Perfection doesn’t matter—that much seems almost obvious today, when daring mantras like “Make mistakes! Kill your darlings!” permeate the discipline of design.

But there was a time when perfection actually sorta kinda didmatter. And many of us came from that time.

Print design is known to be fairly rigid. You only get one shot at getting it right (two, if your client is forgiving). Once you hit send on those files, you have no choice but to wait with bated breath. Two weeks later, you get back the end result, an irrefutable physical consequence of all your design choices.

In my past life as a print designer, business card design would take me at least two weeks. I’d take a couple days to explore the brand, do like 50 comps, print them out, pin them up, get feedback, narrow those 50 comps down to like 3, do 10 more versions of each of those, pin them up, get feedback, and eventually pick one. That one—the chosen one—would then be subjected to an intense hour or two of pre-press second-guessing. Did I pick the best layout? Maybe the name should be in bold? Maybe the tint of the background should be 55% instead of 50%?

Enter the modern age.

I designed a business card for work and it took 6 hours total, from the moment I got the assignment to the moment I sent off the files to the printer.

It wasn’t that I cared less about font sizes or background tints. It wasn’t that I was rushed on time. It was simply that even print is no longer rigid like print.

The press we used was Moo.com, and their process is entirely digital. You can order as few as 50 cards, on the cheap, and they arrive in a few days. You can upload as many different variations on one order as you’d like. You don’t even have an option of going with offset, which would normally require you to order large quantities.

The flexibility of having a digital printer allowed me to do stuff like slap cute animals on the back of this person’s card without really thinking too hard about it. Because if the next person didn’t want it, he can get those taken off. Or he can have a different set of cute animals. He can have a picture of his keyboard. Or his window.

These printed pieces are alive, like the web.

I’m starting to believe that perfectionism in design only ever existed because of the once-rigid nature of the medium. Doing paste-up with Exacto knives and Xerox machines surely wasn’t a very flexible, painterly process. But now in pixels and code, we can “paint” freely, iterate endlessly, never having to commit to a single, final result.

And in the process, by shipping version after version of with changes both subtle and grand, we’re discovering that not only does perfection not matter, but that in a world of mutability and flux, it by definition cannot even exist.