Good isn’t good enough: beware the design middle ground

Scroll far enough through any creative platform, feed or portfolio, and you’ll notice it. Most of the work is good. Genuinely good, well made, confident, occasionally even fresh. That’s what makes it compelling. Good has gravity. It pulls you in and gives you very little reason to keep pushing the work forward. Why keep searching for something genuinely different when something good already feels this satisfying?

Be wary of the gravity of the middle ground.

When we started out, we were two people in a borrowed room in South London who had seen enough of the industry to know that the work that genuinely moves people, the work that stops them, changes them, stays with them, never comes from the centre. It comes from somewhere deeper. More obsessed. More alive with the particular energy of the people who made it. 24 years later we are a broader team with deeper experience, but that ambition, that desire to move people, still drives us.

And right now I think that ambition matters more than ever.

New design tools and platforms that promise speed and ease keep arriving, and honestly, they’re good. New agents, new ways to create, faster every time. Motion, coding, typographic systems, the whole apparatus of what we do keeps getting more democratised. That’s worth celebrating.

But something else is happening alongside this. Design is flattening. Not getting worse, exactly, getting narrower. Less weird. Less range. Less of the thing that only one person, or one challenging brief, or one long night can make.

The democratisation of creativity hasn’t made originality easier. It’s made it rarer. The more the range of outputs shrinks, the wider the middle grows to hold them all. And as the middle grows, the distance to something more distinct grows with it.

So while creative execution has become more accessible to everyone, it was never really the thing. Delight is. Meaning is. That’s what we chase when we refuse to let accomplished become enough.

Nobody decides to make work that settles. It happens in the accumulation of reasonable decisions. The brief that nudges towards the familiar. The client who says bold but really means safe. Each of these decisions makes a coherent argument, but together, they inch you slowly toward the centre.

That’s how the pull to the middle works. It rarely announces itself.

Yes, the work is good. Carefully, professionally good. There’s very little to criticise. But afterwards you feel strangely drained by it. That’s when you know you’ve stepped away from your own judgement.

The danger isn’t burnout. It’s going numb and calling it professionalism.

We’ve been there. A fast and surface-led process, a challenging client, or simply stress and pressure leading to a compromise.

But if you catch yourself in the compromise, you can still choose differently. A few years ago we were working on an identity for Roli, an innovative music technology company whose instruments could give anyone, from Hans Zimmer to Hannah in her bedroom taking her first steps, the means to make music. Out of pure enthusiasm, we explored five distinct directions. All creative. All taking the brand somewhere interesting. The sessions were electric.

But then we stepped back, and something wasn’t landing. The work felt musical. It felt creative. None of it felt like Roli. The realisation didn’t come from the client. It came from us.

So we stopped. We went back. Stripped everything down. We found a symbol sitting in the keys of a keyboard that unlocked the whole identity. Simple. Human. Inevitable. That moment, when something clicks into place before you can explain it, is what this is all for.

So how do you actually get further out?

Knowing the middle is wide is one thing. Getting out of it is another. It starts with disrupting your own recipes: the shortcuts, the safe references, the moves that worked last time. It isn’t a destination. You keep walking towards it. And it’s fine to get lost along the way. That’s not a detour from the search, it is the search.

This is why we developed SuperFutures, our invention engine that runs through everything we make. Every person in the studio, designer or writer or someone in operations, finance, production, gets two to four weeks to build a project of their own choosing, in whatever format they want. No brief. No client. And creating things with no end result.

Those projects have become a living practice, a mindset. Lo-fi or hi-fi, analogue or digital, new technology or old, they’re the fuel for how we look at creativity because they let people feel what it’s like to make something without pressure. That feeling is the whole point. You have to light that fire before you can move anything else forward.

When a real brief lands, the team can carry that same feeling into it, before the deadline and the details take over. Intuition first. Intention after.

One word we keep coming back to is wonder. A big word for professional creators to use out loud, broad and emotional, and a little magical. But even with all the scale and structure involved in working the way we do, there’s still something simple at the core: an almost childlike way of seeing and making without expectation or limit. It’s what keeps us from calcifying. And it isn’t just something we reach for. It’s something we want to make other people feel.

So while the middle is wider than it’s ever been, that’s not a reason to worry – it’s an invitation. Every recipe you’re willing to disrupt, every moment you let yourself feel wonder, every project you make just because you want to, moves you a little further out. The work that stays with us has always had an attitude. Swagger. Weirdness. It asks more of us: more curiosity, more conviction, and more honesty with ourselves to recognise when the work is merely good, and when it’s finally unmistakable.

That’s the joy of making. Not arriving at the answer, but staying with the question long enough for something alive to emerge. 24 years later, that need to keep going never gets old. It’s why I still love design. It’s why I keep searching.