Behind the scenes perfectionism

I suffer from an extreme perfectionism disorder! For real!! I drive Sadish crazy when we are working together on a project. Poor guy… He’s patient with me, maybe because no matter how annoying I can be (and I am, trust me!!!), the final result is worth the effort.

As I write this, we are actually working on a client’s project that, from the regular user’s point of view, could be almost ready. But I’m sitting here with a list of tiny ajustments, such as:

- move comment icon 2 pixels to the left, it’s too close from the comment text.
- move the date text 1 pixel up, it’s not 100% aligned with the title bar.

Only things of this nature.

The regular user might not notice, but from the designer’s perspective, these things make a lot of difference. Each spacing has a purpose. Each font is there for a reason. From my perspective, attention to detail is what separates the good from the bad designs. While the regular user might not notice that small detail, if you, as a developer, overlook it, the overall look and feel seems flawed somehow. The user might not know exactly for sure why, but have a general feeling that there’s something wrong.

I was once told that I should work in quality assurance. But as much as I try to achieve perfection in everything I do and contradictorily to all my efforts toward that, I don’t actually enjoy this. It is, in fact, a tedious task.

I try at all times not to miss the big picture while doing this. It may not seem like that, but I do. My feeling is that this is a very competitive market and unless you set your standards really high, you don’t have much chance in succeeding. It is hard work, time consuming, but this kind of comitment is well worth it in the long run. That is “not missing the bigger picture”. The bigger picture is not the project as a whole, but the business as a whole. The kind of result clients will learn to expect when hiring us. I will not miss a deadline because of a pixel. But I will fight for the pixel to the last minute before the deadline if I feel it will make a difference in the final outcome.

It takes a lot of commitment from the team to achieve such results. As I said, it’s tedious!!! And that’s when I feel very lucky that I am working with someone that understands my point of view and commits to these standards, even when it seems like I’m missing the big picture. Sadish, I know I bug you a lot!!! Thank you for putting up with me and for having faith in what we are doing. I really mean it!