Creative Reaction

Another post on the size of a design team and its effect on creativity. In this post on his blog Subtraction, Khoi Vinh, Design Director for NYTimes.com speaks largely from personal experience and makes several excellent points. I’ll summarize by mashing his words:

— Design doesn’t scale well. This craft rests on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish, maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout. Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical - it almost always has to scale. The smaller the scale, however, the more efficient the practice of design —

Plenty to think about here. So how can we keep our staff/departments lean and agile enough to provide the best possible work for our clients? You could pay the slackers to quit…