Earlier this week, I published this tweet.[2]
IMO, designers posting speculative work are just broadcasting that they are bad at their jobs. The hardest part of the job is not making work that looks cool, it’s convincing the client that your vision is the correct one.
Area
@areatechnology_
Imaginary splash screens for Codex.
Blue vision
It caused a fair amount of discussion and debate, so I wanted to try and provide some additional clarity around my point of view. This is an issue that has bothered me for most of my professional career.[3]
I strongly believe that professional designers who publish killed or speculative work for established entities (brands, companies, organizations, etc.) are broadcasting that they are bad at their jobs.
I want to be clear that I am not talking about students, and I am not talking about recent graduates. They get a pass. But once you’ve been working professionally for ~3–5 years, I think you should have some real work to share.
What exactly do I mean by real work?
I mean work that has been accepted by your client and published in public. I do not mean that it has to have been successful or effective. A real project can fail. It can underperform, be poorly received, or be replaced a year later. My standard is simple: the experiment has to have been run.
Meeting this standard means that in addition to concept and craftsmanship, the work has passed through actual decision-makers, collaborators, budgets, schedules, technical limitations, legal requirements, production constraints, logistics challenges, and competing priorities. The designer has had to actualize and explain their idea, persuade others of its value, respond to criticism, build consensus, make compromises, coordinate production, and ultimately get it shipped out into the world. All without losing their soul.
I think a lot of designers believe their job begins and ends with concept and craftsmanship. I believe that is a huge mistake. That way of thinking means you will always be the hands to execute other people’s visions. I believe it is much more empowering to take responsibility for the entire process, even if you can never realistically hope to control it all. Navigating all of that complexity and coming out the other side with work you’re still proud of is by far the hardest part of the job!
A killed or speculative mockup can demonstrate taste, imagination, and craftsmanship. Those things are critical. You need to master them to make great work. But in my experience, they only represent ~10–20% of the actual job of a designer operating professionally at a high level. Sharing a killed or speculative mockup communicates that you are bad at the hardest part of the job—shipping.
Is there a loophole?
Yes! Self-initiated projects and experiments! I absolutely love them! I love seeing them in a designer’s portfolio. They show your passions, curiosity, and values. Designers should absolutely make strange things without practical application or limitations. Play! Share! Inspire! Just label them honestly as experiments or turn them into your own self-initiated projects.
In a self-initiated project or experiment, the designer controls the entire universe. They define the problem, decide which constraints matter, ignore the inconvenient ones, select the winning concept, and determine how the final output is produced. There is no one to persuade, no disagreements to navigate, no external budget constraints, and no pesky humans to collaborate with (unless you want to), etc.
How is that any different from speculative work?
So far, my description of self-initiated work sounds pretty similar to speculative work, but there is a key difference. A speculative project associates itself with an established entity (brand, company, organization, etc.) with which the designer has no formal relationship. It attempts to draft off the reputation of that established entity in order to make the designer seem successful. The irony is, I think, that it sends the opposite message.
Killed work is really just a slightly different form of speculative work. There was an actual client relationship, but your favorite direction didn’t survive. Yes, sometimes a rejected concept was better. Clients make bad decisions all the time. Projects often get derailed by fear, politics, budgets, legal concerns, leadership changes, and more. A rejected concept is not automatically evidence that a designer is bad at their job. On the contrary, it’s just a reality we all must face.
We all have killed work we still love. Little pieces of us that feel misunderstood or ignored. It can be painful, especially earlier in your career. Trust me, it happens to all of us. My public portfolio is just the tip of a massive iceberg. There is SO MUCH FAILURE under the water. 😅
What can you do with all those unused ideas?
Save your sketches! A sketch is not just a drawing on paper. It’s any manifestation of an idea used in the development and planning of a project.
The design process inevitably produces a huge number of unused sketches. I jokingly call this “process pollution,” but it is actually an incredibly valuable resource. Sometimes unused ideas in one context suddenly become relevant in a new context. Maybe years later. I believe designers should think carefully about who owns this valuable material. In my own consulting agreements, which I developed with my lawyer, the client owns only the final work they select and use (upon complete payment), while I retain ownership of all unused concepts and sketches.
Retaining that ownership does not mean having permission to publish rejected concepts in the context of the client relationship. It only means preserving the ability to return to an idea that is general enough to be removed from its original context, developed further, and used somewhere it genuinely belongs.
Can we wrap this up already?
I know I’m being a cantankerous old designer, but I’m trying to make what I think is an important point here! I don’t expect all designers will stop this behavior of publicly sharing killed or speculative work, but maybe a few more will be aware of what they are actually communicating when they do. ✌️
—Ben Barry
Footnotes
- See Betteridge’s law of headlines.
- I will call them tweets until the day I die. One of the worst rebrands ever, but that’s a topic for another day.
- About 15 years ago, I got into an argument with a talented and well known designer about this same issue. I had admired their work since first discovering it as a young design student. I was fortunate enough to eventually meet them and become friends. Unfortunately, our disagreement over this issue affected our friendship, which I still regret.
Postscript
I owe John, the designer whose work I referenced in my original tweet, an apology. I’m sorry, John. I was not trying to be intentionally cruel, or to pick on your work specifically. It was just the thing that happened to strike a long-agitated nerve. I know it’s not fun to have other people criticize your work. My comment had nothing to do with the design itself. I appreciate that your creations have good craftsmanship and a strong point of view. We need more people pushing at the edges like this—I just also want them to ship real solutions.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to ChatGPT for helping me organize my thoughts, providing feedback on my drafts, and proofreading my grammar. All em dashes are my own.