Aaron Gerdes: Tag process

Uncomfortable creative process: Should we hide behind formality?

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 20:12:00 -0700

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.

Design Process, Reality Check

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 11:02:00 -0700

Brian Sooy has a great quote, via Guy Kawasaki:

Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.

The quote made me laugh, most designers have issued this complaint at one point. I’ll supplement this with my own statement about good design:

A good designer is one who accepts and integrates this reality into their process to produce a better result with less friction.

A designer can be many of things. I don’t claim to have a monopoly on what it is. The above isn’t an exhaustive definition, but the good ones definitely have this in common.

Create more results from less energy: fine tuning your ratio of process to results.

aarongerdes@gmail.com (Aaron Gerdes) — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 22:23:00 -0700

When you hone a knife, you’re sharpening it by inflicting friction on the dull edges.

I’ve been honing my process for delivering branding and marketing work for almost ten years. It’s never been as complex as the first day I used it. The process has been honed into a smarter, simpler tool.

When we’re operating from a fearful mindset, we often judge something’s effectiveness by its “weight”. While in this mindset, effectiveness is confused with our ability to safely hide behind it.

I realize now that when I struck out to develop my own business, the process was something I wanted to hide behind. In Michael Gerber’s excellent book The E-Myth, Gerber urges entrepreneurs to create processes. I warped that concept to develop of my process into something formal enough to offset the risk of working with a new company. In reality, I was placing formalities in between myself and the successful track record I wanted to establish.

Writers understand this. If you can’t write a good book, you can at least write a long one. But they have editors. Unfortunately, many of our business processes will forever be a first draft: too many words, a lack of focus, and after some time even the authors have difficulty understanding the meaning.

Massive functional specs fall prey to change and misunderstandings. I’ve found since I began my business that my process has evolved from trying to understand everything before beginning work to having a general idea and iterating solutions. This delivers better results because:

It’s more collaborative.
It forces you to overcome a fear of criticism.
People are better at defining things by what they’re not than by answering questions about what they are.

There are two added benefits. The first is flexibility. Instead of trying to impose my systematic theory of design on a 2 week project, I can keep sane and work within parameters. The second is happiness. I’m assuming you’re happier being authentic. As you cut away formality, you find what falls on the floor doesn’t justify the time is sucks from doing what you’re good at.