Studio Note #53: Nobody Sees the Decisions You Didn’t Make.
Like Highlanders, there can be only one.
The finished version is usually the least interesting part of the story.
Not because the finished version doesn’t matter, but because you can’t see everything that had to disappear for it to become obvious.
We were working through a new identity this week and got down to some pretty ridiculous levels of detail. Should this line break here? Is that flourish too heavy? Does the gold belong in one place or three? What happens when the whole thing moves onto a dark background?
None of those decisions are particularly remarkable on their own. Nobody is going to look at the finished logo and congratulate us for deciding not to put gold on that other little piece.
They shouldn’t.
The whole point is that by the time they see it, those decisions are gone.
That’s one of the strange things about creative work. A finished piece shows you what someone decided to keep, but almost none of what they decided to remove. You don’t see the other concepts, the color combinations that almost worked, the typeface that was right until it wasn’t or the version that survived six rounds before one tiny change exposed everything wrong with it.
You just see the answer.
And when the answer is good, it can look almost inevitable.
Of course that’s the logo. Of course that’s where the headline goes. Of course those are the colors. Looking at it afterward, it can be difficult to imagine it being anything else.
Getting to “of course” is the work.
It’s easy to associate creative effort with output. More concepts, more options, more elements, more things to point at and say, we made this. But a huge part of the job is deciding what doesn’t deserve to survive. Sometimes progress is adding something. Just as often, it’s realizing you can take something away and nothing important is lost.
The client will probably never know about most of those decisions. The person seeing the work six months from now definitely won’t.
That’s fine.
They don’t need to see the decisions.
They just need to feel like we made the right ones.