Paul Scrivs in The Uniformity of the Design Community, a good post on the dangers of design trends:

This isn’t a manifesto, but merely a reminder that there are different aesthetics out there that will get the job done better. There are different designs that you still haven’t even thought of yet that will solve the problem more efficiently. There are hundreds of more designs that will tell a better story than your current design. Don’t settle on what you or the community are satisfied with all the time. Look outside of the trends and become the person that starts a new one.

Creative pursuits like design and writing are journeys in discovering how we can get better at solving problems. There’s a balance to be struck, though. We have to push ourselves beyond current trends and obvious solutions, but not so far that we end up as digital nomads - always traveling towards the elusive horizon of perfection, but never completing anything. Yes, we need to do exceptional work, but we also have to complete. Dmitry Fadeyev sums this up well in his essay On Perfection:

Instead of chasing perfection, we should be chasing completion. A work need not be prefect, but it has to be complete. Unlike perfection, completion is not about chasing an unattainable goal, it is about meeting a fixed one. There is no such thing as a perfect work, because everyone judges things differently, so there is no standard by which such a thing can be defined. There is however such a thing as great work - work that has been completed and deemed exceptional ”” either by others, or by you. But this can only happen when the work is done.

Or perhaps we need to change our definition of perfection and reframe it as the process of getting a little better each time we complete something. As Khalil Gibran said:

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.

Linds Redding’s A Short Lesson in Perspective is essential reading for anyone in the creative industry - particularly those who make things for the web. He laments the loss of time to think and reflect about designs before they go out the door:

Pretty soon, The Overnight Test became the Over Lunch Test. Then before we knew it, we were eating Pot-Noodles at our desks, and taking it in turns to go home and see our kids before they went to bed. As fast as we could pin an idea on the wall, some red-faced account manager in a bad suit would run away with it. Where we used to rely on taking a break and “stretching the eyes” to allow us to see the wood for the trees, we now fell back on experience and gut feel. It worked most of the time, but nobody is infallible. Some howlers and growlers definitely made it through, and generally standards plummeted.

It’s a strikingly honest essay about the creative process and the pressures of working on the Internet today.

Rabbit holes: Why being smart hurts your productivity is a great post on staying focused without losing the value of going down intellectual rabbit holes:

The names change but the story remains the same. Designers find themselves studying fancy, new CSS3 effects when they should have been wire framing their checkout page. Hapless students find that they are on the Wikipedia page for Esperanto instead of writing notes on Norse mythology. Like Alice led into Wonderland by the White Rabbit, geeks too easily fall into “the rabbit hole”.

I won’t spoil the suggestions for you. See also: The potential and dangers of “˜squirrel projects’.

(via Brad Whittington)

This is my contribution to Chris Shiflett’s Ideas of March initiative, which encourages people to write about why they like blogs.

My love of writing comes from a love of problem-solving. There is a sense of pride and accomplishment in finding the right words to say something. And yet, great writing has an inherent unattainability to it that keeps me ever searching. There are good ways and bad ways to communicate something, but there is never a best way. It’s like a video game in the sense that you can level up by writing often, but it’s not a game you can ever beat. There is no big boss fight at the end that proves that you are now the best writer you can be. What keeps me going is the nagging sense that the last thing I wrote could have been written much better, so I’d better keep trying.

There are many benefits to writing, of course. Most importantly, it’s a problem solving technique in itself. By taking the time to structure your thoughts and your words in a way that other people need to understand, you tend to get a better understanding of what’s going on in your head. Clive Thompson addresses this well in The art of public thinking:

The process of writing exposes your own ignorance and half-baked assumptions: When I’m writing a Wired article, I often don’t realize what I don’t know until I’ve started writing, at which point my unanswered questions and lazy, autofill thinking becomes obvious. Then I freak out and panic and push myself way harder, because the article is soon going before two publics: First my editors, then eventually my readers. Blogging forces a similar clarity of mental purpose for me. As with Wired, I’m going before a public. I’m no longer just muttering to myself in a quiet room. It scarcely matters whether two or ten or a thousand people are going to read the blog post; the transition from nonpublic and public is nonlinear and powerful.

Writing in public continues to help me gain clarity about my thoughts and problems. That I expected. But I didn’t expect it to give me such a sense of community. The past few months have been especially gratifying, ever since I’ve been invited to become a contributor to Smashing Magazine. Through that process I’ve met amazing people, and through them, I think I’ve become a better writer. Which in turn helps me to solve problems better. It hardly seems fair that I gain so much from this community. If you’ll allow me the use of a ridiculous phrase, the ROI on my writing seems preposterously high.

I started my first blog on Windows Live Spaces in 2003. I’d just moved to the US and needed a way to feel connected to friends and family in South Africa. It’s 2012 now, and I don’t write on Windows Live Spaces any more. I also don’t live in the US any more. I’ve moved homes and countries and blogging platforms way too many times over the past 9 years. But looking back over many false starts and wrong turns in life and in blogging, I’m grateful for the thread of words that runs from my beginnings on Spaces, through the detour on Blogger, and now my own home on this domain. Somehow, those words anchor me.

So maybe writing this has once again shown me the error in my original thinking, just as it’s done so many times before. I was wrong in my opening paragraph. I don’t write because I love problem-solving. I write to know that I am here.

This is a great interview with The Bad Plus. They talk about Jazz and finding your voice, but it’s this part on humility that stood out for me:

I prefer to think that it’s possible to always sort of double-check yourself and be like, “Is this really the right thing?” and be searching.  The classic jazz example is John Coltrane: consummate musician, but really never stopped searching. I don’t think he ever believed the hype about himself.  He could’ve been like, “Man, I got it, I’m great.”  But that’s not the feeling you get. Coltrane was incomparably great, but he was also just humbly trying to figure it out.

