Designed

"Designed" is one of the highest compliments that we pay to someone's work.  It is an indication that the work is not only good, it's good on purpose.  We have no ruleset for what we consider designed, it's more of a feeling that we get.  The feeling that everything is in its place.  The feeling that everything was put there for a reason and it all just . . . fits.  The feeling that things that didn't not belong there were removed.

I placed an ad for a graphic designer without even thinking of our overloaded use of the word "designed".  I was quickly reminded when I started looking through sample portfolios.  All but two of them (so far) were terrible.  Photoshop and Illustrator are just tools, they do not a designer make.  One respondent was an outsourcing firm based in India that "specializes in 3D Studio, Maya, Photoshop, PHP and mySQL for $10/hour".  Their work was soul-suckingly bad.  To call it Mickey Mouse would be an insult to Disney.  Yet they chose to respond to my carefully crafted ("designed", if I may say so myself) job copy with their latest collection of what stuck to the wall.

What are you working on?  Are you just trying to get through it and cross it off your list or are you  designing it?