This project felt like one of those reality show challenges where you have almost no time to accomplish something super ambitious but everyone comes up with really impressive results. The fact that this came out as well as it did with the time constraints and lack of sleep I was working with says a lot for how much practice I have with skills like picking a color scheme and masking images in Photoshop efficiently. In some ways, the spontaneity of it forced me to NOT over-think, which I think lead to a result that feels very organic and intuitive.
My mantra once I returned from the trip to New York was “do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” In other words, in order to get any sleep at all and keep up with all my responsibilities, I needed to let my mind relax a bit more than usual and keep pushing through one project after another.
It’s like the internal editor that had been making me obsess over getting every detail died while I was in NYC and there was too much chaos for anything to turn out perfectly. And that internal editor death was not a bad thing. In earlier projects like the product layout, I obsessed for hours on end about the layers of the digital “painting” being perfectly seamless and it was impossible for me to finally feel comfortable with any of the results.
With this article, I let go of all that pressure and tension. It was an incredibly important life lesson to learn. I survived that trip, I survived all the work that came immediately after, and now I get to relax and take my cat to my nephew’s house for Christmas.
