“When launching a new [digital] product, let’s focus more on discussing its PURPOSE and less UI details and features.”
“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”
Blaise Pascal
From Zen Focus’ article Three Little Habits to Find Focus
Aaron James Draplin - CreativeMornings
The highly colorful and entertaining Draplin presents “The DDC 50 Point Plan to Ruin Yer Career”. Over 50 minutes he’ll take you through points covering No.6 Get out there and get dirty, No.15 Exhibit a little humility, No.40 Don’t worry about awards, No.43 Go pantless and No.50 Be thankful for everything.
Story Centered Design
Once you’re dealing with an app that has a dozen screens and hundreds of states, you can’t hold the whole product in your head like a poster. I noticed that our team was emailing around individual screens, talking about individual screens, and naming all the screens just to keep track. But we weren’t paying any attention to how the screens and features fit together.
We were thinking of the product as a set of screens. But there’s a problem with working this way: it’s not at all how people experience the product in real life. People use products in little flows that last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes. […]
A product is not a set of screens — it’s the stories those screens enable.
Don’t let your homepage or primary view of your app be like a great opening chapter to a novel followed by disconnected and boring rubbish. I think it’s time to look at my own process again and see what can be improved.
On a side note the Design Staff blog is a gold mine of a blog for designers, entrepreneurs and researchers.
![Managing Criticism in Design Exploration
Nearly all successful teams understand and value a design exploration approach to solving problems, but how do you productively critic designs when so many options are being explored regardless of job titles or seniority?
Design decisions should always be based on what’s appropriate for the task at hand. If you find your design is being beaten down, the best way to fight back is to counter with “Well, when would my design be appropriate?”. Conversely, before you take pleasure in destroying someone else’s hard work, first make sure that you can answer “When is this solution great?”. […]
Lastly, always remember the golden rule of critique: don’t be a dick.
Read the full post from Intercom and check out their slick new “customer relationship management and messaging tool for web app owners”.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0xtawHXs01qzv45so1_1280.jpg)
Managing Criticism in Design Exploration
Nearly all successful teams understand and value a design exploration approach to solving problems, but how do you productively critic designs when so many options are being explored regardless of job titles or seniority?
Design decisions should always be based on what’s appropriate for the task at hand. If you find your design is being beaten down, the best way to fight back is to counter with “Well, when would my design be appropriate?”. Conversely, before you take pleasure in destroying someone else’s hard work, first make sure that you can answer “When is this solution great?”. […]
Lastly, always remember the golden rule of critique: don’t be a dick.
Read the full post from Intercom and check out their slick new “customer relationship management and messaging tool for web app owners”.
“Among idealists and visionaries, there is no shortage of good intent, but there’s often a shortage on discipline.”
Scott Belsky, Behance
Hidden habits of ineffective people
All five of these habits are easy to pick up but will squeeze out every bit of your effectiveness. The first negative habit really stands out, and I have to constantly remind myself to create more than I consume.
Consuming more than you create
Effective people tend to create a lot of content. Content can mean a lot of things - but the rule is always the same, create more than you consume. Ineffective people, on the other hand, spend the majority of their time consuming the fruits of others’ labor. They are consumate lurkers.
Read the rest on Chris Wake’s Quora post
Explosions in the Sky - Poster Process
A few weeks ago I started noticing DKNG’s shots on Dribbble for “Mystery Project 11”, and yesterday they finally posted the full poster for the band Explosions in the Sky. Similar to their Black Key’s poster process they screen captured the entire design process and put together this amazing process video.
Watching this video makes me want to teach myself how to sketch. Right now I struggle with writing barely legible letters.
Final Poster
Making of Weetabix ‘Dancer’
The DANIELS are back at it again with this creative ad for Weetabix. Watching the spot I was convinced that the dancing bears was simply CG slight of hand, but after watching the making of I’m impressed that they used costumed dancers and puppets.
Check out their Dogboarding short and follow the DANIELS on Tumblr.
“When you have the good fortune to have success in your life that is precisely the time you should reinvent yourself. You should go right back to zero as though nothing had happened and start over. Because you can get real stale. You can fall in love with yourself or get to that danger point when you could ride on that success or try to repeat it.”
— Robert Redford
Wise words. I quickly threw together a desktop image with this quote as a reminder to create, reinvent, repeat. Feel free to download the desktop image at 2560x1440px.
Via Surfstation
“No one cares about your ideas. They only care about what you make.”
Blain Hogan, from his book Untitled: Thoughts on the Creative Process
Follow Blain on Tumblr
Empathy is the Root of Creativity
“The greatest thing we can do and offer is to be great listeners and have to have empathy for your culture to understand what is the truth.”
— John Jay, global executive creative director at W+K
One of the most important skills of a designer or creator is empathy. Without it you’ll fail to connect with users and clients in a meaningful way.
Poster Process - The Black Keys
Design studio DKNG recently screen captured the entire design process that went into creating a tour poster for The Black Keys. The time-lapsed video shows their steps from sketching to details to the actual silkscreening all set to “Black Bug” a mashup of The Black Keys and Big Boi.
How Intellum switched from making a plan for VCs to making a product for customers
We had been writing a plan and basing decisions on what investors told us they wanted to see.
All that chasing left them living off credit card debt and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So the team made a decision: Stop chasing a funding event and figure out how to make money.
Armed with a working prototype, the team kept hustling. But now they were hustling for customers instead of investors.
**Note to self. Re-read this article.
“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Gustave Flaubert
Great quote I just heard from Jina Bolton’s, Sushi & Robots and Engine Yard, talk on providing order and structure to front-end development in her session on CSS Workflow and SASS at Valio Con 2011. Forget passion, focus on process and the rest will follow.
