The image in my head
I have a very clear picture of what I want to make before I make it. Colours, layout, the feeling of it. The way someone's eye should move across the page. The weight of the typography. I can see the finished thing in some internal space where craft is not yet a constraint.
Then I open Figma.
The version in my head is always better than the version on the screen. The gap between them is where most of the frustration lives.
What nobody tells you about developing taste
There is something that happens early in any creative practice that is both encouraging and genuinely cruel. Your taste develops faster than your ability.
You start noticing what good work looks like. You can feel when something is off. You sit with a layout for an hour and know, with some certainty, that it is not right. You just cannot tell why, or what to do about it. You can see the problem and you cannot fix it.
I notice this constantly. My eye has been accumulating references for fifteen years. I have been looking at design work, noticing what moved me and what left me cold, building some internal library of what good looks and feels like. That library is real. The problem is that my hands have not caught up to it.
Ira Glass described this gap better than I can. The taste is there first. The ability follows slowly, and the distance between them is the most uncomfortable part of learning anything.
The particular problem of designing something functional
When I started working on the Let's Design Me site, I ran into a version of this problem I had not expected.
The creative constraint is not only about ability. Sometimes it is about function. A website needs to be readable. The typography needs to work at different sizes. The hierarchy needs to be clear. There are things a site has to do before it gets to do anything interesting.
What I wanted to make was something that felt alive. Not clinical. Not a template. Something that had a specific voice in the way it looked, not just in what it said. Something a little strange and a little careful at the same time.
What I had to make was something people could read.
Those two things are not opposites. But they pulled against each other in a way I did not anticipate.
Where I got stuck
The tension showed up most in typography. I wanted something expressive. I wanted the type to carry personality the way a speaking voice does. But expressive type is hard to read at body copy size. Unusual letter spacing that looks beautiful in a headline becomes exhausting over three paragraphs. A font with real character can feel like a costume when you ask it to deliver information.
I spent a long time trying to find the version of this that could do both things. Something that had enough restraint to function and enough personality to not disappear.
The answer I arrived at was probably obvious in hindsight. Different typefaces for different jobs. Cormorant Garamond for the things that are meant to feel, DM Sans for the things that are meant to be read comfortably at length, Inconsolata for the things that are meant to work. Let each one do what it is actually good at instead of asking one face to carry everything.
That is a basic typographic decision. It is something someone with more experience would have reached in twenty minutes. It took me considerably longer.
Readable does not mean boring
I had been operating under a quiet assumption that I did not notice until fairly late in the process. I had been treating readability and creativity as opposites. As if making something clear required making it neutral. As if function and personality could not occupy the same layout.
I do not think that is true. But it behaved like a belief while I was working.
The most interesting design I have seen is almost always both. It does its job completely and it has a point of view. The personality is not in spite of the constraints. It comes through them. The constraint is where the decision gets made.
What I was actually struggling with was not the tension between readable and interesting. It was not knowing enough to navigate that tension yet. The frustration I was calling a design problem was a skill problem wearing a design problem's clothes.
Good enough to say something
At some point in the process I shifted the goal.
I stopped trying to make the version from my head. That version was not accessible to me yet. My hands could not get there. What I could do was make something honest. Something that communicated what I needed it to communicate, looked considered enough to be taken seriously, and left room to improve over time.
A site is not a finished object. It changes. The first version does not need to be the best version. It needs to be good enough to say something.
I think this is true of most things made during the early part of learning. The taste is already there. The ability to fully execute on it is not. The work that happens in the gap between them is still real work. It still counts. The gap closes slowly, with repetition, with showing the work and noticing what is wrong with it and making it again.
What the gap is for
The image in my head is a compass rather than a destination.
It points in a direction. It tells me what I am trying to make even when I cannot make it yet. Without it I would not know which direction to fail in.
The frustration of the gap is real. So is its function. If my ability had matched my taste from the start, I would have nothing to close. Nothing to work toward. The gap is uncomfortable because it is doing something.
This site exists because I decided the gap was not a reason to wait. The version in my head is still better than the version on the screen. That is still true. But the version on the screen is real, and it says what I needed it to say, and that is enough to start from.
