What separates great design from terrible is a thin smattering of brushy foliage. Great design is always cognizant of how each feature fits into the larger whole - like playing Jenga with a 3-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Terrible design is a cluttered mess of competing ideas and functions all looking to grab your attention at once.

The inability of designers, developers, and stakeholders to understand the primitive concept of the forest and the trees can generally cover most issues in this profession. The next idea is always the most important — even if it affects hardly anybody.

Businesses with the highest standing of design reputation do not lose sight of this. Sure there may be some odd quirks but, by and large, the forest is clear and the trees are in their natural places. Those that plant invasive species quickly become overwhelmed in a marsh internally and drag users into the quagmire with them.

The most important thing to know about your business is what its main purpose is. Everything else comes second. A car dealership does not try to sell you oil changes until you’re negotiating price. A fast food chain does not try to sell you new special ketchup before you’ve decided what you’re eating. But in software this becomes akin to Latin. People ask if they can, not if they should. How they might instead of how it fits. Our tools have exceeded our capability of reason.

I wish there was some great wisdom I could bestow to help assuage this but it is a bone cancer that can spread to every area of a business. It either is or it isn’t. If there is middle ground, it is a grain of sand balancing on a needle with a wind blowing.

What I can suggest is to not let it affect your work. With your tasks, always keep in mind the forest regardless of the other’s focus on the trees or the leaves. You’ll have to fight for it — repeatedly, without end. You will lose, a lot. You may win, sometimes. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Imagine you’re spinning a few plates. Add more. And more. And more. Spin them faster. Faster. Faster, goddamn it! Did I just hear one break? Just use this misshapen pottery that wobbles from side to side instead. I need hands on plate #28! Actually take the teacup off plate #7 and put it on plate #15. What do you mean what tea cup? Where’s my chef on bowl #13? I’ve got a table that’s been waiting six months for their risotto. And where’s that casserole dish I sent you? I think I might want to change it into an electric kettle.

This is the life of the poor, unfortunate souls promoted to management — those dedicated to their craft and resilient enough to eat the shit that comes along with it. Even the word “management” is so brutish and unbecoming that it should carry more shame when uttered in polite company.

On the bright side, you can always opt to have a stroke, develop a drug addiction, or manifest any number of negative coping mechanisms to deal with the stress.

But. There is a precious "but". You gain a level of control over how things are done. And the control-freak nature that brought you here is enticed by that. You get the privilege to set standards. To bring everything into beautiful consistency. To carve out your methodology across the heavens. To make decisions that have lasting impact. To be haunted by those decisions. To have nobody to blame but yourself. To explain why you want to change this component for the 5th time. Oh shit — why is my saucepan boiling over?

Plates and glasses and ductwork start crashing on your head. All the while the dinnerware you already forgot about is being served on. Dear god — people are going to eat off those! What idiot thought this was okay? And Christ the kitchen’s a horrid mess. What a stupid idea to organize utensils by handle length. Did my sous chef just pour rat poison in the broth? Why is the health inspector here? Maintain a simmer? HA! The restaurateur just turned the burner on high, tied my hands to my feet, and wants to maintain a simmer!?

This goes on until you have that second stroke or develop another drug addiction. Or wait. Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe you can just check out. “Job’s a job, man.”

But you can’t pretend. Your brain is already hard-wired and the electricians in your area seem to be booked up until the next generation — which might not be long if the pace keeps up.

Perhaps it’s a game of extremely long term strategy and patience. Or maybe some things just can’t be changed. Maybe you move on. The closer you are to how the sausage is made, the keener your interest in a vegetarian lifestyle.

The pursuit of greatness is a monomaniacal curse. It is a constant, unending anxiety to do better - worse still, to be better. Being is an unfriendly state. I’d say I’m rather ambivalent to it on the whole. When the subject comes up, I tell people my dream death is walking into the street like an idiot and being evaporated by a bus I didn’t know was coming. It would make things simpler. But until that day comes, the curse to strive continues. Ceaselessly.

Oh, the places you’ll go. The depths you’ll reach. The Curse does not care about money, nor family, nor friends. Though they enrich your life, they do not satiate its hunger. The Curse has a singular, unquenchable appetite: your utter devotion.

A drop of its blood, and you are a thrall. Unable and unwilling to break the spell of your master. For there is purity in the affliction. A wonderfully complicated prestige that’s often reserved for men of gods long dead. For The Curse will strip away what is ungodly and unnecessary from its diet. It begs: How many hobbies do you really need? Feed me instead. How many people do you really care to know? Feed me instead. Leaving only what is needed for its survival. A simple, complicated, devoted life. It is a beautiful agony.

The Curse rewards your devotion with immense highs of self-satisfaction. Overflowing pride. Preying on man’s psychosis to achieve transcendence from the creature self to purely symbolic. Maybe he can pierce the heavens with his cleverness. Maybe he can fulfill the creative's oedipal complex and make something so awesomely useful, so stunningly beautiful that he eclipses the creator of the wheel.

