Designers should get comfortable making throwaway work. Most ideas never ship, and that's not failure—it's how you find the good ones. The more concepts you discard, the better your final work becomes.
Um, morning, it's, um, 7:44, 7:47 AM. I'm headed to the gym and I just had this thought that I wanted to share. It's been a while that I've made one of these, um, quick short-form videos, um, for YouTube. And the thought I wanted to share is that if you're a designer at a startup or if you're working in an established organization, one of the things that you have to be most comfortable about I mean, it might feel very trivial, but one of the things that you have to be most comfortable about is doing throwaway work. And what do I mean by this? Doing work that you are not so precious about, that you know that this work might not even see the light of the day, that it might just be like throwaway work that, you know, nobody is actually going to implement eventually. You're going to do so much of that. And I think one of the things that makes designers feel— I don't want to use the word depression, but that make them feel like, feel down about their work is they do so much work and then they feel like they have very, very little impact on their team. But it is the reality. And I think that's like one of the core tenets of being a designer. The core tenet of being a designer is that that you're the kind of person that sees a problem and approaches a solution from multiple perspectives. In fact, I would say that the more perspectives of solutions that you can think of as a designer, the better you are. And the more solutions that you come up with, the more work that you're going to throw away before you finally find that gold. So today, if you're at work or if you're going to work and you're working on something and for some reasons you feel like, oh, this is going to be another throwaway work, don't feel bad about it. It is part of your journey to being a really, really good designer. So be comfortable with doing throwaway work, be comfortable with doing work that would not see the light of day, but make sure that you are constantly exploring and constantly sharing your ideas until you hit that golden work that you can put in your portfolio. And of course, you can put the trail walk in your portfolio as well.
