Process
Craft
The second draft is where the work is
First drafts are fast because they are made of your existing habits. You reach for the proportions you always reach for, the spacing you always use, the two typefaces you have been quietly relying on for a year. It feels like designing. Mostly it is recall.
Where the actual decisions live
The second draft is when you have to justify all of it. Why this weight. Why this much space here and not there. Why this hierarchy rather than the obvious one. Half your first-draft choices will have no answer, and finding that out is the job.
I have started keeping the first draft visible on a second screen while working on the second, specifically so I can see what I have changed and force myself to say why. Anything I changed without being able to say why usually goes back.
Do not show the first draft
Clients anchor hard on whatever they see first, and a first draft is by definition the least considered version of the work. Showing it costs you weeks of arguing your way back out of decisions you had not actually made.
The exception is when you genuinely do not know which of two directions is right and need a reaction rather than a verdict. Then show both, say clearly that they are early, and ask a specific question rather than “what do you think”.
Third drafts are usually subtraction
If the second draft is about justification, the third is almost always about removal. By then the argument is sound and the problem is that you have said it four times. Most of my third drafts are the second draft with about a fifth of it deleted.
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