Average or Excellent?
As a designer spending time on the details to make your design work for your audience is absolutely vital.
Over the last year I progressed a fair amount and I think I could be happy with it, but I noticed one thing I really struggle with:
Spending time on the details
I design web-interfaces, artworks and even source-code. I try to practice everyday. I just want to have fun. Usually the first hours or maybe days of a design project are the best — I love creating all the basics. Then I often stop. I stop if its “good enough” for me personally. It is very easy to skip the hard part of “detailing it out”.
I think there are two major phases of creation:
- the establishing-phase and
- the detailing-phase.
In the establishing-phase you do the most noticeable creation, basically you go from a white canvas to a visual basis. The second phase is all about adding details to “make things read” (I’ll illustrate what I am getting at in just a few seconds).
The establishing-phase is the most fun phase, the purest phase of creation. After establishing the foundation the whole design is already working in your mind. Your mind is able to add all the necessary details by itself. But your audiences view (the people you are designing for) requires the detailing-phase to make the design work for themselves.
To make my design work for my audience is the point I struggled with most recently. In some cases the detailing phase may be boring but it is always necessary.
I would like to illustrate this phenomenon with the help of this piece of concept art.
(image and copyright Feng Zhu @ http://www.fengzhudesign.com/ — src: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVZtq-3EhL4)
The image above takes place after roughly 20 minutes of painting. It is the most fun phase and in the designers mind the painting is already working. But to make a design really work for your audience you need to spend time on detailing it out (the image below).
(image and copyright Feng Zhu @ http://www.fengzhudesign.com/ — src: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVZtq-3EhL4)
One of the greatest conceptual artists taught me this phenomenon and I recognized this difference in graphic- and web-design, too. Spending time on the details is actually very hard (and boring sometimes) and needs very much courage, but I think it is worth the time. The well thought out details are what differentiates a “very good“ design from a “good enough” design. Don’t stay in the comfortable okay-area, try spending a few extra hours on details and make your work really stand out.
Let your audience have the fun with your well thought out design which you had in the early phase while creating it.
If you would like to get in touch: @thsbrk