This should always be our attitude when we design as well. If we think that we’ve figured out how people use computers, or exactly how human psychology works, or that we can design the perfect, seamless experience - then we tend to start designing for ourselves at the expense of our users. Never stop searching.

See also: Humble Design.

This is such a gem of an interview with Andy Ihnatko that it’s hard to pick just one section to quote, but I’ll go with this one:

What’s your advice to new writers?

Build your whole workflow around the “vomit draft.” When you create a blank document, empty your mind of any expectations or aspirations. Just start typing. Never edit anything. Just get it all out of you and into the document. Type, type, type until you get to the end. The results will be horrible, but the hardest work is done: you’ll have taken a nebulous idea out of your head and created something that really exists. Then you fix, fix, fix.

Such great advice - I’ve started doing this on all longer pieces.

I love this line from Sweet Maria’s Coffee Library:

Espresso is fussy. It is the pursuit for perfection by a person who is driven by minutiae.

It’s not just Espresso that’s fussy. Design is fussy too. So is writing, drawing, painting, or any other creative pursuit you can think of. It is all “the pursuit for perfection by a person who is driven by minutiae”. And this pursuit is usually undertaken by unreasonable people.

Speaking of coffee (a huge passion that’s pretty hard to merge with a blog on design and technology), I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post this recent photo, taken at Melissa’s Food Shop in Cape Town:

Remember, always read the manual.

Fabio Sergio wrote a slightly rambling but very interesting post called The Myth of the Brand New Innovation Myth. He takes on some recent opposing views on innovation and creative thinking. Should you listen to customers or not? Should you work in an environment where you can do your thinking alone, or collaborate? Sergio’s point is that (surprise!) it’s not that simple:

I don’t think there is an archetypal, simplistic image of what type of personality or process best fosters innovative thinking, or even what type of physical working environment can best support a creative culture. That view of the world is too polarized. In my experience there is no single specific behavioral trait, methodological approach, or carefully-selected set of contextual factors that guarantees success in the ability to think differently and translate that thinking into success in the market.

He goes on to say that the truth doesn’t lie in any of these extremes, but somewhere in between:

That said, there is indeed a common trait in the typical way creative thinkers approach challenges: they can comfortably hold opposing thoughts in their heads and get to work. [”¦] Informed intuition. Controlled chaos. Abductive analysis. This is often the mindset of successful creative, innovative thinkers: seeing opposites and apparently contradicting goals not just as a potential for dissonance, but as an opportunity for dynamic harmony.

It’s a much more balanced and realistic view than some of the other black-and-white proclamations of truth we’ve been seeing lately.

Clay Johnson wants us to write 500 Words before 8am:

Starting your day as a producer means that your information consumption has meaning: the rest of the day means consuming information that is relevant to what it is that you’re producing. Waking up as a producer frames the rest of your habits. You’re not mindlessly grazing on everyone’s facebook’s statuses. You’re out getting what it is you need to get in order to produce. Waking up as a producer is procrastination insurance.

“Procrastination insurance.” I like that. This is tricky when you have a 2-year old that you want to read stories to in the morning, and you also need to get a run in before work. But there are other ways to apply this principle. I write most of my longer pieces at night when the family is already in bed. This is not ideal, but I do most of the planning in my head early in the morning while doing other tasks. I also tend to do a lot of design work in the shower - it’s uninterrupted time to think about a problem and come up with possible solutions. Maybe I’m rationalizing, but I choose to view this morning thinking time as part of producing and providing focus for the day to come.

I’ve been following the recent back-and-forth about blog comments closely, since I have the same question about this blog: should comments be turned on or off? I even mentioned recently that I’m going to turn comments off for a while and see how it goes.

Matt Gemmell is driving/documenting the debate in the most articulate way, and his recent post on pseudonyms is another example of that. Even though the conversation now mostly appears to have run its course, it occurred to me that the root of this debate is related to what Paul Ford calls the fundamental question of the web:

“Why wasn’t I consulted,” which I abbreviate as WWIC, is the fundamental question of the web. It is the rule from which other rules are derived. Humans have a fundamental need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

The Internet gives people this idea that if they can’t respond directly to something someone else said on a web site, their fundamental right to be consulted is violated. And that’s just not true - we don’t have a right to be consulted on everything that happens around us. What is true, however, is that we all have a voice, and that finding that voice is extremely important for our own development.

So the thing is, we’re having the wrong discussion. We shouldn’t be arguing about whether comments should be turned on or off on a blog. What we should be talking about is how all of us can spend more time finding our own obsession and voice, and how we can share that with the world. Tom Standage argues that writing is the greatest invention:

It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.

So forget about comments - it doesn’t matter whether you have them turned on or not. The real question is which one of the many available options you’re going to choose to start writing and owning your voice.

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Update: Reader Greg Mathes asks in an email, “What’s so important about finding our own voice?” To answer, I’d like to quote Clive Thompson in The Art of Public Thinking:

The process of writing exposes your own ignorance and half-baked assumptions: When I’m writing a Wired article, I often don’t realize what I don’t know until I’ve started writing, at which point my unanswered questions and lazy, autofill thinking becomes obvious. Then I freak out and panic and push myself way harder, because the article is soon going before two publics: First my editors, then eventually my readers. Blogging (or tumbling or posterousing or even, in a smaller way, tweeting) forces a similar clarity of mental purpose for me. As with Wired, I’m going before a public. I’m no longer just muttering to myself in a quiet room. It scarcely matters whether two or ten or a thousand people are going to read the blog post; the transition from nonpublic and public is nonlinear and powerful.