Vanishing Points

On the specific agony of becoming an expert

The hardest part of getting better at design is that the gap between where you are and where you want to be does not get smaller. It just gets more specific.

Early on, the gap is this vast, foggy distance. You look at your work and you know it is bad (in my case, really bad), but you cannot quite say why. You are reaching for a general sense of ‘good’ that remains frustratingly out of hand. But as you gain skill, that distance shrinks into a sharp, narrow focus. You go from worrying about the font size, to the line height, and then eventually to the minutiae of the letter spacing and kerning. Or from worrying if your colours clash, to whether the palette is accessible, and then to the struggle of keeping perceived brightness consistent across a wide-gamut display using OKLCH. You get the idea.

It turns out that ‘good’ is not a place you actually arrive at. It is more like a horizon line. You keep walking toward it, and the landscape around you definitely changes, and you certainly get better at walking(!), but the horizon itself stays exactly as far away as it was when you started. I do not think the gap ever really goes away; I think you just get better at describing why it is still there.