Paul Scrivs in The Uniformity of the Design Community, a good post on the dangers of design trends:

This isn’t a manifesto, but merely a reminder that there are different aesthetics out there that will get the job done better. There are different designs that you still haven’t even thought of yet that will solve the problem more efficiently. There are hundreds of more designs that will tell a better story than your current design. Don’t settle on what you or the community are satisfied with all the time. Look outside of the trends and become the person that starts a new one.

Creative pursuits like design and writing are journeys in discovering how we can get better at solving problems. There’s a balance to be struck, though. We have to push ourselves beyond current trends and obvious solutions, but not so far that we end up as digital nomads – always traveling towards the elusive horizon of perfection, but never completing anything. Yes, we need to do exceptional work, but we also have to complete. Dmitry Fadeyev sums this up well in his essay On Perfection:

Instead of chasing perfection, we should be chasing completion. A work need not be prefect, but it has to be complete. Unlike perfection, completion is not about chasing an unattainable goal, it is about meeting a fixed one. There is no such thing as a perfect work, because everyone judges things differently, so there is no standard by which such a thing can be defined. There is however such a thing as great work – work that has been completed and deemed exceptional “” either by others, or by you. But this can only happen when the work is done.

Or perhaps we need to change our definition of perfection and reframe it as the process of getting a little better each time we complete something. As Khalil Gibran said:

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.