Week 40

Waves

Nate Langley
Nov 1 · 3 min read

Music I’ve been listening to this week — the week I discovered the best Nina Simone track ever! Bit of a banging week of music, which is a good reflection of the words below.


If last week was a week of riding the big wave, this was the week I crashed spectacularly on the rocks. Far from the beach.

Look! A romantic image of someone surfing a wave. My week, not so romantic. Photo by Linus Nylund on Unsplash

As all weeks do, this week started in the last. I was buoyed after a great design review with a Very Important Person midweek 38. My sketches of a future vision had gone down well. Time to fire up Sketch. Red flags ahoy*

🚩 #1
The weeks first Red Flag is a big ‘un. I never jump from paper sketch to app Sketch without getting the journey right. But, lo-fi had gone down so well in the review and we had no time to dwell on the look and feel. There was a lot of feedback on the journey. It wasn’t quite right. Even so, I was feeling blasé and I hadn’t designed anything proper in a while, so I recklessly jumped straight into the pixels.

🚩 #2
Future visions are always tricky. They are usually requested by Very Important People who are struggling to see how things can fit together. Any designer that finds themselves in this position and doesn’t spend time making sense of the journey — the story — is missing the point.

🚩 #3
After 12 Hours of flinging pixels, the penny dropped that I was focussing on the wrong thing. To add to this, I wasn’t enjoying designing at all. I switched back to refining on the journey. The result was a bland design, with an ok journey.

🚩 #4
The print out was shit. I change my playback style depending on the stakeholder. This stakeholder responds well to print outs on the wall rather than a screen presentation. The printer ink was running low making the design look even blander.

🚩 #5
Very Important Person entered the room, swearing at their phone. Already the atmosphere was sour.

🚩 #6
I apologised. One of the first pieces of feedback I ever got as a designer was ‘stop apologising!’. It took me a long time to get out of the habit of saying sorry every time something looked like my responsibility. I apologised for the state of the printouts and immediately mumbled something about it being in work in progress. But by then I knew the meeting would be a disaster.

And it was. There were raised voices, frustration, eyes to the floor and the general vibe of failure.

You looked shocked, dear reader. Yes, I was too, but I understand the stakeholder’s frustration. It’s hard to get across the context in these short notes yet a lot is riding on this work, so it had to be right. I made the situation worse by probing to get clarity on what they meant. I knew what they meant — the design wasn’t good enough. I’m so used to exposing my work often at any fidelity in Co-op Digital. I forget that to the rest of the business this is alien.

A lot was learnt that afternoon. I learnt about what story I need to tell this stakeholder in the future; what to show and when. I went back to Fed, got a pep talk from my boss and nailed the journey (like I should have done). After that, I dived into Sketch and with the help of some of my awesome team we pulled out a pretty good design that everyone is happy with. Hopefully, I’ll be able to share it far and wide one day.

Why am I sharing this story? I think it’s important to reflect on my mistakes so I can learn, but also others may learn from them. I’ve been designing for nearly 15 years and it’s only recently that I have been comfortable in failure. Mistakes lead to growth after all. But in a work environment it still feels weird to put your hands up and go ‘yep, I fucked up. Now how can I fix this’. I’ve not done this plenty of times in the past and it never, ever works out. I bottle it up, I get stressed and ultimately it sabotages the work.

*how long can I keep the nautical theme on for?

Nate Langley

Written by

Designer.

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