Design is a search problem

A decade ago, working at a design agency, I lived in fear of one sentence: “this looks nice, can we see a few other options?” I was not an ‘options’ guy. I fashioned myself as Paul Rand, telling Steve Jobs off when he asked for multiple options: “No. I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people.”1 But I didn’t have the guts to tell my clients off, so I dutifully designed a few other options.2 Recently, I’ve gotten to work with some of the best designers in the field. Looking at their digital workspace — in Figma, Paper, Claude Design, or something else — I see hundreds of artboards and variants, laid out in a sprawling grid, representing branching parallel universes of design directions. Sometimes I see little panels filled with dials to sweep through the possibilities, enabling a single person to see thousands of combinations in the hope of picking a single, perfect specimen. Lots and lots of…

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