Giant Squid Industries | We make the internet all wet and squiggly.

I really wish I was less of a thinking man and more of a fool not afraid of rejection.
~ Billy Joel

Before we start – Yes I did just quote Billy Joel. You want to make something of it?

There’s a fine line that designers and working creative types everyone needs to walk. How much or how little of yourself to invest in your work. Invest too little of yourself and obviously your work will suck. That’s true of designers, developers, accountants, circus jugglers who ever. It takes a certain amount of personal investment to do any job well. But… what about being to personally invested?

Me, I’m a pretty passionate guy. When I like things – I generally really like them. When I design stuff, I put a lot of heart and guts and sweat into it.  Every single time.  That’s how I’m hard wired. It’s a good trait.  Most of the time. Sometimes it bites me in the ass. The single hardest lesson for me to learn as a designer was to not take my work to personally.

At first it was the rejections.

As a rough estimate, I present 3 design solutions to any 1 project. 2 out of the 3 don’t make the cut.As a junior designer I was often only responsible for 1 of 3 comps presented to a client.  At the time I was a pretty crappy designer, so I didn’t expect my comps to make it very far in the process. And they didn’t.  I’d go months without an original Reid idea getting produced. But as I got a little better I was soon putting together a set of different comps for the client, and they would choose one path out of 3-4 options.  That means that every project I worked on, the client was vetoing 66% of my work. After hundreds of projects that works out to multiple hundreds of designs that went straight into the crapper. That’s a lot of rejection to deal with. Now some of that work would resurface in other projects, or multiple designs would morph into new versions, so it’s not all lost work. But at it’s heart this business is about the magic third.

If you can detach yourself and come to terms with the fact that a lot of what we do is process and not product, the better designer you’ll be. I see a lot of young designers latch onto an idea or concept and struggle with it until they drown. They get personally attached to that idea, and it’s failure =’s their failure. They can’t see past it, and therefore don’t get to where they need to be.

If you’re free to let your ideas succeed or fail without it being a direct reflection of your personal success or failure – you’re going to be a lot happier. It will make you more open to criticism.  If you’re personally tied to a piece, you won’t hear “This is a good start, but we need to change this and this and we can leverage this concept over here.” Instead you hear, “You’re a sucky designer, that sucks balls, and you’ll never make a living, and you’ll starve and you’re fat.”

I guess my point is this.

There’s no crying in baseball.