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Designer, Don’t Fall In Love With Your Project
Your designs won’t be able to stay loyal to you, so why should you?
Your creative work is intimately yours
Have you ever heard a UX designer referring to their latest work as “their baby”? Using lots of possessive pronouns such as MY product, MY design file? Becoming territorial when others need to chime in? I admit I have done all of these things.
Our work as creatives feels intimate: We have to use our imagination to create solutions that would not exist otherwise, and once we have them in our minds, we have to shape them with pixels for the world to see.
The design stage is the only phase in the entire development process of a digital product where ideas take a concrete form for the first time.
Project Managers may write down requirements and identify investment areas, but those are just words that have not been turned into a solution yet. Developers may build the actual product, but I would say that the ideas are already shaped by us designers by then.
Design is intimate. It becomes personal when, even if we follow patterns, rules, guidelines, components and other puzzle…
