If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and visit amodernpromise.com. It’s a shockingly simple site — just a video, an uber-basic music player, and some download and purchase links — and yet it feels very new. It’s novel not because of some crazy technology or design motif — rather, it’s fresh because it’s the work of a designer who’s confident and passionate about the project he’s working on. He took something great (a friend’s minimal, 35mm single-take music video) and presented it the way he wanted to see it.

Show me what you owe me

Visiting the site, what’s most striking is all that’s missing — there’s no heading, no branding, no pitch or navigation. What is there is an enormous, nearly screen-filling video that begs to be watched. It is the whole point. The only other options are to download this video in wonderfully absurd sizes (1.6GB!), listen to a few more tracks by the artist, pay for his music, or go to the band’s site. And all these options are very depreciated, only there to supplement the video. The entire site functions to promote the enjoyment of a short film, not to offer endless possibilities (sharing, friending, twittering, etc). It’s all fun, no bullshit.

Resist, focus

Part of any good design process requires that we imagine others’ problems — specifically those of our clients and their audience(s). Much of this is good — empathy almost always results in strong work. Yet occasionally, we go too far, and try too hard to please as many people as possible, and solve all problems. In short, we forget our own inclinations.

Honestly selfish

I find more and more that being just a bit more selfish in the design process — really listening to your own inclinations — is a very effective strategy for great work. For one, we just know ourselves much better than we know the unknown “user.” It’s also much easier to please yourself, from a creative standpoint, than to please an abstract goal.

This is not to say that we should abandon our creative empathy entirely. Rather, we just need to make sure that we take our own tastes and desires very seriously — because being just a little bit selfish can inject a very noticeable amount of passion and confidence into your work.