Nobody Is Judging the Work

I spent a week by the ocean.

Practising my bad surfing on waves that were, to be fair, terrible. Hard to say whose fault it was. Sitting in the water for hours doing nothing useful. No laptop at all.

The hard part was the quiet. It arrived on the third day. Nothing to organise, nothing to check, and I noticed something still running in my head. A noise with nothing to feed on. It kept going anyway.

I work in an industry that puts that noise in you and then calls it being professional.

Everyone in branding and creative knows this. Almost nobody says it.

Take a piece of work. Put Pentagram’s name on it. People call it brave. Confident. Restrained. Now put the name of a small studio nobody has heard of on exactly the same work. People call it nice. Clean. Maybe a bit too safe.

The work did not change. The name did.

That happens because design has no scoreboard. Code can be wrong. A campaign can miss its numbers. Design can only be judged, and people need something to judge with, so they use the source.

So if you look at your own work and think it would get a completely different reaction with a bigger name on it, you are right. Most articles about imposter syndrome treat that feeling as a mistake in your head. In design it is often accurate.

And we built this on purpose. Awards. Annuals. Agency of the year. Conference stages and all the BS. New case studies on LinkedIn every morning. Studios win clients by being seen, so everybody spends their life being seen. Your portfolio is your advertising, so you are never off duty. There is no version of this job where you are quietly good and it still counts.

Then there is the second part, which took me much longer to see.

What makes you good at this is what makes you miserable.

Design teaches you to spot what is wrong. The spacing that is slightly off. The hierarchy that nearly works. You do that every day for ten years and it stops being a choice.

Nobody gives you a way to switch it off. You cannot use that eye all day at work and then not use it on yourself. It is the same eye.

So the voice in your head telling you it is not good enough is your professional skill, pointed at you. It came with the training.

I saw something on that trip I do not like about myself.

I have been hard on other people’s work my whole career. I have been five or ten times harder on my own.

Now look at what happens when work goes public.

Coca-Cola launched a new identity this week. JKR built it. Bauetiful. Typography led, made to work across more than two hundred markets. A new serif, the wordmark turned on its side, one colour system across all the flavours.

Within a few hours the only thing anybody was talking about was that the type looks like Marlboro. Then the fridge cigarette jokes started. That is the story now. Years of work, thousands of decisions, and the public verdict is one joke about cigarettes.

I think the work is very good. I also know that hardly matters any more.

Think about what that teaches everyone watching. Nobody posts to say a piece of work is quietly excellent. Compliments happen privately, once, and then they are gone. Criticism is public, it repeats, and it gets rewarded.

So most of the feedback you ever see is negative. And you use it to work out how good you are, because it is the only feedback there is.

The people I know in this industry who are quietly miserable are never the ones who stopped caring. It is the opposite. The ones who get worn down are the ones with high standards. They are ambitious, they have that trained eye, and they work in a business that pays them in status instead of anything you can measure. Caring more is what breaks you.

Nobody says that on stage. It comes out late at night, one to one, usually after someone has had a bad year.

In the water none of this exists.

The ocean does not know who I have worked with. Nothing is asked of me. No audience, no race, no verdict, nothing keeping score. A week of that was enough to hear how loud everything else is.

Then you go home. It is a race, and to stay in it you have to stay sharp. Being sharp is the same thing that turns on you at three in the morning. I have not worked out how to have one without the other.

So I am not going to finish with a method. I do not have one.

I keep trying to work out whether you can hold both. The quiet and the game. Maybe in some industries you can. I do not see it in this one, and I have not managed it.

I do know I want to keep caring this much. The other option is not caring, and I have no interest in that. So the only thing I can actually change is how much of me rides on what people say about the work. That is the bit I am working on. Badly, so far.

If this sounds familiar, it is probably not something wrong with you. It is the industry. Knowing that does not fix it. It did make it lighter.

Love,

Stef.