How Hexagons can make your life miserable

How Hexagons can make your life miserable

One of the days when your marketing collateral overhaul is a back burner project, you happen to come across a design that is just too impressive in your face. And then, when it comes to a design inspiration, you quickly raid your laptop’s history to find that great work of art that hasn’t left you yet. Voila! you find it, to assure yourself, that this is THE design you want your project to have.

One such thing happened to us while overhauling our website. And what hit us was an unassuming shape, we call a Hexagon. A typical hexagon is a six sided polygon, to define it simply. But, how does this harmless form of geometry become a nightmare.

Well it starts with that phase, when you appreciate some design. Then this admiration grows into fondness and Hexagons become the smartest thing to have happened in geometry.

The next phase is when you start noticing Hexagons everywhere. So the storyboarding of the project happens, our design is just a cluster of hexagons scrolling up and down the webpage. We are good to go. Then we add animations to them, fair enough. Now that is where the monster wakes up. How would you align a six sided figure, a bunch of them, to pop, slide, appear, or sway across the screen?

So you decide to animate each of them individually, while dancing to a common tune. That was too much music for a website design. Some hexagons jumped, some swayed, some slid etc. But it is not happening. The co-workers start giving their suggestions and inputs. We improvise, but the we are still not there. Stuck on a design we are lagging behind our deadline, numb on creativity, and a team of frustrated designers who just don’t understand what’s the big deal with Hexagons.

Our developers have started hating us, our designers think we are logic less individuals, aimlessly obsessed by a silly shape, our other key projects are getting hit, we are paying one big bunch for months together just to make a few hexagons glide elegantly from right to the left of the screen, and we still have the audacity to try, once more! Why? Because they are different, they represent complexity with a simple shape, and because you like them.

This is what hexagons can do to you. Well, this has happened with most of us, who work in creative environments. Those times, when you feel, was creativity really your calling, were you actually hired for it?

How do you shake it off:

And if this is not enough, there are apps to help: