Choices, choices, choices...
With famous quotes like "You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear," Sammy Davis, Jr. or “A wise person decides slowly but abides by his decisions,” Arthur Ashe it is easy to see why the decision making portion of a designer’s life can be daunting to say the very least.
The reason I wanted to start this discussion was for purely selfish reasons but I realize that after a few comments it would turn out to be beneficial for all of those who struggle with the horrible burden of making those tough choices that can make a good design turn into a stellar design. I’m not talking about fundamentals like elements or principals I am talking about what comes, or doesn’t come after the supposed tough stuff is done. I use the word “supposed” because it is my opinion that what comes next is a far more difficult task.
The question I pose is this, when do you call it quits? I know many artists feel that the work is never “Finished” and that is the way I feel almost all the time. With so many new and innovative tools available to designers today, the ways in which we can tweak and modify designs are limitless. From text effects to color treatments to animation to texture and pattern it can be dizzying.
What are your tips and tricks pertaining to making those decisions correctly and sometimes and more importantly faster? Imagine that all you have for a design brief consist of some basic text, and the cliché tendencies like if the text is the word "Mad" use a color pallet with colors like red where do you go when you have such a vast and blank canvas? How do you narrow your choices in order to make real decisions? Then how do you take those project decisions and cut the time it took in half in order to produce faster in the future?
