Here’s why your design looks sucky the next day
And what to do about it
You’ve spent 12 hours on your first design project and everything looks perfect! You are confident your client will love every pixel. However, the very next day, you take a second look.
In the light of the morning, you see mistakes you’re sure weren’t there yesterday. The proportions are off. Your colour choices are dismal. You can’t believe you felt so good about this only the day before.
Perhaps you’re not cut out for life as a designer. You get ready to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE.
Hold up a moment.
Quite often, when designers revisit their old work a few years later, they have a good laugh. Why? Because the experience I mention above is the norm for beginning designers working on their first design projects, with many newbies unable to articulate what looks off when it seemed perfectly fine hours ago.
Mistakes are part of the learning process. Spotting them and figuring out solutions is how you will develop as a designer.
Here are 3 tips to help you spot mistakes quickly and accelerate your growth and skill in your design career.
1. Refresh, reset, and take your eyes out for a walk
Refresh your eyes
Working on a design project for 3 hours straight might sound hardworking, but therein lies the problem: you have been looking at your work all day so your perception of attractiveness has been fixated on what you’ve been working on.
Taking the occasional break by going out for a walk to a café or the park will allow new ideas to pop into your mind. According to Stanford research, going for a walk is one of the best ways to recharge your creativity and can boost creative output by 60 percent!
“One key to creativity is to not lock on that first idea. Keep going. Keep coming up with new ones, until you pick one or two to pursue.”
Authors of the study, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz, state, “Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.” (Click here for the full journal report published in the APA.)
2. Guard against blindly falling in love with your design or idea
Heard of Narcissus? He’s the guy who fell in love with his own reflection, which led to his death. Don’t be that guy.
Does feedback from others hurt your ego? Learn to eat humble pie and move on. One way to guard against wearing rose-coloured glasses is by learning to accept feedback from others.
Design is an iterative process. At the end of the day, if it doesn’t work, learn to accept it and start over again. Process matters.
3. Develop your sense of taste (the long-term solution)
The first two tips are quick solutions to help you refresh your perspective in design by looking at your project from a different perspective.
Often, however, a new designer won’t be able to design something extraordinary right off the bat because they lack the exposure that develops aesthetic taste.
Taste is the ability to gauge what is good or bad.
- How do you gauge that a certain piece of music was played well or poorly
- How do you gauge an art instalment as good or bad?
- How do you gauge an experience as good or bad?
- How do you gauge someone with good fashion taste?
A few years ago, I came across this book from Manabu Mizuno, Director of Good Design Company, Sensu Wa Chishiki Kara Hajimaru. In it Mizuno states,
“If taste is a piece of art, then knowledge is the canvas.”
So how does one acquire taste? In the book itself, it mentioned a simple way to develop your taste: allow yourself to see more and experience more. Only then, can you easily design a work with good taste and create something extraordinary.
Sourcing inspiration from Pinterest or Behance will only get you so far. Get out of your seat and experience the real thing. Immerse yourself in a knowledge buffet. Read all kinds of magazines and don’t settle for what appeals to only you. By widening your experiences and sources of information, you will be creating more dots that will lead to new ideas.
Bonus tip: Learn, unlearn and relearn
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler
In the era of the Internet, anyone can learn fundamentals of design by watching YouTube tutorials, taking online courses, and perusing design boards and swiping ideas from other designers.
But if you want to become the kind of designer with a portfolio of original, fresh concepts that help you establish a long-lasting career… You’ll need to get out of your chair for that.
Don’t despair if you are unable to produce good work on your first go, or even your second or third. What matters most is mastering the ability to pick yourself up after a failure and get comfortable with learning, unlearning, and relearning because that’s where the journey to great design begins.
“In music, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played the fastest, and there would be composers who wrote only finales.” — Alan Watts
Notes
- A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity — TED Talk by Tim Harford
- Shuhari
- Music & Life — Alan Watts
- 《品味，從知識開始。》 — 先有不同凡行，才有不同凡響。
- “To make delicious food, you need to eat delicious food” — Jiro Ono