Sorry. Every design you make isn't going to be amazing.
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Music and links from this episode
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Nihilore/Truth_and_Justification/Nihilore_-_Truth_and_Justification_-_02_Creative_Destruction (Creative Destruction by Nihilore)
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sro/We_Feel/Slow_Nights (Slow Nights by Sro)
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sro/We_Feel/Synthetic_Feels (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,...