Process?

Through my recently gained experience designing several logos during my internship, I have learned that developing the perfect mark for a brand can be quite laborious. The smallest tweak of a point in Illustrator can make the biggest difference in a design, as it can change the entire feeling that a shape evokes, as well as how the icon interacts with the negative space and typography around it.

Regardless of the type of company for which a logo (or really any other piece) is designed, the emphasis is always on the final product. Designers present polished, complete solutions in hope that their clients will accept the proposal with only minor revisions. Do clients always pay for the journey that leads to the final product? What if designs don’t always have a bounty of type studies, multiple file versions, or series of scratchy thumbnail sketches that help the final version come to fruition? What if a designer can get it right on the first try?

Many other forms of art, including painting, sculpture, drawing, are process-based, and viewers can detect and appreciate the process even when presented with the final product, but this really isn’t the case for design. Come the final presentation, designers (figuratively) throw all their preliminary work out the window because only the solution matters. Only the final logo is used on the business card to be seen by all.

As designers (or designers-to-be), do we need to resort to more handmade forms of fine art in order to truly appreciate the process of what we are designing? What about design prevents the natural process of art-making from making itself known? In her book, Make it Bigger, Paula Scher, a current principal at Pentagram (and one of my design heroes), claims that “the act of designing is more ephemeral; it is an intuitive process informed by external forces that direct the intuition. Whereas a solution can be explained, the process that created it can never adequately be understood.” And Paula is probably right.

I wholeheartedly believe that the first solutions for a design can actually be the best. Why? Because over time, the first attempt is really the 150^th attempt or the 1000^th attempt, and each time we sit down to design, we learn from our experience. And until we can hand that experience over to the client for review, we’ll have to continue to grapple with what exactly qualifies the “process” of design.

A great Paula Scher video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdzzVeIdwpQ