Can you go too far?

So when it comes to designing iteration seems to me one of the best tools a design can use. You have to balance churning out iteration and not straying far from the original design. I've been hopping back and forth between milling out variation and concepts and knowing exactly what I want. The key difference is that when I design for someone else I'm looking at a minimum of 150 variation and maybe 25 concepts and my personal work is maybe 25 variations of two or three concepts. You can imagine that is just a gargantuan amount of work and honestly in the end for clients and if you aren't a practicing designer you should know you are only going to use a few of those. If I was working on paper I would feel bad for the forests. But thankfully I'm in the modern day and I utilize digital mock up like the one above the test my designs. It isn't as good as printing but it does give an idea of proportions in perspective and a basic idea of how it will look on the stock. I will stress if I didn't have the experience of printing tons of things these mockups would not be good enough.

I'm nearing the end of another project, a big one. This project is my BA Thesis it's a corporate ID for an organization in Stuttgart Germany. I'm going to show you a sample of the work I did to develop the logo and identity. When I say sample it is something in the range of half of the design concepts and doo-dads I made. Sometimes I just make things that might have something to do with the concept and play with it. Oh and I forgot to mention this is after about 20 pages of thumbnail sketches that include logo concepts, lettering, and shapes and objects.

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Sorry it wouldn't let me put them in order I had them labeled. But maybe you'll get a sense about how much work really goes into design or should. I know I'm no design master but I know I'm much happier with what I make now then just a year ago. And now I'm bracing myself for the hardest part, not the design but clients. I've been very lucky with the clients I've had and I can't say what makes a good client or a bad one but I can tell you some jobs are just more enjoyable. But during all this work you have to remind yourself  your work is for a purpose and that is to convey an idea or concept and to make the client happy.

Hey I've been on a creative roll, I've got some great projects to work on for clients and my personal projects are really turning out great as well I'm just looking forward to what is next.