Definitely understand what you're going through. Especially if you're playing product and design roles.

However.

Designers are not artists. We work with constraints. What you're experiencing is very normal and quite frankly why your company is paying you. Given enough time, anyone can create a great design. A designer's job is to do it under time pressure, while juggling multiple inputs and to do it consistently every time.

"Dribbblable" work is full of impractical animations and eye-candy that ultimately detracts from full UX. If that's why you need proper iteration time — looking to create something worth showing and lauding by a group of non-users — shame on you.

Not that unreasonable deadlines are acceptable. Just don't use Dribbble as your metric.

At first, I didn't quite get that both voices were you're own, and so I wanted to start by explaining, why it's not smart to focus on designing for Dribbble likes. But realizing that it's an inner dialogue and you're aware of both sides, I'm sure you already know about this :)

Other than that, I can relate to your situation from my own experience. I was never satisfied with my work and worst of all, I even started to blame my circumstances for this. Clients, customers, users, colleagues, I was blaming everyone (mostly through internal dialogue ;).

Later I realized that the problem wasn't out there, but that I myself had been the problem. Especially in the beginning, I was so focused on producing portfolio work, that I wasn't able to achieve my high standards in too many projects. This was frustrating, and it only changed after I had heard about usability testing and user experience.

Especially the latter led me to study more about design. I also started to pickup some basic programming in order to build websites and prototypes on my own. This way I learned that design doesn't exist in isolation. It's connected to programming, as well as it's connected to business. This realization got me curious about businesses in general, and thus I started studying the connection between design and business. At this moment I can say one thing about it for sure:

Design for it's own sake (design that's first and foremost liked by it's creators and their peers) isn't really design. Design has to work for real people – no more, no less. For a design to work for real people, it has to be tested iteratively. That's why shipping imperfect design is the only thing you will ever be able to ship (if shipping means coding your design so it can be tested by real people). It's because in order to perfect your design (to make it work for your users), you have to watch how people are really using it, and improve your solution in accordance to their feedback and even more important, your own conclusions.

This way I learned to love imperfection and started to admire minimal viable products and landing pages for new digital services and tools. I guess, all I really did, was taking my focus from myself (the perfectionist) and putting in onto others, by testing my designs with real people to continually improve them, instead of just posting them to some portfolio websites or forums, to get praised by colleagues.

I really hope this was useful although I had just realized that I was actually explaining why it's not smart to design for Dribbble likes while my first paragraph suggests I would not do so ;)

The very concept of trying to achieve 'Dribbblable' work day in and day out is not very healthy for pushing a product forward, especially if you are working within a team (regardless of it's size).

That kind of quality takes time to concoct and achieve, move fast and learn fast is the better option overall I feel; because your users should be guiding the direction of the product. Imagine spending weeks of over-time perfecting a design only for it to fall apart in the hands of real users.

Interestingly I just wrote a short piece on the pursuit of perfection and how it should be approached in stepping-stones rather than 'as-the-crow-flies'. http://tsainsbury.com/writing/2014/11/16/completeness-vs-perfection/

I'm not saying you should be satisfied with mediocre designs, or that you should be happy with a half-baked product. But you should see the value in iterative design. Plan to perfect the basics first, then build on those groundworks with whatever 'beauty' and cool stuff you may want, when and as time may allow. But that cool stuff should be 'for the product', in that it delivers obvious value for the overall user experience.

True that. the unstoppable inner battle of being practical and yet amazing.

This is so so awesome and spot on. I currently do product and design and am dealing with much of the same as you.

A lot of good comments below, I won't try to repeat them, but the fact is that this is why product design is such an important role. We take product and design and mash them together in an environment with many many variables. As Bowen said, you've got to deal with these constraints, that is part of the job.

With that said, it's a real dilemma sometimes and your inner dialog rings def rings true :) Exercise and meditation are the only cures to delayed decision-making for me.

I don't remember who originally said that, but if you're not ashamed of your version 1, then you spent too much time on it.

Giving design enough time is different than complaining about 'proud work'.

The yield of product design is not dribbble-able work.

Product design is not perfection. It's not inherent beauty. It's about creating products that are functional, delightful and purposeful. Be proud that your work helps someone else's day go smoother. Be proud that you just saved a user from massive headaches. Be proud of the great feedback you're getting from customers. Be proud that using your product makes users happy.

Are you using your time effectively? Is it to get the pixel-perfect design, or is it to make sure the app flow is tested and usable? Which one is your priority?

"Mediocre" is in the eye of the beholder. There's nothing mediocre about a user who got from point A to B in a delightful, smooth way.

Are you iterating? Get the nuts and bolts right first, then worry about perfect tweening later.

Simply surface-deep "beauty" is art. Not product design.

Is this like that in your company? I think our proffesion as product designers is extremely challenging these days. We have to make calls between product and design. I'd love the design part to win more often or find a better way for them to corelate

I know this world so good, I call it "corporate design"... Very simple and way off course :) Never cave to the enemy!