Let me start by saying that I have a bit of a man-crush on Merlin Mann. He is an erratically brilliant guy that talks about productivity and other stuff. He speaks in metaphors and parentheses and I mostly don’t understand any of it, but once in a while there’s a shining gem of wisdom. The latest was when he was talking about the four options that his book publisher gave him for the cover design:
“[It's] like somebody giving you four piles of poodle poop and saying ‘which one has the least corn?’”
The problem was that they didn’t understand what he or his book was really about and they whipped up a bunch of cover designs without any of his input. And it wasn’t that long ago that that was the default for most design work. “We don’t really understand (or want to take the time to understand) what you’re about and we don’t really want to have to work together with you on this, so we’ll just whip up three designs and hope you like one.”
Now I won’t lie: we still do multiple concepts when it comes to logos. I’m not sure why – maybe we should change that. But we do not do this when it comes to web design and here’s why:
We have two possible uses for our time in a web design project:
option 1. Lock the doors, put our heads down and put together three different designs, hoping that one will catch the client’s fancy.
option 2. Talk to the client, go visit their place of business, do some research, talk to the client some more, look at the competition, take a bathroom break, talk to the client even more and then start designing the “right” solution for this particular project. (Our ongoing process is also fairly collaborative, but I’ll talk about that some other time.)
While each of these two options will likely take about the same amount of time, the outcomes are different:
option 1. The selected design may or may not be “right”. Meanwhile, the other two options are thrown away; they’re wasted effort.
option 2. We end up with a better, “righter” design, we learned a lot, and we made some new friends.
We like option 2.
PS. We have never ended up with a “wrong” solution using option 2.