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

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Music and links from this episode

Creative Destruction by Nihilore

Slow Nights by Sro

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, your job is to come up with ideas

And as your job is ideas

Not all of them are solid gold

And you've got to be OK with that

Because as soon as you are

And you can dismiss the bad ideas easily

The good ideas suddenly start appearing

And then you get to the solid gold ones

MUSIC

This was AADA, and I'm Craig Burgess

Music featured in this episode was

Creative Destruction by Nihilore

Slow Nights by Sro

Synthetic Feels by Sro

 For a line by line rundown of this episode go to askadesigneranythingdotcom/ep127

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