6 Pointless Design Achievements You Should Totally Go For

Web design is a process of carefully planned and researched steps. You have a job to do, and users to satisfy. Ideally, everything you do has a purpose. There is a point to it all.

But life is weird, complex, and even fun sometimes. Sometimes, you end up doing something that might seem a bit excessive, a bit “out there”, or even downright silly. But you do it just because it makes you feel good to have accomplished it, or because it looked fun. In gaming parlance, we call these things “achievements”.

Achievements in gaming often don’t give you anything but a sense of pride and accomplishment. (That’s an EA joke for you fellow gamers out there.) But seriously, while achievements occasionally do give you an in-game bonus, they’re usually mostly pointless. You do these things just to see if you can.

I thought it would be fun to take a look at some possible achievements that I think we should make official. If you think of more, please, please post them in the comments, along with any stories you have.

Make Another Designer Green With Envy

Okay, this is an interesting one, because you can do this on easy mode or hard mode. Easy mode is when you’ve been working in design for a while, and you show off your work to a brand new designer. I myself bestowed this achievement upon many a designer when I was new to the industry, because this design stuff looks like magic until you really get into it.

Hard mode is, of course, impressing an experienced designer. You can’t just get them to say “it’s good”. You have to make them wish they were you, and that’s tough to do. Bonus points if you can make a design celebrity publicly lament your superiority on Twitter.

My Score: I’ve only managed this on easy mode.

Get Your Site Featured on a Website Gallery

This achievement is mostly pointless because, if you’re freelancing, customers usually don’t browse website galleries. This is a distinctly web designer thing. That said, you can get a small in-industry bonus with other designers. It can possibly help you land agency jobs, too.

My Score: I have done this once in the long past, when you didn’t have to pay CSSMania to showcase your stuff.

Build a Site Full of Easter Eggs

We’ve all seen them: Vogue, of all websites, used to have well-dressed T-Rexes pop up when you input the Konami code. Then there’s Zurb with the cows. Google itself is known to incorporate little gimmicks when you search for things like “do a barrel roll”, and a full game when you search for “Atari Breakout”.

Now, it could be said that Easter eggs delight users when they’re found, but they are hardly essential to any website’s core experience. That said, they’re fun to imagine up, and fun to build. The only real downside is the amount of time it may take to implement them, which is why most Easter eggs tend to reside within the text of the code itself.

My Score: I’ve put amusing comments to myself in the code. That’s about as far as I’ve gone.

Convince a Client Their Logo Doesn’t Actually Need to be Bigger.

Client input is important. However, some clients tend to provide input just because they believe it’s expected of them. They feel compelled to make their mark, and put their stamp on the website, if only so that they feel it’s “really theirs”.

You get this achievement by convincing them to leave well enough alone. I mean, as long as you didn’t make the logo ridiculously small, it’s usually fine, right? But you forfeit this achievement if you use “the fold” as an excuse for not making the logo bigger. You have to convince them with the truth.

My Score: Nope. Never pulled it off.

Send a Client the Exact Same File When They Ask You to “Make it Pop”

Just like in the last example, this happens when you get a client who provides input because their “management style” demands it, and not because anything needs to be changed. Just send them back the same file, and see if they accept it this time.

If they do, you’ve saved yourself some time. If not, then at least you know they’re actually paying attention. Either way, you’ve gained valuable information.

My Score: I’ve never actually done this one, either. I got lucky, and my clients have nearly always provided more specific feedback, and would have known if I sent the same file back. I have sent the same file back by accident, though.

Write Humorous Temporary Copy, Have it Accepted as the Final Text

When you don’t have copy to work with, Lorem Ipsum and such like things often have to suffice. It’s certainly not ideal, but you can’t make content appear out of thin air. You can, however, write some silly things in your mockups, just for fun. I typically only do this with headings and other small strings of text. Paragraphs would be too much.

You score if any one of your silly ideas is accepted as actual copy in the final product. It need only be a line or two.

My Score: Yup, I got this one!

Ezequiel Bruni

Ezequiel Bruni is a web/UX designer, blogger, and aspiring photographer living in Mexico. When he’s not up to his finely-chiselled ears in wire-frames and front-end code, or ranting about the same, he indulges in beer, pizza, fantasy novels, and stand-up comedy.