Good design takes time

Why taking your time is the only way to make anything good

The first draft of almost everything is shit. Not because we’re bad at what we do, but because that’s how creativity works. You have to wade through the mess to get to the magic. And in a world obsessed with speed and polish, that truth feels borderline sacrilegious.

The world is batshit at the moment. Everything is moving at a million miles an hour, the noise is deafening and it is all very confusing. It feels like if you’re not making something instantly, it’s already irrelevant. Take your time and you’ll miss the boat. Take too much time and you’re just being self-indulgent.

Combine that with the ease at which seemingly ‘good’ things can now be spat out (hello AI reference, we’ve been expecting you), and iteration starts to look like desperation. If it didn’t land the first time, it’s a write off. The problem with this mindset is that it’s complete bollocks.

The first draft of almost everything is shit. It always has been. For everyone. That’s just the nature of creating something. You have to wade through the embarrassingly bad ideas before you can get to the good ones. And you have to sweat that idea until it finally lands.

That process isn’t sexy. Which is why it’s easier to believe in the myth of talent. That some people are just naturally brilliant. That good work appears fully formed like some kind of divine intervention.

Take design legend Paula Scher. One of the most famous stories in branding is her logo for Citibank in 1998. She sketched it on a napkin in the first meeting, the client said yes on the spot, and that was that. It’s a great story. But the fact it’s famous tells you something. It is an outlier. And Paula Scher herself would likely be the first to admit that not every logo can be summoned into existence quite that easily.

It’s a romantic notion to remember the napkin. So much so, it’s easy to forget the decades of late nights, false starts, and client decks that made that napkin possible.

This is why great design takes time. It takes time to break through the bad ideas and find the tiny, hopeful, half-decent sliver of a good one. Time to mould that nugget of an idea into something usable, and time to push it until it’s good, maybe even great. And that means leaving a trail of slaughtered darlings behind you.

And this is what makes commercial design so hard. Without enough budget to justify the time and effort this process takes, you have to take shortcuts. You fall back on what has worked before, or what others are doing. You make something familiar enough to get approved. Which is why increasingly more work looks the same, because we don’t have time to find and fight those ideas.

You have to mould that nugget of an idea into something usable, and take the time to push it until it’s good. And that means leaving a trail of slaughtered darlings behind you.

Experience and time make this process easier. Your muscle gets stronger. In weightlifting there is a method called ‘greasing the groove’, repeating a movement until your body becomes more efficient and it feels like second nature. The same happens with creative work. The more you do it, the easier it is to recognise what’s worth pursuing. But even then, you still have to wade through the mud.

This is something our old friend Paula Scher is acutely aware of. As she got up to leave that infamous Citibank meeting, someone from the team asked, ”How can it be that it’s done in a second?”, to which Scher replied “It’s done in a second and 34 years. It’s done in a second and every experience and everything that’s in my head.”

The first draft doesn’t have to be good. It just has to exist. Because, if you’re lucky, that’s where the work begins.