Notes from the Design Room | Edition 03
It was sometime in the morning, and the Design Room had settled into its usual rhythm.
I was at my desk checking one of the previous requests, with a coffee sitting beside my keyboard. Around me, the other designers were absorbed in their screens, while the live feeds ran quietly on the wall monitors.
Through the glass wall, I noticed a colleague walking along the corridor. She caught my eye and gave me a small wave. I waved back. She carried on for a couple of steps, then stopped, turned around and came into the room.
She walked over to my desk.
“Do you remember that graphic we made a while ago?” she asked.
“Not sure,” I said. “What are you looking for?”
She explained that she needed an older graphic for a related package. It wasn’t really a new design request. She mainly wanted to know whether we still had the original file.
“Let me have a look.”
At the time, our archive system wasn’t particularly efficient, especially when it came to work created during breaking news. When everything was moving quickly, getting the graphic ready for broadcast naturally took priority over thinking about where somebody might look for the file a year later.
I searched through folders, old versions and filenames that had probably made perfect sense when they were created.
Nothing.
After a while, I looked up.
“I’m sorry. I can’t find it.”
She said it was fine and left the room.
I went back to what I had been doing. Or at least I tried to.
I was almost certain the file existed somewhere, and the fact that I couldn’t find it bothered me. A few minutes later I started looking again.
Another folder. Another version. Another guess at where somebody might have saved it.
Eventually, there it was.
I opened the file to make sure, then sent her a message.
“I found it.”
A little later she came back and stood beside my desk while I opened the graphic.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s the one.”
The graphic had originally been created during a fast-moving news story. It hadn’t been designed once and then left untouched. It had developed alongside the story.
As new information arrived, the graphic changed with it. Another piece of information was added, then another label, then another detail that mattered at that particular moment.
Looking at it again, I could see how much information it had accumulated.
But I also knew why everything was there.
And perhaps that was part of the problem.
I asked what she needed the graphic for.
“For my package,” she replied.
At the time, that seemed like enough information.
She needed one small change, so I made it. I adjusted the graphic, rendered a new version and passed it on. Then I returned to the rest of my work.
As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it.
Later, I became aware of a conversation about the graphic.
Someone asked a very simple question:
“Why are there so many labels on it?”
The question made me stop.
I looked at the graphic again, and this time I saw it differently.
I knew the history behind those labels. I knew why they had been added and why each one had once mattered. To me, the graphic contained the memory of how the story had developed.
But none of that history was visible to somebody looking at it now.
They could only see what was on the screen.
And there was too much of it.
I knew the reasoning behind the design. The viewer could only see the result.
I had asked what the graphic was needed for, but “for my package” had been enough for me.
What I hadn’t asked was the next question:
How exactly will it be used, and what does it need to communicate now?
Had I asked that properly, I might have approached the file very differently.
Instead of simply making the requested adjustment, I could have reconsidered the whole graphic. I could have removed information that was no longer relevant, simplified what remained and allowed the needs of the current story to determine what appeared on the screen.
It sounds obvious afterwards.
But familiarity can be deceptive.
When we know why something is there, we can stop asking whether it still needs to be there. We see the decisions behind the work because we remember making them.
The audience doesn’t have that history.
Reusing a design is not the same as reopening a file.
Archives make this particularly easy to forget.
We open an old project and everything already looks resolved. The typography is there. The hierarchy is there. The colours, layouts and information have already been decided. Someone has already done the difficult work.
And sometimes that someone was us.
So there is a temptation to think that most of the design problem has already been solved.
But every old file contains decisions made for an older set of circumstances.
The file may still be useful. The decisions inside it may not be.
An old file is not a current solution. It is a collection of previous decisions waiting to be reconsidered.
That morning, my persistence in finding the file wasn’t the problem. Helping a colleague wasn’t the problem either.
The mistake came afterwards.
I found what she had asked for, and for a moment I treated finding the file as though I had solved the design problem.
In reality, finding it should only have been the beginning.
If I were approaching the same situation today, I think I would look at the old graphic and ask two very simple questions:
What still matters?
And what can now be removed?
Because good design is not only about knowing what to add.
Very often, it is about having the judgment to know what no longer belongs.
The archive can remember everything. Design still has to decide what matters now.
If you work with old designs, templates or archived creative work, I’d be interested to know:
How do you decide what deserves to survive into the next version?