Take a Minute
We’re trying something different based on an offhand comment Emily made last year about something that came up when she started working with David nearly ten years ago.
What follows is a rambling, interview-style thing based on a quick Zoom call between Emily and David. Note that we might have edited out various “umms” and, believe it or not, rambling digressions.
Let’s jump in.
David Spratte: Do you remember your comment that kicked this off?
Emily Combs: When we started working together, you told me I could take more time and work through a few options before turning designs in for review. It blew my mind, because every other place I worked was “Hurry” about everything. It changed the way I work and the way I view work.
Cautionary Tales
DS: Wow, ok. So, do you have any standout examples of “hurry” going wrong?
EC: Right now? Just a really dumb example: It was such a small thing, but it set the “everything must be done in a hurry” tone for the process back then while working for a marketing company.
Early in my career, I was supposed to set up this print ad in, maybe, an hour, and I did it. I had a limited amount of time to learn about this brand and review its assets and stuff. I felt good about it because I was new there. We went to print, and later, I got called into someone’s office about the ad. I couldn’t figure out why. The client approved it, everyone approved it, and it looked like it should have looked.
Well, at some point, they’d changed the color of this man’s leather belt in the art. They had changed this detail, and I didn’t catch it. But how was I supposed to have caught that in an hour? When I had no time to go back and review previous ads to look for details like that. You know, like these finer point details that probably no one noticed, but the client was pissed. My boss was pissed.
You create room for error when you’re working that fast. Because you don’t have time to go back and review. You don’t know the history of stuff, or maybe you do, but working fast creates room for error.
And that was just one of those lessons early on. I can work really fast, but you’re not always going to get the product you want.
DS: That’s one of the things that’s good about having a print background. With digital and online, most of the time, you don’t have to live with your mistakes except for however long it takes to fix them. But with print, you might have 10,000 reminders of that mistake.
EC: Yes, right.
DS: And it’s not free to fix.
EC: It also made me think about how there needs to be some training between the client and the vendor. If you don’t talk to them about why it’s crucial to know about deadlines more than, say, two hours before it’s due, then this is the kind of situation that you’re going to be living in. It becomes a terrible pattern that ultimately frustrates everyone. Also, you’re not designing anymore; you’re just on an assembly line.
Duotone Woes
DS: Yeah, you telling that story reminded me of this mistake I made years ago. I was just out of school and was doing pre-press at a printing company, and there was a lot of “learning on the job.” We were donating cards to a film festival and had photographed these old film reels, and we had just started running our own film for printing instead of sending it all to a service bureau.
Of course, we were up against a deadline, and what I didn’t realize at the time was that the screen angles in a duotone are different from what you would do for full-color printing.
It didn’t show up on the proof, it didn’t show up anywhere until it was on press, and the operator didn’t think to flag it as an issue. We’d run the whole thing, and we looked at the press sheet, and there’s a moiré on it—it’s like looking through a screen door at this card that was supposed to be like this real subtle and nuanced duotone. The art director, who I’m still friends with, was really bummed out. It was supposed to be a portfolio piece.
Editor’s Note: Liza, if by chance you’re reading this, I’m sorry that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. —DS
Going back to your idea of how when you remove all that margin, there’s no room for a mistake. If there had been even a little margin in the schedule. I don’t know—maybe I could have asked someone. Or the operator would have said, “Does this look weird?”
Snap Judgment
DS: What are the other benefits of having some margin beyond avoiding errors? I’ll start: The whole Ted Lasso surfacing of “Be curious, not judgmental” seemed to connect with people, but it applies to so many things—including our work.
In some ways, it feels good to quickly say yes or no to things, but you’re rushing to judgment. Curiosity takes time, right? You have to be curious about the problem you’re trying to solve if you want to get to a quality solution.
Rushing locks you into that “first idea is the best idea” fallacy. It makes you really latch on to that initial idea.
Do you have any other examples of when latching onto that first idea has led to other issues downstream?
EC: Specific examples? No, but we encounter that all the time. Sometimes, you just don’t get as much time or budget as you’d like.
But it’s really hard to ship work knowing you haven’t had enough time to work on it—you can have all the experience in the world. But sometimes, you need more time to work it out. Because the first idea isn’t always right. You gave that example in the notes of Paula Scher and the Citi logo napkin—and she had so much experience she could pull that off.
