One of the more common steps in a typical web or interface design work flow is to take the notes from a creative brief and create 2 or 3 (or more) different “looks” demonstrating different directions you can take.
Why multiple comps is a bad idea
We’ve found over the years that nearly all designers create one really strong design and then supplement it with straw men designs that exist solely for the purpose of looking busy. They know that they put most of their energy and thought into the first design, and they generally push for that design when presenting - the others exist largely to be rejected.
Problem is, what often ends up happening is that Design A gets combined with Design B, with a smattering of Design C thrown in. The design which once expressed a sense of cohesion and order, where everything was in the right place an felt “right” devolves into an amalgam, devoid of a strong sense of purpose.
It’s not that the features from the other designs aren’t cool ideas or aren’t pretty - they usually are. They’re just not right for that interface - if they were, they would have been there in the first place.
Create one strong design. Iterate.
The alternative, and the one we pursue, is to create one design and iterate over it with the client. Most of the time we’re tweaking elements. Sometimes we start from scratch. But every design has a clear intent behind it. Every design brings our strongest, sharpest thinking to bear on the problem. Besides, if we have X units of time to complete the first round of designs, we want all that time focused on solving the problem, not trying to think of how many different wrappers to put around it.
This approach has actually served us very well, even on larger projects. After doing hundreds of university designs (which are always committee based and political in nature) the one-design approach has consistently led to fewer revisions, happier clients and better results. On the rare occasion when a client insisted on doing multiple designs up front, the end result was confusion, longer turnaround times and a Frankenstein monster of a final product.