Speed.

One of the most important aspects a designer can have in their repertoire is speed. Speed and passion are traits that often go hand in hand and can be the cause and effect of how a project progresses. In my experience, if you can jump on a project right away, you keep your enthusiasm up about the job which in turn keeps your passion high and creative juices flowing. This fact alone can increase the quality of your work and help you meet deadlines. This is only one of many reasons speed can play an important role in a design process.

Why Fast?

Often, if you spend too much time at the beginning thinking it through and analyzing every detail, you can lose the passion that you initially had. This can make the job drag out and then take longer for the designer to get it where it needs to be creatively. Every little thing a designer does is based on some kind of timeline or schedule, whether internal or external. This fact is especially true when dealing with a time-sensitive subject like magazine design. Unfortunately, those schedules are a nasty reality that we will always have to deal with—so the faster we work, the less those deadlines can impact our design. Another benefit of speed is that it can increase quality and creativity down the road—the more ideas a designer can come up with quickly (see my last article on Brainstorming) the faster you can validate or negate the idea and create again. This allows you to come up with the best ideas and solutions quickly and allow yourself more time for the detail oriented, time consuming part of production. The faster you work, the more time you have on the project. The more time you have on a project translates to higher quality work, deadlines that are always met and happy clientele.

The Effect

Working fast forces designers to compress their own design process into a shorter time frame and push them into thinking quicker on their feet. The speed drives the designer to identify and solve design problems immediately. These traits can save you time later in the design process. Also, impressing the need to work quickly on younger designers can also increase the effectiveness and speed of other talents like focus, creative problem solving and client-facing communication skills.

Speed vs. Accuracy

The benefits of speed are obvious (as chronicled above), but I would be remiss if I also didn’t at least touch upon the possible downside and how a designer can deal. If a designer works faster than he or she is comfortable with or capable of, it can reduce the level of attention to detail and sometimes general accuracy. To work quickly and effectively, a designer needs to have a high level of understanding regarding the project and have all the information organized and accessible. This knowledge and organization of information will allow the designer to work quickly while having everything they need to know at their fingertips.

Extended deadlines and long, drawn-out schedules are not something we see a lot in our industry. Everyone wants it done yesterday—and that will not change anytime soon. Speed is integral to the design process and something that we can’t really do without. Designers that can create both quickly and accurately will always have a high value in today’s fast-paced world.

Read more posts by Seth Sirbaugh