Shady non-sequitur
Overheard at my local Harley-Davidson dealership (warning: audio-enabled page).
"Well everybody knows that black is the new chrome."
To answer the obvious question, yes I'm interested in motorcycling and purchasing a bike, but I'm not in the market for a chopper. I'm much more of a sport-bike kinda' guy.
Ooodles of fun
My vote for the most worthy successor to the big red button that does nothing for the modern web (ya' know Web 2.0, NextWeb, etc).
Drum roll please...1-Dimentional-Tetris!
Design as a form of Method Acting
A great post and follow-up discussions by Jeff Veen of Wired/AdaptivePath fame (like I need to tell you that) on his typical design effort/timeline.
- Talk to everybody I possibly can about the problem.
- Read everything that would even be remotely related to what I'm doing.
- Hang charts, graphs, diagrams, and screenshots all over my office.
- Observe user research; recall past research.
- Stew in it all, panic as deadline approaches, stop sleeping, stop eating.
- Be struck with an epiphany. Instantly see the solution. Curse my tools for being too slow as I frantically get it all down in a document.
- Sleep for three days.
Being trained in engineering, I've always been a fan of having a structured approach to software development, but with time and experience, I've realized that most of that 'structure stuff' exists as retrospective documentation to satisfy the non-creative stakeholders (ugh, I hate that work) in case something goes wrong. Writing software, or at least especially exceptional software, is closer to composing music than building a car. The real 'leveragable work product' often takes place at the extreme beginning (design) and ending (performance/execution 'hacks') of the project when the maximum creativity is applied in very nebulous and often impossible-to-deconstruct ways.
After days/weeks of 'stewing' things just click together and the problem finally speaks to you.
I wonder how generally applicable this pattern (ugh...is EVERYTHING a pattern these days) of effort applies to any creative endeavor.