I'd like to talk for a moment about losing. Specifically about losing work, and ultimately, time. Back in the early days of my employment at iMarc, we didn't have the same luxuries we so heavily rely on today. Before we adopted subversion, it wasn't uncommon to lose copious amounts of work due to simple miscommunication. Groans and swearing would echo through these walls as we carelessly saved over each other's hard work. Before cloud computing and automatic backups, everyone would inevitably lose data and designs due to occasional mechanical or human error. Even as recently as last week, I almost lost an hour of work when Photoshop decided to lock up unexpectedly as I was saving a fresh new design. The near loss of my work reminded me of something I used to do frequently that I still do from time to time.
I destroy my own work.
Often times as designers, we'll spend hours and days creating a design comp that we think our clients will love and embrace. We'll show it off internally to the entire creative team, strategy department, as well as our project managers and anyone else who happens to walk through the room. Some may love it as is, while others will offer several opinions on how it could be improved. How much feedback do I welcome before going back to work implementing said changes? I'd wager that most designers are content keeping what they currently have, iterating as needed to incorporate all of the feedback they've gathered, despite how tedious. More often than not in these scenarios, I take a different approach.
I create a new document.
A blank canvas can cause anxiety, especially with a deadline looming. The silver lining to this is that things always go faster the second time around. I know what works and what doesn't. I know the tricks to replicating the good styles I had established the first time around. If I had painted myself into a corner in the first version, I'm now free to explore new options. If my design was too complicated before, a second attempt is almost always cleaner and therefore easier for our front end team to implement.
I'm of the belief that nothing is ever truly "done". There will always be something to improve or remove. The most important things I can do as a designer are knowing when to stop fussing with a design, knowing when and what feedback to ignore, and realizing when it's time to start anew. There are plenty of fields and careers where the luxury of starting fresh with your work isn't a possibility. We forget sometimes that just because we may never have to "lose" our work again doesn't mean we shouldn't axe it ourselves from time to time.
