it either works how it should or doesn’t, nobody really had an opinion on how you got there.

When it comes to design, everyone has an opinion on your final result and often all you get is “Don’t like that”. Often, it is ‘have you tried this, have you tried that?”

I’ve touched on this before. When you show a design, it is often a result of trial and error. I don’t pull designs out of my arse. I spend hours crafting something till eventually it works. I will have tried tonnes of ways of doing it long before I share the Figma designs. Truth be told, if I go away and come back to said work, my mood will be completely different and I’ll hate on what I did and want to change it again. Designs are often “in the moment’ pieces. What often gets lost is the journey taken to get there.

So when you are met with a “don’t like it” it’s often hard to take. it's not the wrong answer so to speak. Design is of course subjective but often the feedback cannot be backed up with a real reason. Not liking something does not mean something is wrong or doesn't work. It's also only one opinion.

What I try to do is design little and often and try to get feedback from a client. I like to design in tandem so they can feel the pain of making the logo bigger for no reason or moving the text 5px to the left, again for no reason. But jokes aside, working together helps to show others how much effort goes into a design. Doing the big reveal of a few days work and being met with a look of someone whose cat you just killed is not a nice experience so always get people involved. That way, when they suggest something stupid and they don’t like it, it’s quickly amended and forgotten about.

But ultimately it’s not the destination that matters, it’s the journey and design is often a journey. Sometimes it’s a nice trip out, the sun is shining and the roads are clear, sometimes, the traffic is bad, the aircon is playing up and the kids are asking are we nearly there yet and we've been driving 15 minutes?

Design is hard. But eventful.

PS Your nephews designs suck ;)