---
title: "What I Stopped Doing Once I Stopped Trying to Impress Everyone — X Gravity"
description: "Most of what designers call presentation polish is insecurity with nice typography."
url: https://xgravity.co/field-notes/what-i-stopped-doing.html
---

[Field Notes](https://xgravity.co/field-notes/) · By X Gravity

# What I Stopped Doing Once I Stopped Trying to Impress Everyone

Most of what designers call presentation polish is insecurity with nice typography.

Earlier in my career I built presentations like I was defending a thesis. Forty, fifty slides. Mood boards and competitor audits, a process diagram with little arrows, and at least once a slide about where the typeface came from (nobody asked). By the time we got to the actual work the client was tired and I was sweating, and the work had to claw its way out from under all of it.

I told myself that was rigor. Mostly I was trying to prove I belonged in the room.

It took a while to notice. There wasn't a big moment, just meeting after meeting where the thing that landed was the simplest thing I showed. A single photo. The line of copy I nearly cut because it felt too plain. Eventually I started trusting that, and a bunch of habits fell off without much ceremony.

Five options went first. It all changed when I realized I'm the professional they hired to do the job. I used to worry, so I'd offer extra revisions or a handful of versions for the client to choose from. What I found out is that when you give people too many options, it becomes chaos. Showing five is a way of not deciding – you're handing the hardest part of the job, the judgment, back to the person who hired you to have it. So now I give one strong recommendation, how I think it should be done. There are always multiple versions, but those versions stay with me. And most of the time, it lands really well, and they go with it with very minimal tweaks. And if it doesn't, the next version is usually a lot faster because we've already gotten feedback.

The long rationales went too. I love a rationale, I really do. But if the work needs four paragraphs of backstory to make sense, it probably isn't done yet. The thinking should already be sitting in the proportions and the color and the words, where people pick up on it without being walked through it.

I dropped the vocabulary as well. "Brand architecture." "Holistic ecosystem." I know what they mean, and sometimes they're even the right words. I just noticed I reached for them hardest when I was least sure of the work.

Saying yes to every revision so people would like me took longer to kill. Pushing back felt rude at first. But agreeing to a change I thought made the work worse never actually made anybody happier. The work just got worse, and then we were both a little disappointed and neither of us said so.

The last one is designing for other designers. You know the move. The one you make because it'll look badass in a case study, not because it helps anybody sell a solar panel. I care what other creatives think, obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this. But the work I'm proud of now did its job for the client first. Looking good came along for the ride.

None of that made me less careful. If anything, dropping the performance freed up time for the craft, which is what the slides were supposed to be about in the first place.

I'll still catch myself building one more slide nobody needs, or adding a fourth option at midnight just in case. Old habits have good cardio. Usually I delete it in the morning.

[Next noteThe Difference Between Being Hired and Being Trusted](https://xgravity.co/field-notes/hired-vs-trusted.html)