Right, so I remember stumbling across Lauren Gould’s name, or maybe it was some of her work, a while back. It stuck in my head for some reason.
At the time, I was deep into this messy project. We were building out this internal dashboard thing. Honestly, it looked drab. Like something from ten years ago. I was tasked with making it look, well, less terrible. Easier said than done, right?
So, I started poking around, looking for inspiration. Saw some designs, maybe hers, maybe others inspired by that kind of clean, sharp style. Thought, okay, let’s try something like that.
Trying to Make it Work
I spent a good chunk of time just trying things out. No fancy software, mind you, just the basic stuff we had. Pushing boxes around, changing font sizes, messing with the color palette. Trying to get more white space in there, make things breathe a bit.
- First, I ripped out a bunch of the clutter. Just deleted visual noise.
- Then, I tried simplifying the navigation. Made the buttons bigger, clearer.
- Played with a couple of bolder accent colors, but kept the overall thing pretty minimal.
It felt like I was getting somewhere. It wasn’t exactly like the stuff I’d seen, obviously, but it was an improvement. Cleaner. More focused.
Hitting a Wall
Showed my progress to the team lead. Big mistake. He basically shut it down immediately. Said it wasn’t “on brand” or whatever excuse he pulled out. Said it looked “empty”. Wanted all the clutter back.
We went back and forth. I tried explaining the reasoning – clarity, ease of use. He just wasn’t hearing it. Wanted it to look like every other clunky internal tool we had. Familiarity over function, I guess.
So, I had to scrap all that work. Went back to the old design, just tweaked a few minor things so I could say I did something. Felt pretty pointless.
It was one of those moments, you know? Where you try to push things forward just a little bit, bring in something slightly different, and the whole system just resists. It’s tiring. Made me really think about where I was and what I was doing.
Funny thing is, that whole experience kind of lit a fire under me. Started looking around not long after. Found a place where they actually encouraged trying new things. Sometimes hitting a wall is just what you need to find a different path, I suppose.
