Description

Sorry. Every design you make isn't going to be amazing.

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Music and links from this episode

1. Creative Destruction by Nihilore
2. Slow Nights by Sro
3. Synthetic Feels by Sro

Line-by-line notes

1. No matter what your job is
2. When you do it every day of your life
3. When you create stuff every day
4. It's not always good
5. In fact, most of what you do isn't good
6. And every thing you do isn't solid gold
7. This is AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess
8. MUSIC
9. Let me clarify what I mean when I say most of what you do isn't good
10. Unless you're really lucky
11. I mean, really lucky
12. 90% of what you create isn't good
13. It might be average
14. It might be better than average
15. And some of it that you never show anybody will be absolutely terrible
16. Some of it will be good
17. But most of it won't be solid gold
18. It's hard making stuff that's good, and especially solid gold design work
19. It's a sad and inevitable fact of design
20. Sometimes
21. Whether it's the client's fault, your fault, or you just run out of time
22. The design work you make won't be amazing
23. It'll be passable
24. And sometimes good enough is...good enough
25. Sometimes, and I don't want to sound snobby about this but I guess I'm going to
26. Sometimes a company or a client deserves just good enough
27. Not every company in the world should look amazing
28. You wouldn't make a scrap yard look like a perfume brand
29. A perfume brand should look elegant and usually high class
30. But the same isn't true for a scrap yard, and it shouldn't look...amazing
31. And yeah...I know that sounds snobbish
32. But it's true
33. Not every brand should look amazing, because it isn't appropriate
34. As a designer, it's OK to sometimes be bad
35. In my last episode, I spoke about creative block
36. And learning to appreciate that it's OK to sometimes run out of ideas
37. It's also OK to sometimes make bad design work
38. So long as you have an internal barometer to know that you should never show it to a client
39. Because I can guarantee that the client will pick your worst design if you show it
40. My sketchbooks and my rough logo documents are full of things that look like they've been designed by a 2 year old
41. But nobody ever sees them
42. You've got to get past all of the bad ideas before you can get to the good ones
43. Sometimes you get lucky, and the first thing out of your brain is amazing
44. But that's rare
45. And it takes persistence and consistency to find that solid gold idea amongst all the dross
46. Sometimes you can start to feel a little self conscious about this though
47. If you go...