The Unseen Work of Design

I was reading the (absolutely wonderful) book Several short sentences about writing and this passage struck me:

A writer’s real work is the endless winnowing of sentences,

The relentless exploration of possibilities,

The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started out to say

The possibility of saying something you didn’t know you could.

The corollary here to the design process is striking.

So much of the work in design—like writing, a fusion of art and communication—is unseen. The finished product is the outside perception of “design”. But it’s the process of how you get there that, to me, constitutes “design”—however unseen or unlauded.

The final product is the result of this “endless winnowing” and “relentless exploration”. So often, at least in my experience, the final product isn’t produced but discovered. When done right, it feels like the inevitable outcome of where you started.

Adapted to my experience as a designer on the web, I would rephrase the above passage this way:

The unseen work of a visual designer is the endless refinement of elements and their relationships,

The relentless exploration of possibilities,

The effort, over and over again, to see in what you started

The possibility of communicating something you didn’t know you could in a way you hadn’t conceived as possible.