Friday, November 15, 2013

Advice from a jaded designer

To you creatives out there, here's what I learned from my 5 years in the field.

Anytime you have too many people involved in a creative process, the result is counterproductive. A design project should involve three people at most. The designer, the client who gave you the job, and one other person to give a second opinion. The third party should be a marketing director of the client's company, someone from your own design firm, or whoever is responsible for producing or delivering the end product. Nobody else. 


Whenever a client tells me my work will be "submitted to a design board for approval" I gotta just roll my eyes. Each member of a group thinks they are right and everyone else is wrong. 


If the so-called "design board" (usually made of non-designers) can make any decision, it will be a weak compromise based on your least favorite concept, or a mish-mash of elements from other people's ideas that don't work together, they'll even want to go back to an old idea you threw out when you started because you already knew it wouldn't work. 


The result will be cluttered, incoherent and unsatisfying to look at. Once you get to iteration #8 or so of the concept, you realize the work you did up to that point won't mean anything and wasn't worth the effort or time you put into it. Committees are indecisive, prone to changing details at the last minute, telling you the work is done then calling you a day later asking for "one more little thing" and it never ends. It takes all the fun out of the creative process and it makes you regret ever taking the job in the first place.


A creative process should be an intimate one. Design is not a democracy, nor is it a republic of squabbling bureaucrats. Design is kind of a dictatorship. You're the artist, if you're being paid to do the job, then you should be allowed to do it.

No comments:

Post a Comment