The designs I loved and killed, and what they taught me

A reform that moved slower than the design

About fifteen years ago, filing a tax return in our country still meant paper. Someone living in a village had to travel into town to submit it in person, and if a single document was missing, they were sent home and had to make the whole journey again. I joined the team working on the digital system that would replace that ritual.

It was slow work, as reform always is. A requirement was written one year and implemented two years later, which meant that the interface I designed was often out of date by the time anyone used it. Patterns I was proud of looked old on launch day. As a young designer, that hurt. I had to kill my attachment to many of those screens, again and again, because the process simply could not move at the speed of design.

And yet that project remains one of the most important things I have ever worked on. Not because of how it looked, but because of what it changed. Being part of a reform, of something genuinely visionary for an entire country, mattered far more than whether a button followed the latest trend. Somewhere, a person no longer had to travel twice to hand over a form. That was the design.

A small logo that fascinated me more than anything

At the other end of the scale, some of my happiest moments came from the smallest projects. A local business with a simple request: a new logo, perhaps a few pages of basic standards, to replace something that was, to put it kindly, truly dreadful. No committees, no two-year timelines, no hundred stakeholders. Just a person who cared about their business and a design that was holding it back.

Those projects fascinated me, sometimes more than the big ones. There is something deeply satisfying in taking a mess and making it clear, in watching a client see their own business properly for the first time. I killed plenty of sketches along the way, as you always do, but the one that survived carried the whole story of that small transformation.

What the two have in common

On the surface, a national tax reform and a small logo redesign have nothing in common. One took years and touched millions of people; the other took weeks and touched one business. But they taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. The value of design is not in the artefact I fall in love with. It is in the change it makes for someone else.

In the reform, I had to let go of the design to serve the vision. In the logo, I had to let go of my favourite sketches to serve the client. Either way, the work only became good once I stopped protecting it and started asking what it was for.

Loving the work, not the pixels

I still fall for my designs; I suspect every designer does, and the day it stops would be a sad one. But I hold them more lightly now. The screens I lost to slow processes, the concepts I abandoned, the logos that never made it past the sketchbook: none of them were wasted. They taught me to love the work rather than the pixels, and to measure a project not by how it looks in my portfolio, but by whether someone’s day became a little easier because of it.