Saturday July 12

details

I was thinking about the dilemma a creative person faces when deciding how much time to spend working on small details. The problem with details is, when you put a lot of effort into them, people often think you wasted your time, because they aren't really important. But they are important, and I'll tell you why. Everybody who experiences your work will notice some of the details, but not all of them. If your work doesn't convey a feeling of detailed craftmanship, everybody will notice how dull it is. However, since people only see a subset of your details, you need a lot of them in order to ensure that people will notice some of them. This means that you will have to spend a large amount of time on details, many of which will nobody will notice, but if you spend no time on details for this reason, people will notice that.

So my point is, if you care about what you're working on, allocate significant time to work on trivial details, because the sum of all of your details is a major feature in itself.