I had Covid last week. Too much time on YouTube led me down a design rabbit hole. Two videos resonated.
The first was Saul Bass talking about aesthetics:
Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. The fact of the matter is, I want everything we do, that I do personally, that our office does to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or whether the client thinks it’s worth anything or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares … It costs every designer money to make it beautiful, because it means you have to spend more time … and that’s all money … It’s very important for us not to be under the illusion that anybody else cares.
This resonated because I’ve questioned the cost of making things more aesthetically pleasing than strictly necessary throughout my career.
We’ve spent the last few weeks updating our strategy deck for Personalised Prevention Services. Having something that clearly articulates our vision, why it matters, and how we deliver it is important. It helps our teams align. It helps the stakeholders understand what we’re doing and how they can contribute. When we created this deck for the first time, 6 months ago, it felt like I was out on a limb. I joked at the time that ’strategy’ meant making things up and asking for money.
But 6 months later we have 5 teams working towards our vision and at the recent Digital Prevention Service get together our work was shown as the future vision for the whole portfolio. Having people understand what we’re doing and why it’s important has been a part of getting us to where we are now.
What’s less clear is whether making the deck beautiful matters. When doing work like this, I spend time getting the graphic design to a standard I feel happy with. I rebuilt the slide templates with grids. Then recreated the grids in Illustrator so every diagram follows the same layout. I spent an hour redrawing one diagram so it aligns with another – both are shown for about 20 seconds. Doing this takes time. I constantly question if this is a good use of my time and cost to the taxpayer. I tend to work later when doing this, so the time I spend fussing with graphics comes from my evenings, not the taxpayer.
Doing this for myself is maybe justification enough.
The second video, on a similar subject, was Jony Ive being interviewed by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison:
Much of my contribution and the contribution of other creatives, you can’t measure … I believe that when somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable and they thought somebody gave a shit about me. I think that’s a spiritual thing … we have this ability to sense care.
Maybe the care shows. Maybe spending hours on diagrams, making sure the titles are two‑thirds width communicates something about how much this work matters.