An evolutionary approach to designing
Each designer has his or her unique way of finding the right design solution for the project. Obviously, there are some things that everyone from the creative field has in common: framing the main goals and objectives of the design, working with references and more. However, at some point, every designer chooses the unique approach of how to make designs not just fine, but great and awesome! Here, I would like to share with you a small tip on how to produce creative work efficiently and quite fast for your next client or concept. I call this approach “evolutionary designing” and you’ll soon be able to understand, why is it called like that.
My main design credo is “making by doing” (that sound familiar to someone who knows the saying “hunger comes during dinner”), which means that in the majority of cases it is better to start actually creating stuff, and not overwhelm yourself with too much of thinking. It doesn’t mean, though, that there should be no preliminary analysis and discovery phase for the project you are working on, but there is never enough time for research and analysis since during each iteration you just go deeper and deeper, which is a neverending story. Moreover, in the case of our design studio (and many designers out there), the time is limited for this kind of things: our main clients are startups, that need to receive MVP for their products that should be tested by the market as soon as possible. Thus, we usually start designing early on (as soon as we have an idea about all key parts of the project) and trying to make some kind of fast draft.
So how evolution has anything to do with all those above? Let’s start and figure this out.
Imagine a situation, when you have something that you’ve designed in front of you. If you are a creative person, there is a high probability that you don’t like it (and this is totally fine). What should you do with that? Assume that this is your version 0, the base point for your design. It should be the full design for a whole page but could be just a completed section of the block.
Now, copy the whole screen (artboard) and make small and minor changes to it: this could be rearrangement positions or adding more elements, increasing the size of some icon or text, changing fonts etc. The key thing here is that those changes should be tiny — they should not change your design completely, but the difference should be noticeable.
After the previous manipulations, you have two versions of your designs: assume, these are “Version 0” and “Version 1” (or, you can call them a “Parent” and a “Child” versions). The next step is obvious: compare those two versions and choose the best one (for your subjective opinion, of course). In case the original stays the best one, then it’s still your “Version 0”.
In case the new one appears better, then it becomes the new “zero” basepoint for your designs, and the original one is now just history.
In the first case, you’ll need to proceed with your trials until you find the option which will be better than your original version.
This means that you’ll make different changes in your design and each time compare these fresh options with the original until you find your new champion.
As soon as you have a winner, you may finish with your designs (if you are satisfied with them), or repeat the same process, done in the previous step: but now your new option becomes “Version 0” and from this moment all new developments should be based on the current version “zero” of design. In this way, the “stronger” solution becomes the “parent” for all next to come. Eventually, repeating of such process leads to a number of iterations: a couple of “generations” may pass until you find the solution that you’ll be completely satisfied with.
However, it is needed to be mentioned, that not all paths lead to the best results. Very often you’ll have a situation when you are just stuck with the result: the thing you have in front of you just isn’t felt right. It seemed to go well up to this point, and each iteration was better than the previous. However, at some moment the design became awful or just not that good as you were expected, and you are thinking about something like: “How I came to this? When did I turn the wrong way?”. In this case, the solution is one and only, even though it’s not the most pleasant one: you need to go back to the last appropriate version, sometimes, it may be even a couple of “generations” ago — all just to start over. Eventually, this will lead to the right solution, even though there will be a number of trial and error along the way.
After all that is mentioned above, it should be obvious why the method called “evolutionary”: eventually, everything comes down to the need of finding the best solution, best “genes”. We do it generation by generation, having “child” be just slightly different from the “parent” and comparing them with each to choose the best, more “adapted to the environment” one. A lot of options and ideas could be discovered along this journey, allowing to select the fittest option from each generation. Eventually, after a number of “generations” will pass, one may receive a very nice design, that could differ dramatically from the original one while having some features it.
The beauty of this method lies in its simplicity: everything in this world is developing step by step, iteratively, with minor changes on each turn. This is true for all matters: from business growth to human progress. However, a lot of designers often choose to work on the same screen to avoid multiplying the number of screens all over the working space. In this case, they are limiting themselves and not able to compare the progress, which is crucial for understanding if one is moving in the right direction with his or her design.
Why not follow mother nature and apply its approach to the creation process? Everyone should give it a try!
