Aaron Gerdes

Prolific designer Michael Bierut blogs honestly about a common unease among designers:

The iterative process, the role of improvisation, the adjustments that are made in response to audience feedback, all of these elements are a part of any design process. And, in a way, they’ve always been the ones that have vaguely unnerving to me.

I’ve mentioned some fear wrapped up in my own process in an earlier post.

Firms tend to market processes as a proof that we’ll be able to replicate past victories — to show prospects our success hasn’t only been through luck. Yet sometimes we break process. I’ve done it over constraints, at the client’s request, and because sometimes the first concept out of the gate is the right one (and all the stakeholders agree). If you’re too rigid in those situations, you interfere with natural momentum.

This is why I’m an advocate of less formality and less bulk in a process.