When do you give up on component designators?
When working with smaller and smaller boards at what point do you give up on component designators on the silkscreen layers?
I'm working on several boards that have around 1 square inch of space. Depending on component count it can quickly reach a point where I'm trying to alter layout to accommodate component designators. It seems really convenient to have them on the board. But that convenience is starting to cost a lot of time. Some board shops can print some high DPI silkscreen text. But even with that ,shrinking the text size even more just doesn't work.
I'm looking for some opinions on when people just give up and leave them off all together. What do you use as your deciding factors. Maybe I just need to learn to live without them and rely on drawings for identifying components.