Recently, I heard a podcast interview with the Marketing Design Lead at ConvertKit, Charli Prangley, who mentioned she created 90 different variations of a homepage redesign and usually creates around 20 different versions of a design.
“90?!”, you might say. While that number may seem high to some, to me, it demonstrates a professional’s desire to create the best work possible.
As Charlie points out, ConvertKit’s homepage attracts a high number of views and is a significant page for communicating how the service helps creators.
Quantity leads to quality. I see examples of it time and time again.
It happens in all creative fields. For example, video games.
An extensive leak of Nintendo’s old code and documentation shows different iterations of Yoshi before he became the lovable dinosaur we know today.
Some of them are very different to the real Yoshi.
I would bet there are many more versions that didn’t even make it past the sketching stage and probably many more making it into the digital process than we see here.
Some ideas are absolutely terrible, like Mario punching Yoshi in the head to trigger a fire attack:
But it’s OK to have terrible ideas at this stage. No one is going to see it. Well… unless hackers break into your system and share it with the world as happened to Nintendo, but even then we can clearly see why most of their ideas never saw the light of day.
Amateurs stop iterating too soon. Professionals iterate as much as it possibly takes to create something great.
If you want to create better designs, get comfortable creating more and throwing most of it away.
