Designer OCD
I’ve been meaning to start blogging for a while now, and after noticing it was World Mental Health Day this morning, this seemed like as good a day as any to get going.
A lot of my fellow designers like to talk about ‘Designer OCD’ and a quick Google will reveal plenty articles, blogs and profiles using the term, invariably along the lines of ‘I just have to have my layouts neat and tidy or I go crazy!’ or just using it as a rather throwaway descriptor.
And they all really need to stop.
Why?
Because they don’t have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t see it as something malicious by any means, but it does play into the stereotype of what OCD is; neat freaks who like everything perfect.
I am a designer that has OCD. Actual, real, OCD. I’d be lying if I said that some elements of the disorder make me ‘better’ at what I do than I may otherwise have been, but it’s no bed of roses. So sure, I’ve always struggled to understand why designers might produce work that isn’t ‘pixel perfect,’ but that isn’t because my OCD demands neatness, more that my brain requires things to be right, or it’ll gnaw at my consciousness till I fix it. So yeah, you can be sure that if my content boxes are meant to have 32px padding, then every single one of them will.
“My brain requires things to be right, or it’ll gnaw at my consciousness till I fix it.”
You might think that’s possibly a good thing, but then there’s the other side of the coin, the side where doing the slightest thing, moving a button, changing a bit of text, hell clicking the mouse, becomes more frustrating than you can possibly imagine, because something in the back of my brain insists it wasn’t done right by some unknown arbitrary measure, so must be done again. And again.
I’ve had OCD since I was 12, and I’ve scarcely had a moment of internal peace since. It’s like being hyper aware of everything you do, an internal monologue considering every step, every thought, every movement and deciding whether it was correct or not (case in point the number of words up till here that I’ve deleted and retyped twice).
It is, at times, utterly exhausting.
Most of the time I find a good balance, it doesn’t slow me down, and sometimes it let’s me spot mistakes others don’t / wouldn’t notice. Particularly at work, I’ve gotten good at keeping a lid on it. Indeed, I’m probably the fastest moving designer you’ll come across! This sometimes isn’t so easy at home, which is probably true of so many mental health issues. Last night I felt the need to put my clothes in the washing basket 5 different times before I wanted to punch the wall. As an otherwise logical person, maybe that’s an insight into the sheer frustration that might be felt at having part of your brain go off the cliff about an activity anyone else probably barely thinks about doing.
It’s time designers stopped saying they have OCD.
They don’t.
And they don’t want to.
