The Epiphany of Details

Epiphany (the appearance of a god among mortals) can strike us through all sorts of things. As a creative person, one is often especially susceptible to it, because one retains into adulthood the natural ability to lose oneself completely in an activity. This is a quality that otherwise only children possess and that our society strips away from us piece by piece as we grow older.

And it is precisely when it comes to the subject of “details” that such an epiphany can occur. What this means is that details take on a special importance. This is especially true when we come across a detail that had remained hidden from us for a long time.

It can strike us in various ways. Through careful observation. Through explicit search. Through mental exercises that free the mind and reduce stress. And so on.

If you want to get a feel for what an epiphany of details feels like, it is especially worthwhile to read books in which the authors devote so much time to describing individual actions, movements, and events that it takes so long to read them that the reader is left with the sensation of watching an observation in slow motion marcel proust comes to mind here.

But it is not only literature; art, too, is a field that revolves heavily around details. Some artists even spend years examining individual details of their works again and again from every angle and grappling with them, just to see whether “something more might still emerge.”

The Devil Is in the Detail

As designers, we know this all too well. Because in an “economized” working world, something is not finished when it is finished, but rather finished when the budget (whether money or time makes no difference in this case) has been used up.

Since one naturally knows this from the outset, one tries to work broadly and in parallel here, using modern working methods that ensure the big picture is coherent even if not all the details have yet been completed or worked out. After all, one can attend to those in updates, provided the product is accepted by the market.

Imagine if directors or authors worked this way. You watch a film that isn’t quite finished yet, or in which certain scenes haven’t yet been shot because important details are missing whose provision would take a disproportionately long time. Such a film would undoubtedly be interesting, but would it also be commercially successful?

In modern, iterative production cycles, we work almost entirely opposite to classical project structures (think of waterfall versus agile). Film, with its parallel shooting and a post-production that begins while filming is still underway, tries more and more to approach this iterative way of working (so much so that many actors in modern feature films often only find out after shooting has wrapped what actually happens and in what order).

This iterative production, with its constant further development (and hopefully improvement) from cycle to cycle, has many advantages. But one of the disadvantages, unfortunately, is that in such a work process details can often get lost. This is above all because they are frequently very small. And the faster the pace of work, the easier it is for details to slip through the cracks.

The Sum of the Details Makes the Whole

Speaking of details automatically creates a division between details and “non-details.” While the latter make up the big picture in the first instance, it is often the details that decide the success or failure of a thing, because it is often only they that make a product, a film, a story worthwhile.

That is why it is important to give sufficient thought to details. And not only when the project plan happens to call for it, but before and after as well.

But You Must Not Lose Yourself in Details

The beautiful thing about details is that placing them deliberately helps make a piece of work seem far more complex than it actually is. This is often exploited in concept art by furnishing rough concepts with corresponding details at the right places. Details help direct the eye. The right detail in the right place can tell more about the story than dwelling too much on detailing the entire environment. But to decide where the details are needed and what is an important detail and what is not, one may under some circumstances need to engage with the subject matter for years and, above all, always observe very carefully.

To achieve this and to at least partly avert the danger of losing oneself too early in too many details, there are various techniques one can apply.

One technique that works especially well for me is adopted from Feng Zhu (a concept designer). Feng Zhu suggests working on all the images/designs you have to produce for a particular round or a particular meeting in parallel. That is, they are not worked through one after another as in the classic “waterfall principle,” but all at the same time. If, for example, ten design proposals need to be prepared for a first meeting the day after tomorrow, then I don’t start with one and move on to the next only after finishing it; instead, I open up multiple design routes side by side. Now I can start working in one and then, at regular intervals, switch to the next route. The right moment to switch always arrives when you feel that one of the drafts has already been worked out in more detail than the others. When that’s the case, you switch to the next draft and develop it further.

The goal of this technique is not to get all the drafts “finished.” That is often not what a design review is about anyway. The goal is rather to keep all the drafts at a qualitatively equivalent level, so that the approaches can be compared fairly with one another. This is especially true in work environments where the dates for the review are set very “softly” and can sometimes shift drastically. Nothing is more annoying than arriving at a review having detailed half of the approaches extensively while the others are still in an early stage.

The goal of such meetings, after all, is not to evaluate fully worked-out, richly detailed drafts, but above all to set the direction and to move ever closer to the actual goal from meeting to meeting.

From Large to the Small

What is important here, is that you always work from large to the small, or from the outside in. That is, you must not succumb to the temptation to start with details too early. Something that happens especially often to beginners, but often enough to veterans as well. Sometimes it simply carries you away, and once you’ve started detailing, it can be hard to stop. But as I already noted in my article 8020, the priority is first of all to create the framework in which the details can later shine. And since details make up 80% of the work but only 20% of the effect of a draft, it is fitting to hold back on them for as long as possible and to deploy the first details only where they can deliberately underscore the draft’s idea.

The cluttered Wide Shot

The amateur revels in the cluttered wide shot, while the pro zooms in on the telling details. This is precisely the reason why so many people take bad photos even with good cameras. Who does not learn to see will also find it especially hard to distinguish the important things from the unimportant ones. And because one cannot decide to set the focus more deliberately, one is afraid of missing something important and zooms out as far as possible in order to get as much as possible into the frame. This approach applies to many areas of design in which non-designers make decisions. “Make the logo bigger” and “more of everything” are the most popular approaches here. But this only leads to a watering-down of what is actually meant to be said. And if it is already so hard for us ourselves to set the focus, then we cannot possibly expect the viewer to be able to remember the important things afterward.

And this is still the reason why so many images generated by artificial intelligence do not work yet. They are often way to detailed. Like bad concept art they suffer from more is more. Overcrowding the image with so many details all over the place, that the eye of the beholder is no longer guided properly and the message get’s lost.

Too much details

Yes, there can be such a thing as to o much details. In a world like today, where everything can be digitally created, everything will be digitally created. Modern Hollywood movies often have too much going on. A recent example of this is the Netflix movie The Gray Man, where so much is going on and so much is in focus at the same time and everything is so evenly lit that the eye does not really know where to focus and the scene becomes too much and is nothing more than just a visual blur of overindulgence.¹

Yet a story can be told just as well through omission as through addition. The gaps will be filled in by the brain anyway. We needn’t worry about that, and that is exactly what makes it so exciting.