Designers and perfectionism

During Melbourne Design Week, I was invited to sit on a panel that finished with a Q+A. One question was around perfectionism – a pretty common question because it’s a pretty common trait of creatives.

Perfectionism is only a problem when it negatively impacts your mental health and your bottom line. I recently spoke to two designers who use perfectionism to their advantage. Here’s what they said…

Identifying as a perfectionist

Many designers identify as perfectionists because they think it’s a necessity for anyone pursuing excellence.

The problem is, perfectionism is often aligned to an increase in anxiety.
Anxiety can result in a decrease in productivity.
Neither anxiety nor reduced productivity delivers excellence.

…it’s worth pointing out that nobody is perfect

Cass Mackenzie is the Design Director and co-founder of the award-winning studio Storyfolk. I asked if she ‘suffers’ from perfectionism…

I find that perfectionism in my work and skill set drives me and has made me the designer I am today.

I see perfectionism as a benefit and a driving force that pushes me to make each project the best I have created yet.

I don’t use it to compare myself to others. My competition has been more with myself, and that has helped me grow and does not result in anxiety.

Cass and her business partner Sarah Gross are queens at the balanced lifestyle, often running their studio ‘on-the-road’ (quite literally in Cass’s case, living in a van, chasing waves).

There is a difference between the healthy and helpful pursuit of excellence
and the unhealthy and unhelpful striving for perfection.

Perfect can be positive

Liking to do things well and getting pleasure out of achieving is positive.
Perfectionism becomes negative when:

1. you assume others are not able to perform to the same quality and therefore you must do everything yourself to maintain (self-driven) standards
2. your self-worth is based on an ability to strive for and achieve ever escalating standards
3. your actions result in negative consequences, yet you continue, despite the high cost.

Unfortunately, in a world of co-creation and collaboration these character traits can cause grief in a studio.

It causes grief to the studio owner because a project may meet and exceed the client brief, but the perfectionist designer is reluctant to handover leading to scope creep and declining profits. And it causes grief to the designer because perfectionism in unattainable – especially within commercially-viable time and budget constraints.

Dean Gordon, founder of Studio Baton tackles perfectionism this way:

Creative outputs aren’t a science, there is technically no perfect solution to any problem, there’s always another way to approach things or a different way of thinking, and there are almost infinite stylistic choices that could be made. 

How would one even begin to define perfection? Art, design, music, they are all subjective, the work that I create vs another designer given the same brief will never be identical and shouldn’t be, in the same way that a client, their customers or your mum wouldn’t experience the work when presented with it. 

So, forget about what other people are doing, work in your own way, experiment with different techniques and styles and have fun! At the end of the day if your work meets the brief, is effective as a piece of communication and your client is happy, you should be too. Each piece of work you create is just a step in your evolution as a creative. 

Dean, like Cass, doesn’t rely on clients to satisfy his creativity urge. When not at his computer working on his website 😉 Dean plays guitar and sings for a five-piece punk/alt-rock band Catholic Guilt.

So what?

The topic of perfectionism comes up regularly.

Two tips:

1. Perfectionism is not about ambition. Ambitious people set themselves up for success. High achievers learn from mistakes and bounce back. Perfectionists beat themselves up thinking they’re not good enough.
2. Get out of your head. Don’t rely on your thoughts of incompetency, instead hoard hard evidence (emails, screenshots) of all the good things (accolades and congratulatory messages others have said about you).

That’s not just my thoughts, Pedro Canhenha’s article published on UX Planet argues the same point – only much better. In Perfectionism vs Thoroughness Canhenha talks design principles and having respect for the end user. It’s OK Pedro argues the point better than me because I’m a reformed perfectionist. 🙂

 

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Want more?

Here’s more information on designers making change to stay head:
1 Five quick tweaks that can make a big difference to your business
2 What we think about where design is heading
3 Designers doing new business development well