Let's talk a little bit now about wrapping up and revising your project. So let's say you've done some beautiful work and you're coming to that point where it's time to wrap it up and deliver it to your client, or present it or put it online. Whatever it is you're about to do with it, the last step before you go public. We'll talk about that. I want to introduce two seemingly opposing ideas and it will make sense why they seem opposing, but also why they complement each other beautifully. And they are, your work is not precious and it's time to stop seriously. because it's time to stop. The first is your work is not precious. What does that mean? Well, this is a quote that I picked up from a friend of mine who teaches art at CU Boulder. I've also heard it from other people, but I've never really found where this term comes from. But it's a wonderful term to talk about the creative endeavor. Do you know about these guys? These are Buddhist sand painters. Maybe you're familiar with them. They work in teams and they put together these gorgeous paintings with colored sand. They take weeks to do them. And when they're done, they sweep them away. It's all gone. That's a crazy thing to do. There's something to learn from them and I don't just mean patience. There's something else deeper than that. Your designs aren't precious no matter how great you think they are. What really matters isn't the design, isn't the product itself, it's your creative ability. It's your creative style. That's the thing that's precious. After all, if you feel that your work is a result of a rare and wonderous process, then you'll rarely have wonderful ideas. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. So, I wouldn't ask you to sweep away your best work, but it's important to remember that you can always redo something. You can always go back to the drawing board and start over. This is where you become a true designer. This matters of course, because inevitably, if you design long enough, someone is going to tell you. I don't care if it's a client, or a boss, or your audience or your co-workers, they're going to tell you that you haven't done the job. They're completely unhappy with the product that you've come up with and that means that you have to start over again. Your first response to that is I can't start over again, this is perfect. The thing I've delivered is absolutely perfect, it can't be better. The thing is of course, it can always be better and it can always be different. This is a logo I did a long time ago for a boat maker and I loved the logo. I thought it was really good. I delivered it to them. I thought it was my best work. And they look at it and they said, you know what? It's okay, but what we really want is we want a logo that shows that our boats float like a feather on the water and really, we just want a capital Z. That's all we want. Well, I thought this is a crazy idea. It's not going to work, it's going to be ugly and dumb. I wanted to quit. I wanted to tell them they could just keep the project and move on. I gave it a shot and I came up with this, which I think is pretty good. What's really cool about this though is that I didn't think this idea would work. And actually within this frame, something came to pass, so that I was actually quite happy with. The takeaway is quite often you'll think going back to the drawing board, working with different restrictions or different demands. It's going to make the project impossible and you find that you can actually pull it off. It's just a matter of working hard enough, exploring, learning how to work with elements and making things happen. That's what precious. Not the project itself but your creative abilities. Your creative muscle, that's what we're after as designers. So it's true. You can always find different solutions, different ways to solve a problem, but at some point you have to stop. That seems to run against this idea that there are an infinite number of solutions to any design problem, but at some point you do have to stop. I used to do these illustrations. At the university, I did hundreds if not thousands of them for scientific groups on campus. I did this one for the integrated physiology department, I was really happy with it. I sent it off to the journal, the journal promptly rejected it. They sent it back to me and they said, the wood grain in the box has nothing to do with the experiment. And they were exactly right, I don't know what I was thinking, I was listening to great music, I got carried away. And I just kept going and going with this illustration well beyond the point of stopping. I killed the wood grain, resubmitted the image and they printed it. The takeaway is you have to know when to stop. There's a great quote by the fellow who wrote The Little Prince. Whose name I won't attempt to pronounce at this point. Who said the designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away. Absolutely true. Quin talks about the importance of gravity and getting to the point and writing it's the same with designing, you need to know when to stop. Otherwise, I've said it before, you're decorating and you're not designing.
