Web Creative

Make friends with the details

I love it when I read something that makes me feel a little less like of a freak, and this recent article from A List Apart had me celebrating my admittedly obsessive compulsive nature.

I am passionate about the details of a design. Once it has made it out of my sketch pad and into Photoshop I find it impossible to leave a design in a ‘rough’ state. Certainly I will ‘rough it up’ for a while, playing with ideas and treatments, but no matter how tight my deadline I just can’t bring myself to leave it unpolished. Every detail matters to me, and nobody is a tougher critic of my designs than me (which is why I have a love/hate relationship with most of them - well except for the those that I just hate).

I have to agree with Naz Hamid when he says of designers presenting freshly mocked-up work, “Half the time, the presenting designer shows a rough product on the screen, and they usually believe the design is 90-100% done. But to the detail-savvy designer, the work is only 50-70% there. You can see the groundwork, foundation, and feel of the design in front of you, but you know it’s just not finished.”

Except I also feel like that about many of the ‘good’ designs I see online, never mind those haven’t even made it out of the studio!

It happens to me all the time, this design disappointment, usually when browsing one of the many, many lists of ‘great’ designs that seem to be everywhere online these days. I am presented with a big list of screen shots of what look like (mostly) good designs for me to get excited about and (hopefully) find some inspiration from - yet when I actually visit the sites the disappointment sets in because at least 50% of them just don’t have the final polish they need to be truly great pieces of work. In most cases the concept is there, the right elements are there, but something just isn’t quite right - things just aren’t in perfect harmony.

Much of the time what bugs me are simple things that are easy to fix like spacing and alignment, or setting appropriate line heights - although typography tends to be a bigger issue and is usually what I find most lacking (not that I am professing to be an expert on typography). To be honest, plenty of appropriate polish can make even the weakest of design concepts look the part. That is not to say that designs should be heavy on polish and light on ideas - I think they should be well ladened with both - but it does emphasize what a good job polish can do in taking your design to the next level.

So, as Naz Hamid quite rightly asserts, obsession is healthy. So embrace the compulsion to apply say what others may consider insane mathematical formulas to the ‘logic’ behind your padding and margins (I don’t see what is wrong in making sure that all spacing values used are divisible by each other, thus ensuring the ‘harmony of all things’).

The details are your friend, be nice to them.