Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien – Sarah Drake Design
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Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

July 28, 2011 | 0 comments

From Voltaire. Translation: The perfect is the enemy of the good. My dad told me this, as I struggled with the first wave of my website, back in 2005. Good advice, too, as if I hadn't stopped tweaking the design, it may never have gone live. I think I must have spent months, actually, creating the logo and the first five pages of the site. The first draft of the original site:

As the business has grown, I'm constantly in struggle with this concept. I will agonize over the shade of taupe for a client's ribbon wrap, then over the quality of the grosgrain. Or that the envelope font color doesn't exactly match that of the invitations, as they were printed at a different printer. Or that the embroidery on the custom linens is slightly off center. Don't even get me started on press checks! It's better really, that I use the best printers, and they do such great work, that I don't have to worry about it. Of course, striving for the best is important. My clients expect the best, and choose to work with me based, in part, on the level of quality they know they'll receive. But, there must be a limit to my madness, or I will never get anything done, and can waste precious time muddling over details that are inconsequential. The font I chose really is amazing. Sure, there probably are better ones out there, but to struggle over it isn't helping me be productive, when my time could be put to better use. I once had a printer say, You want to press check an envelope?, Like that was weird or something. So, in the few major updates the website has received over the years, in order to get it working and showing off new product, we've gotten it up, unfinished. A couple coming soon pages, new custom products going unphotographed. But the time has come to fine tune those details, and make it more usable and consistent. MC, my fabulous marketing intern, has been combing over it, making sure it all makes sense to you, and making the appropriate edits and changes with our web designer. The clean navigation, with our new narrative: Invite. Write. Give. Live.

So happy to finally see the adorable lineart that Margie created for us over a year ago- finally front and center in the monogram collection:

Of course, there's still more to do. But, we'd never get anything on the site if we waited until it was perfect.


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