Wrong Turns by Jack Ramsey // Designer's Perspective
Wrong Turns
Failure is a dirty word. Even in writing this now, I keep scrolling through a list of synonyms to try and soften or massage the word into something less striking. As designers we strive for perfection. With every meticulous detail in its place. But perfection requires experimentation, and it requires failure. To find the right answer we have to thoroughly interrogate the wrong one. In learning why something doesn’t work, we find out why something does or we find something brand new entirely.
In his book, Failed it, artist and creative director Eric Kessels, explores being inspired by errors and how that leads to true originality. “When you use sat nav in a car, it is perfect and takes you to where you want to be. This means we don’t look or discover any more,” he says. “We don’t take side streets. There are no wrong turns anymore, which is where the interesting things happen.”
Kessels believes in throwing yourself into experimentation and play in all creative pursuits. He says if you aren’t calling yourself an idiot at least once a day ‘you need to work less and play more'. Like a child, we need to free ourselves to learn through play and not be afraid to get something wrong. Fear of failure holds us back. It’s only through these errors that we can learn, progress, develop and create something original.
In the early stages of a brand development at the studio, we don’t show each other neat curated ideas. We dig into the roughs, going through the sketches and see what didn’t work. Often a mistake is subjective. Something that I may have dismissed seen with fresh eyes can form a new direction. There may be the seed of something new in what I was feeling embarrassed of showing. By keeping in the mistakes, we as a team can see where the idea came from, the divergences and maybe even something completely original.
David Bayles and Ted Orland tell a story in their book Art and Fear of a ceramics teacher who on the first day of class splits the students into two groups. The first group would be graded on quality, the second group would be graded on quantity. The teacher would bring in a set of scales and 50lb of clay pots gets the student an ‘A’. The other half just had to bring in one perfectly designed pot.
On the day of grading, it was clear all the best pieces, the most interesting, beautiful and creative work was produced by the group assessed on quantity. "It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the 'quality' group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
The best idea isn’t always the first idea, past those first thoughts is where the interesting things lie. You have to run the tap before the water gets hot, and it’s worth taking the time to push through those initial thoughts. Former Pentagram Designer Vince Frost puts it like this “just do as many things as possible. Get it out there, put it down, try lots of ideas and don’t be so critical of each idea. Let them live and breathe and keep trying again and again and again until you find something that feels like it’s the right thing.”
This isn’t to say the end result will be a failure. When you see a beautiful piece of design, you don’t see all the previous versions that paved the way for that perfect final piece. But by dissecting, reassessing and refining at every part of the process, we make sure that our final outcome is the very best it can be. We owe it to ourselves as designers and to our clients to put aside our egos and say when something is wrong, so that we can make it better. Creating good design is a journey, by not worrying about getting their fastest, and exploring those wrong turns, you reach a far better final destination..
Words by
Jack Ramsey, Graphic Designer