How to break up with your design

Your design is beautiful, every element on the screen has been through a journey with you, fighting through critiques, variations, font changes and numerous other iterations to settle in this special place in your heart. There’s one thing you need to do in order to make it better, Dump it.

One of my leads sat down with me to go through a piece of work that I had created, we worked together making final adjustments until we were both happy with the design. A final comment as walking away was that I could try flipping it upside down. What?! Of course I was reluctant about this, We had finally come to a happy place with the design after weeks of exploration and I had engineers waiting for me to get something finalised for them. I took a fresh look at the design, flipping it, deleting some unnecessary elements and combining the rest to reduce the amount of noise on the screen, and ended up with a much clearer design that solved all of our concerns.

As hard as it is to let go of your designs it is a vital part of the process, how are you meant to progress it if you’re hanging onto that particular font choice or alignment?

This incident led me to think about how might we build this drive into our design process. Having that lead suggest to try something totally new once I was already happy is something that really pushed me, but how can we push ourselves in the same way?

I aim to try incorporate this into my workflow, having the mindset that even if I think it’s done there are other ways to do it will hopefully push my designs in a new direction. Design evolution takes time.

So to all those beautiful design choices I’ve made, I think we need to see other options.

It’s not me, its you.