Coping with Obsolescence: What happens when your work gets re-worked

The web is an ephemeral medium, subject to trends and whims; art directors and design by committee; browser-based compromise and accessibility assessments. Excellence on the web is subjective, elusive, and fickle. But you’d like to think that you do good work. Every project comes with concessions but your latest project is usually your best. You take screen shots for your portfolio, maybe enter it into some contests or showcases, and you promote it any way you can. But inevitably you have to hand that design off to the client, or a developer, or another designer who may not share your vision. And that’s when the heart-break sets in. Lately I’ve had several sites butchered by the clumsy hands of zealous, would-be designers. It makes me envy my friends in the print design field who’s work is preserved at the peak of its freshness like a beetle in amber.

Some of my designs stay alive, just as I designed them for many years. Some, just for a few months. Sometimes the designs degrade over time due to client access, improper training, or just a lack of attention. You try to account for that degradation in your design by applying character limits, styling markup elements, or offering style guides. But it’s inevitable. Then some day someone comes along and institutes a sweeping change. You just hope it’s for the better.

Picture yourself as a parent. You work hard to raise the perfect child and before you know it, they’ve left the house, fallen in with a bad crowd and they’re smoking crack! (Breathe.)

But what happens when the major change is detrimental to your original design, or to the client’s brand? Picture yourself as a parent. You work hard to raise the perfect child and before you know it, they’ve left the house, fallen in with a bad crowd and they’re smoking crack! (Breathe.) How do you tell people that you had nothing to do with it without sounding like a snob? Or, worse yet, what if the client asks for your opinion? I’m not the type to bash people’s work unless it’s unnecessarily awful. By that I mean, you had a perfectly good site but you trashed it just because you felt like it. (Breathe.) It’s natural to get upset about it. In fact it’s healthy. It shows that you care about your work. But it’s also unprofessional to let it get you down.

Remember: It’s not your fault

Don’t forget that people always want to put their mark on things. Even if your design was better that the new one, it doesn’t matter. If someone decides to make a change, you can’t stop them. So have a good cry, keep your chin up, and move on with your career.

Stay Fresh

One thing you can do is keep your portfolio fresh. Make sure your portfolio home page always reflects your latest and/or best work. Be proud of your  latest accomplishments and don’t hang on too tightly to previous success. I used to have a creative director who would walk into every pitch with the same 3-5 case studies of projects he had done over 10 years before. This is a bad habit. The work looks dated and it makes you look as though you haven’t done anything good in a while. PURGE! No one’s gonna look through your old work, and if they do, chances are it does not accurately reflect the way your current status as a designer. If you must include old work, perhaps add a conspicuous date to it, or better yet, section it off in a “vintage” or “classic” area where old designs can be put out to pasture.

Stay Honest

If you must show out-dated work, don’t beat around the bush. Feel free to tell users when a site has become inactive. I like to show the date of completion for a project and if my design is no longer live, I say so. If it’s a small site or a Flash site, I may even archive my version on my website for display only. However, be careful not to detract from the current site’s SEO by stripping meta data, alt tags, and any live links to the site.

Put Your Best Foot Forward

Push your latest work. I find it useful to have a “featured work” area that showcases my latest and/or greatest work over my other work. Items in my general portfolio are listed by vertical market, while most other pages showcase items I feel represent where I am at this moment. And that’s important because people want to quickly understand what distinguishes you from other artists. Make sure you lead with the right impression.

But the best thing you can do is keep working. Keep doing your best work on each project. You will ultimately be defined by your latest work so make sure that your next design is always your best.