Aronowitz says she’s lucky that at her last two jobs, she hasn’t had to do the rock-pushing-up-the-hill work that has historically plagued design teams in the tech world: trying to convince company leaders of the value of design.
I don’t worry about the future. It comes soon enough.
— Albert Einstein
Sagmeister goes on a year-long sabbatical around every seven years, where he does not take work from clients. Currently on one in Bali, Indonesia, he is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting, and has displayed this by declining an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Sagmeister spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer.[3]
the act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.
— Jonah Lehrer
The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
— Isaac Asimov
I want to be Ben Barry when I grow up.
In addition to web design, I’ve always had an interest in traditional print design. We had a bunch of leased space, and I was able to get access to one of the warehouse buildings to set up a little workshop in the back by the loading dock. After work and on the weekends, I kind of secretly built out a little screen printing studio. Once I got it setup and working I was able to start making posters that I put all around the company. Now it makes up a big part of my job, even though nobody asked me to do it and it’s not what I was originally hired to do. I didn’t ask for permission, I just did it.
Something that is often overlooked with creatives is time management and getting shit done. You can be the most talented designer in the world but if you don’t follow through and get stuff out there, it doesn’t matter.
I have several friends that are incredibly talented. They will start on projects but rarely follow through. They get bored or distracted or discouraged that it’s not “perfect” and give up. Following through and finishing things is one of the most important things you can learn.
Nick Bilton resolves to use his phone less in 2012.
I’ve been traveling more lately and I like it most when there is no data and no wifi. It means people are more present. I hate it when I’m in the most amazing place and look around to my companions and see them all on their phones instead of absorbing all the details of the place we’re in.
Once again: it doesn’t matter how great and fun an experience is, good UI design cannot fix a broken solution. Good design can effectively differentiate a good solution, and bad design can completely ruin a good solution. But good design simply cannot make up for a solution that doesn’t address a core user need really well. As a recent post on ZURBlog proclaimed, people don’t buy products – they buy the benefit.
Winning ideas eventually become table stakes. Patterns. Expected behaviours. In UI terms, this means that your clever element gets over used, and you lose something that made you unique. That’s not so bad, but to survive you’ll need more than clever UI techniques.
I was re-reading a quote by Steve Jobs that I posted several months ago about creative people and how they come up with things. He states that creative people (or the people who are able to see something and connect the dots in ways others cannot) have more life experience or have thought about their experiences more. They have a broader understanding of the human experience and therefore design better.
I think this perfectly illustrates why I was in such a rush to experience everything before my 30th birthday.
I grew up in a midwestern bubble. I did safe things with safe people. They didn’t inspire me to do anything more than the status quo. It wasn’t until i moved to NYC and later started traveling the world that I realized how much I was missing out on.
People would often ask why I was in such a hurry to make things happen and why I didn’t just let them happen. They wondered why I was so hungry for new experiences, as if I would never be satisfied with what I had. My answer was because I felt like I had missed out on so much growing up. They didn’t understand why that mattered. The best way I can describe it is because doing these things makes me a more creative person and I don’t think there is anything wrong with a desire to make that happen.
