The hard things about design
I once wrote in 16 pieces of design wisdom that design requires a tremendous amount of mental fortitude. One line in a list of sixteen, for something that deserves a full essay.
Design attracts people with romantic notions of the craft, and the notions aren’t wrong. The work can be genuinely beautiful. But nobody sits you down and tells you what the craft costs, so here’s an honest accounting.
The material is infinite
The inspiration space in design is near infinite. Being able to hold a million threads in your head and pull the right one on cue is powerful, incredibly rare, and very hard to do. When it happens, it looks effortless but only you’d know the mental cycles spent behind the outcomes.
The path to a breakthrough is non-linear, and worse, non-repetitive. The route that took you to your last great piece of work won’t take you to the next one, so you end up discovering a new path every single time. Experience helps you search better, but it never hands you the answer.
And if you’re after genuinely original work, understanding art becomes just as important as understanding the mechanics of experience. Flows, patterns and heuristics will get you competence, but they won’t get you anything new.
Creativity on schedule is the hardest version of all this, because producing it on command, on a Tuesday, for a review at 4pm, is a skill that takes years to build.
Everyone can read your work
Design is highly legible. Anyone can look at a piece of design and have a reaction to it. Not even nuanced feedback, just a reaction at the very minimum. Nobody walks past a database schema and comments on it, but everyone will comment on your screens.
That legibility means the signal never stops, ranging from casual reactions to considered critique and everything in between. I’m not even talking about the overwhelming end of this. Just the sheer input of signals to process as they come is a lot on its own. Design faces more scrutiny than almost any other craft, and that makes it a vocation that requires immense fortitude.
There’s a cost to all these interactions too. In most crafts, quality comes from time spent with the work. In design, it comes from time spent with the work and with everyone who has opinions about it. The mental cost of interactions is the price you pay for high-quality outcomes.
Obsession is the tool
Being truly satisfied with your work is a rare feat, and when it happens, it’s usually the result of constant obsession: going over the work again and again until it holds up from every angle. Obsession works, but it’s cognitively very demanding. Do it properly and you end up exhausted. Consumed.
The steady state of a good designer is permanent dissatisfaction with how things are, which is an uncomfortable but essential fuel. You never fully make peace with it. You just learn to run on it.
Then there’s the awareness. Once your eye develops, you start seeing a thousand little details everywhere: the misaligned padding, the inconsistent radius, the label that’s one word too long. Being aware of them all is exhausting, and not being able to unsee them is worse.
Obsession is also largely a lonely pursuit. Your colleagues won’t likely care as much as you do, your timelines won’t be forgiving enough to accommodate your standards, and you’ll find yourself negotiating with your own well-being more often than with your stakeholders.
Volume is the only way through
Ira Glass famously called this the taste gap: you get into creative work because you have good taste, and for years that same taste keeps telling you that your work isn’t good enough. His fix was volume. Do a huge amount of work and the gap eventually closes. He’s right, but what he didn’t say is what the volume costs. Prolificity demands obsession, and obsession demands everything I described above. The loops in design don’t have an exit. They have repetition.
When your cutting room floor is full of a million discarded iterations, something shifts: your internal algorithm for taste finally gets refined enough to produce quality on command, across any space. That’s the payoff, and it takes most of a career to collect.
None of this is meant to scare anyone off. I’d pick this craft again without any hesitation. I just think people deserve to know what they’re signing up for.
Now, back to work.
