As an intern, there is a lot to learn in a short amount of time. So far, at Lydell, I realize  failure is inevitable to everyone. Mostly because we go through a reasonable amount of trial and error. But that is the nature of our job right? Finding solutions to problems, failing at it, then finding a new solution… failing at it again, then finding a better solution… you get the drift. Eventually we land something unexpected but the best idea we never thought of. I always knew this in theory, but this became real for me after a few weeks on my journey through this internship.

Let me explain further.

A few weeks in and I’m going through the process of continuously re-working projects. One of which was photographing street style fashionistas from Fashion Week and designing layouts of them for the blog and other social media platforms. This went through quite  a few failures. The photos were great, laying them out and getting the correct crop really relied on trial and error to get them all close to perfect. Specifically, creating a collage of all the images was the biggest challenge and also resulted in failure the first time around, by cutting the images out irregularly. However, as a result of this, after stroking the images in an opaque red, gave the collage that NYFW pop that was needed.

As interns, failure is unpreventable but not as bad as it sounds. No matter how much we try to prevent it, it will happen!  The good thing is, going through trial and error helps us to get that one rich and meaningful design, both accidental or intentional. Regardless, we get better after we failed a few times. The fact is, if it doesn’t work the first 3, 6… or even 10 times, it’s kind of a success.

The takeaway is simple. Failure opens our mind to new alternatives and can lead to exciting design episodes.