Approaching the finishing line

Here is a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

"You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away."

The finishing line is now getting ever closer. However, apart from those projects where there is a clear finite deadline to work to, the judgment of when a design is actually finished is not necessarily always obviously recognizable. A deadline provides this finality, but open-ended projects need their own completion point to be determined. It is natural to keep tweaking, refining, and enhancing your piece but eventually you need to call out something as being completed.

A useful signpost to note your progress was proposed by designer Martin Wattenberg (co-developer on the "Wind Map" project that we saw earlier). Martin describes the subtle but telling change in your role as you shift from debugging a design (programmatically or figuratively) to finding yourself becoming an enthusiastic...