But most of the time, you need time to understand the problem. You need time to understand the audience, too. That’s a big one for us. And when we run through those first ideas, sometimes you look at it, and you know: This is not as good as it could have been. I had this other idea I wanted to try, but we needed more time.
DS: Just this morning, the fact that we made time to work on that logo is great because it’s easy to feel like you’re in a hurry. Which means it’s so easy to fall into the rut of being in a hurry. In this case, the second idea wasn’t that good either. (Laughs.)
EC: The third idea almost worked. The fourth idea won. But we needed that third one to get there!
DS: Sometimes you need that time to test, too. Sometimes the ideas are so good in your mind, but they come out so poorly in practice.
That first idea needs to happen, and then someone can pick it apart, find the viable parts, and come up with something else. That next take could be dramatically different from what the first person had in mind, but that’s part of the process. And then you work together to refine.
EC: Yeah, I learned that lesson early on in art school from a painting teacher.
When you’re new to painting, you want to think that all of the strokes that you’ve made are meaningful and perfect and right the first time, but they’re not.
He encouraged us to step away from the canvas, go do something completely unrelated and come back. It may look completely different to you with fresh eyes. Maybe you did do it right the first time, but it gives you an opportunity to go, “Oh wait, I missed this entire area,” or “That color is a little bit wrong,” or “We could add some detail here, and it really improves the quality of the piece.”
DS: The point of a first draft is just to get it done. Don’t get hung up on perfect because it rarely will be the first time. Then, you know, the actual work happens in editing and going back through it. If that first idea is the right one, taking this time proves it.
EC: That first draft is often foundational, which is important, but it’s not always ship quality.
Work isn’t always ideal.
DS: So let’s talk about how deadlines are real and how we can bridge allowing time with tight schedules. What are the things we can rely on when we don’t have those margins? Besides the experience and previous lessons learned?
EC: One thing we do most commonly is redistribute the work if the balance between team members is off—especially if one person suddenly needs to work on a quick ship project. We make sure that they can put their full focus on the thing they have to get done quickly so that it can come out as high quality as possible given the time or budget or whatever.
Time blocking helps, too. There are all these other distractions that can come up during the day, like the temptation to read emails or check alerts in Basecamp right away. Over the years I’ve learned that I have to let those notifications sit for a little bit if I’m in the middle of crunch time.
If I’m taking the time to work on something carefully, maintaining focus is one of the best things you can do for the design.
DS: You’re exactly right. Another thing that comes into play is having a process that complements the experience. A process is a huge help in letting us move systematically, which is especially critical when moving quickly—a solid process lets you handle things.
EC: Even an organized folder structure in Dropbox helps. You know exactly where to look for what you need, rather than using it like a heaping junk drawer. Where are the scissors?
DS: Exactly. The website that we’re working on now? The origins of that client folder go back more than a decade, and we’ve not been in much touch. And so it is; it is definitely more like a drunk drawer, I mean, like a junk drawer. It’s like a drunk made a junk drawer.
You might not have that right now—have you been in that house long enough?
EC: Oh no, we have that already. But it’s every drawer because we just moved in about a month ago.
For work, making that part of your process to organize files when you’re free of those crunch time deadlines is going to help you down the road—especially if the client or industry tracks toward tight deadlines.
DS: Part of what a process does is give you a plan. I first thought about this around racing. When you’re in the car on course, and something unexpected happens, part of what makes it easier to react to fix a situation is that you have a plan, “I know if I’m here and I need to go there.” I can let experience and awareness do the rest.
Bringing it back to what we do, the way we produce brand guides, is an excellent example because they remove many layers of decision-making. Good branding means you don’t have to scroll through a nearly infinite number of typefaces. “Nope. We’re going here. We’re using this one. That’s it. Done, end of story.” Same with color and spacing, etc.
EC: Yeah. That comes back to roles, too. Everyone on a team has the roles that they play. Yes, nearly anyone on our team could do any of the jobs. But having established roles on the team helps us make those plans better.
DS: Absolutely.
DS: Cool. This has been kind of fun. Anything else?
EC: So, are we doing a podcast?
DS: TBD
