Too Fast For Greatness - Creativity vs Convenience

Good design can happen fast. Great design doesn’t.

I've been spending time thinking about how we've all sped up, treating the creative process as an app that deliver instant results - hello Canva, and the relationship between creativity and convenience.

As systems around us have gotten faster, so have we. 

I’ve seen first hand how design timelines have become shorter and shorter and teams have gotten smaller and smaller.

In response, designers are valued for how quickly they can work, and actually, controversially, this doesn’t lead to bad design, but it does prevent GREAT design.

In design there is a time to go fast and a time to slow down. 

Agonising over your first design is a waste of time. 

Learning to quickly iterate through several ideas keeps you from being overly precious and allows your creative mind to be more agile and free.

Then comes the part that leads to great design, THE EDIT.

And this is then the part that we miss - slowing down to edit. Questioning the WHY behind your design, why does it work or not work? How does it fit into the cultural context of what you FEEL consumers will want?

This is well documented. In fact, studies show that creativity thrives in moments of pause.

When our minds wander (Baird et al., 2012) or slip into a restful, reflective state (Beaty et al., 2014), we’re more likely to connect unexpected ideas and find original solutions. Sometimes, the best way to move a design forward is to sit with it—not rush it.

Rushing your design team could have just cost you your next winner.