The Drawer Test
There’s a very simple test for whether an idea is actually good.
Put it in a drawer.
Not literally, although in the days before everything lived on a hard drive, I suppose that was exactly what we did.
You work on something. You love it. You’ve stared at it for hours. You’ve moved the headline three pixels to the left, changed it back, changed it again, convinced yourself the first version was better, and eventually reached that dangerous stage where you can no longer tell whether it’s brilliant or whether you’ve simply looked at it too long.
That’s when it goes in the drawer.
Walk away.
Work on something else. Go home. Sleep. Make dinner. Argue with the dog about who owns the blanket. Do absolutely anything that has nothing to do with the piece in front of you.
Then come back later and open the drawer.
That moment tells you almost everything.
A good idea usually survives the drawer.
Sometimes it’s even better than you remembered.
You look at it with fresh eyes and think, Yes. There it is.
Other times you open the drawer and wonder what on earth you were thinking.
That headline you thought was incredibly clever now requires an instruction manual.
The layout that seemed wonderfully sophisticated suddenly looks as though fourteen different ideas got into a bar fight.
The logo you spent six hours refining looks like a plumbing company.
The drawer is ruthless.
And that is precisely why it’s useful.
Distance Is Part of the Creative Process
Creative people are terrible judges of their own work while they are making it.
We’re too close to it.
We know what we intended, which means our brains conveniently fill in all the things that may not actually be there.
We know what the headline means.
We know where the eye is supposed to go.
We know why that strange little graphic is sitting in the corner.
The person seeing it for the first time knows none of that.
The drawer gives you a tiny bit of the distance your audience already has.
You stop seeing the effort and start seeing the result.
And effort can be terribly persuasive.
If you’ve spent eight hours on something, there is a natural tendency to believe those eight hours must have produced something worth keeping.
Unfortunately, creativity does not work on an hourly billing system.
Sometimes the thing you did in twenty minutes is the answer.
Sometimes the thing you labored over all afternoon deserves a respectful burial.
The Best Ideas Don’t Need You Standing Beside Them
This may be the hardest part.
When we present work, we often want to explain it.
“Well, what I was trying to do here…”
Dangerous sentence.
If the idea requires you to stand next to it and explain why it works, it may not be working hard enough on its own.
The drawer test strips away the sales pitch.
There is no presentation.
No beautifully rehearsed rationale.
No one reminding you that the blue represents trust and the circle represents unity.
There is just the work.
Does it still communicate?
Does it still make you feel something?
Do you understand it quickly?
Does it still have that little spark that made you excited when you created it?
If yes, good.
If not, back to work.
This Is Also Why I Don’t Trust “Fresh”
Fresh work is seductive.
You’ve just made it, so naturally it feels new.
And because it feels new, it can feel better than it actually is.
This happens constantly in design.
You create Version 7 and immediately prefer it to Version 3 because Version 7 is the one you’ve been staring at for the last hour.
Then you look again the next morning and discover Version 3 was better all along.
The drawer has no loyalty to chronology.
It doesn’t care which version is newest.
It doesn’t care which took longest.
It doesn’t care which one you were most excited about at 11:47 last night.
It just asks:
Which one still works?
Clients Could Use a Drawer Too
The drawer test isn’t only for designers.
Clients could benefit enormously from it.
Anyone who has ever received feedback eleven seconds after emailing a presentation knows exactly what I mean.
Sometimes the first reaction is useful.
Sometimes it’s just a reaction.
“This feels too blue.”
“There’s too much white space.”
“Can we make the logo bigger?”
“Can we try something completely different?”
Certainly.
But perhaps first we could all have lunch.
There is an enormous difference between instinct and impatience.
Good work occasionally needs a minute.
Not six committees, twelve focus groups and a three-week research study.
Just a little time for the initial noise to settle.
I have often found that the idea somebody dislikes immediately becomes the one they like best after they’ve lived with it for a day.
The drawer works on clients too.
The Drawer Has Changed
Of course, most of us don’t put work into actual drawers anymore.
We close Illustrator.
We minimize Photoshop.
We shut the laptop.
We leave the file alone.
Same drawer.
The important thing isn’t where the work goes.
It’s that you go away from it.
Creativity needs periods when you are actively working on the problem and periods when you apparently aren’t.
Your brain keeps doing things while you’re off making coffee.
That is why the answer sometimes arrives in the shower, in the car, halfway through dinner or at three in the morning when you suddenly know exactly what was wrong.
You gave the problem room.
Open the Drawer
There is a temptation in every creative business to keep moving.
Deadlines.
Emails.
Revisions.
Meetings.
Another project waiting behind this one.
But when you can, give the work a night.
Even an hour helps.
Then come back and look at it as though somebody else made it.
That last part is important.
Don’t ask:
How hard did I work on this?
Ask:
Is it good?
Don’t ask:
Do I remember why I made that choice?
Ask:
Can I see why I made that choice?
And don’t ask:
Can I fix this?
First ask:
Should I?
Put it in the drawer.
Then open it again.
The good ideas will usually be waiting for you.
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