It’s been 4 years since I first started down the crazy path of full-time freelancing, and boy oh boy have I learned a TON, both about myself and about design! Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned, though, have come along in the past year as I’ve been working to rebrand and redesign my own website. Re-branding a business is never a one-and-done quick fix, but doing your own branding/design is basically comparable to working with your biggest nightmare client– except you’re stuck with yourself 24/7. It’s so easy to jump into a redesign, switch your site to maintenance mode, and then freeze…because all of a sudden Comparisonitis rears its ugly head, you start seeing brands that you’re in love with (but OMG how will your design ever be that great?!), and the wonderful monsters named Procrastination and Perfectionism start creeping in right away.
Well, shit. How do you ever get anything done? The biggest lesson I’ve learned through this year-long redesign is so simple and yet so so so important to remember:
Done is better than perfect.
Seriously. I soft-launched last week with copy that wasn’t perfect, graphics that I wanted to play around with more, and definitely not all of the bells and whistles that I had hoped for. But you know what? I finally have a website. It’s shiny, it’s new, it screams me, and most importantly… it does its job of putting my brand out there and creating a sexy branded home for me on the interwebs to show off my work.
As a designer, I know that I will probably never be 100% happy with my own brand and that I’ll always be seeing new and exciting things I want to incorporate into my design. After this relaunch, I’ve learned that that’s okay– you can work changes in gradually (into blog posts, marketing graphics, emails, even your site graphics!) without jumping straight into the deep end and scrapping everything when you get that itch to change.
Now, for the million dollar question: if you were to change one thing with your brand right now, what would you change?
Email me if you want help getting that change going!