And after, The Curse lays dormant in wait. The reversal of nutrients so quick and powerful it threatens its very existence. Slowly, regaining strength, it lulls you toward others with the same affliction. Showing you their peaks. Their pride. Enough to let the self-doubt and contempt creep back in. Feeding like a fetus on your neurotic brain placenta. Until finally, distaste: How did I ever think this was good?

When this question arises, The Curse softly whispers the answer. It does not need to berate or belittle you. You’re trained enough to know you must atone. That you want to atone. That you need to atone. With a low breeze through your mind, bubbling in intensity, The Curse murmurs: Be better. The worst thing it could say. It knows your predilection with be when it could say do or, in a charitable mood, try. But it says be. Do and try are not present. Do and Try leave room for error. Error which The Curse will not tolerate.

And so beckons. Back to the sea. Back to where you belong. Back to see if you can pull it off before Faust comes to make good on your contract. Back to waves of late work-nights and even later side projects. These are the waves of atonement. Waves for you. Waves for The Curse.

Do not let the dispiriting feedback loops of ‘can we make this look more like shit?’ and ‘can we just cut all the stuff that was useful?’ dissuade you from the original spark that brought you to design.

You must fight the siren song or they will lull you into rocks. Rocks of sad MVPs, unfulfilled potential, and creative scurvy that makes you wonder if you actually are terrible at this job.

As you are beaten down, strive further. Treat every project like it's going in your portfolio. If it’s boring, make it interesting for yourself. Improve your skillset. Go absolutely hog wild and tear that shit down. Start from the ground up. Redesign the whole damn thing if you must. Whatever you must do to avoid the siren’s lure.

You do not always have to share these special explorations. It’s okay to make something outlandish every now and then. It can help inspire change and often will let you consider solutions you would not have thought of in whatever barely consistent hellscape you may inhabit for 8 hours a day.

Making bad shit feels bad. It’s an instinctual response. While these may rarely make it to production, they will invigorate you creatively. They might even invigorate your PM if they have any passion left in their body.

Whatever you must do, avoid the siren song.

As you accumulate design mileage, you become increasingly aware that our glorious leaders make emotional decisions with only occasional spasms of logic. At the highest office, emotion dominates while logic plays with lettered blocks in the basement.

Quick tweak that improves UX? No thanks. Shiny new toy completely unrelated to the business? Ready the treasury. Man the torpedos. All systems red alert.

How do we influence these decisions when the corpo electoral college decides what lives and dies? We become politicians.

The greatest bill ever devised means nothing if it is not signed into law. Careful and effective campaigning are what decide initial success. For our purposes, this boils down to communication with stakeholders — the dreaded lip flapping and hand slapping that governs our workdays.

For your next election cycle, I lay these strategies at your feet.

Grassroots campaigning

When you disagree with the direction of a project, your best hope to influence a stakeholder away is to provide what they asked for and what you believe are better alternatives. This is a "Yes, and" approach.

If you fight it up-front, you'll still have to make it but now your social credit score is diminished.

Marketing your bill

Context is non-negotiable when requesting feedback. Too many times I see designers posting plain links or giving real-estate tours.

When sharing designs, you need to tell stakeholders why they're seeing what they are, not what it is. Presumably they have eyes — they can see.

User feedback influenced major aspects? Make an anecdote. Slight departure from the original brief? Give some background as to why. Criteria unclear? Mention what you went off of and what still needs to be clarified.

Approach from the flank

The fastest way from point A to B is a straight line. That does not make it the most effective.

Directly refuting a stakeholder's idea is a great way to take a lean on your house. If you aim to keep your mortgage paid and have the slimmest chance of achieving your desired result, your best bet will be to lead stakeholders through your thinking with deferential language.

Phrases like "I think", "It might", "I'm unsure about", "We could try" are powerful as they are non-confrontational. Confrontation means resistance. Resistance means defensive. Defensive means no.

Will this make you sound like a punk-ass? Almost definitely. Is it borderline manipulative? Probably, but we're politicians now.

The decision is theirs whether you like it or not but by reinforcing this in our communique we remain in a neutral-to-positive position even if there is disagreement.

No filibuster

Brevity is your best friend when communicating with stakeholders. You must accomplish all the points above while remaining succinct. The better your word economy, the more likely a stakeholder will actually remain attentive.

If you're giving a speech about a button color, you're fucked.

A new beginning. A waste of time and money. The inane ramblings of someone with too much to say and too few places to say it. This could be any and all of these things, in time.

Whether this is a blog, a journal, or screams into the void I do not know. Regardless, it will be about design. Product design. UX design. UI design. Whatever the fuck we call it these days.

Entry length will range from "very short" to "holy shit I'm not reading that". Grammar will be decent but questionable. Metaphors will be bizarre.

My hope is that designers stumble across this and find it entertaining — maybe even useful. Finding solace in their fellow man persevering through the scars of the design process — failure, success, and everything in between.

Ultimately, this is about the hills we die on.