• filed under
• Graphic Design
• Life
• Writing

Someone pointed me at Natalia Ilyin’s brief rant about how designers can’t write—but, worse, believe they can anyway. It reminds me of the endless string of self-help books and slogans we’ve seen over the last several years—things like The Secret—that suggest if we only believe in ourselves, the power of positive thinking will carry us through.

This is bullshit.

And it’s not just bullshit for the big things, like cancer, but for the little things, too, like writing ability. Believing you’re a good writer (or designer, or marathon runner) won’t make it so.

Instead, I recommend my new, patented technique for self-improvement: The Power of Negative Thinking™.

It works like this: look at your work, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and focus on what about it sucks.

Chances are, you can find a lot. Absorb your work’s flaws. Study them. Learn them. Look at how other people, people better than you—which is near everyone, right? remember, we’re looking at the thing you suck at—dealt with those areas.

Now, next time you do that sort of work, pay attention to those flawed areas. That’s where you need to improve. Learn from the other people (people better than you). Do it better.

Once you’re done, look at your work, and focus on what about it sucks. And so on.

That is how you get better at something. If at first you don’t succeed, suck, suck again. Eventually, you’ll suck at something else instead.

But why listen to me? I suck at this, too.

• filed under
• Life
• Writing

Merlin Mann posted a long (long, long) video rant today, following up on a much shorter and funnier one he posted yesterday (note: neither video is safe for work, but the second one is much more egregiously so).

One of the things he talks about (the main point, I think, of his rant) is that there are tons of advice blogs that threaten purport to help you with lots of little bits of information, and that these can be really dangerous because they won’t tell you to stop when you’ve had enough—indeed, it’s in their best interest that you go on benders as often as possible.

This mirrors a change in writing that’s taken place with the internet. 20 years ago, you’d get your advice from a book, a piece of a defined length which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The author, in the course of writing a book (if they did it well), starts at one point, walks you through all the things they want you to get through, and ends. By its very nature, the book tells you to, forces you to put it down.

Websites don’t do that. They’re not like books: they go on and on serving up bite-sized pieces of content for as long as whoever maintains them can keep up the pace, hour on hour, day on day, week on week. It is, in some sense, the nature of the internet to cater to that frenetic “advanced beginner” stage of understanding.

Obviously, the solution (to the extent that this problem needs a solution) isn’t to go back to books. But I’d be thrilled to see a format for publishing on the web that abandons the hyper-current pace of the blogosphere for a more careful, deliberate, considered approach, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The model for the internet thus far has been newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. Maybe we should think about making it like books?

• filed under
• Life

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways people relate to one another. (I’m perhaps not the best person to be doing such thinking, but, never mind for now.)

How much of our relationships are built upon insincerity—or, rather, the appearance of sincerity? Upon not letting the other person know what we really think? Could we still function without that?

Ricky Gervais has a movie coming out soon called The Invention of Lying, premised on the idea that he’s the first guy to figure out you can tell untruths. People spend the whole movie tearing into him, blurting out thoughts about how unsuitable he is as a person. Would anyone stand for that?

Everyone has something to say about everyone else, behind their back. It’s a shameful way of being: but I guess that’s just life. There’s always that moment, though, when all that insincerity snaps. When you find out how someone really feels, really thinks. Usually a fleeting glimpse.

I suppose it’s inevitable it usually turns out badly. It’s not the nice things that we refrain from saying.

• filed under
• Life

If a man’s home is his castle, mine is not a very good one.

Last Thursday, while I was at work, someone scaled the wall behind my apartment building and got in an open window, making off with a number of items. They took a random assortment of objects, from the large (my desktop computer) to the small (a box of cuff links), and many things in between.

It’s a disorienting feeling, knowing that your little corner of the world isn’t as private as it once was. I’ve found myself wondering a lot of things the past few days. Some of them are mundane (how am I going to clean all the fingerprinting powder off?) and some of them are practical (what passwords do I have to change for security?).

The biggest thing that nags at me, though, is the question of who this uninvited guest into my apartment was. Was it a he? (Probably.) Was it one person or more? What’s he look like? What does he think of me?

It’s an imbalance. These are questions he has the means of answering about me. He has all my files, years’ worth of photographs, writing, bookmarks, and so on. I often wonder what he thinks of me. I don’t know if he’s even bothered to switch my computer on. He spent some time rifling through my things. Did he puzzle over a broken pocketwatch? Was he disapproving of my wardrobe? Did he like my taste in art? (Evidently not enough to take it with him.)

I’ve now got this mystery presence in my life, this person whose life is now connected to mine, who I know nothing about. Oddly, all in all, that’s what I find the most interesting, the most disturbing. Whose life have I thus intersected?

• filed under
• Typography
• Life
• Writing

the full quote →

In the event you’ve never heard the original radio show, or read the books, you should do that. Now.

Happy Towel Day, everyone.

• filed under
• Web Design
• Life

I have often been told, usually with a certain air of self-satisfaction, that Twitter will not replace the newspaper. (Well, okay, maybe The Guardian.)

This is sort of like saying that rollerblades won’t replace the family car. It totally misses the point. Twitter is not destined to be the next iteration of reporting. Or blogging. Or searching the web. Or Facebook. That’s a complete misunderstanding of what it does.

Join the chat room!

Twitter’s most reasonable analogue, if you must have one, is something like IRC. It’s a place where people can come and have a chat in short bursts. The other similar invention of the early web is Usenet. (Of course, both these things still exist; on the web, nothing ever quite dies.)

There are, however, a couple key differences that separate Twitter from its antecedents. First: Twitter is fundamentally open. There aren’t rooms or groups on Twitter. The only closed parts of the system are users who make their posts private (in which case, only people they allow can see their feed), and direct messages, which are fairly incidental. If someone tweets about, say, Expression Engine, someone else can search for that and find it. (Even better if they use the hashtag #expressionengine or #ee, which people use to unify all the tweets on a given topic.) Many twitter clients let you run and observe searches like this in near-real time.

The second big difference is that you only see what you want to. Twitter can’t be derailed the way IRC or Usenet could. There’s no need for moderators. Your main feed is pulled from the people you choose to listen to. If you don’t like someone’s tweets, you can always unfollow them. People needn’t “play nice,” because there’s complete separation.

So what?

That makes Twitter exceptionally useful — if you’re in one of those groups (like web technology or politics) that’s adopted it broadly. You end up very quickly coming into contact with people who have the same interests as you, because they’re searching for the same things on Twitter, or monitoring particular topics on Twitter that are important to them. It’s all a very cool way of making conversation across great distances, and it accomplishes it in a way that its closest relations don’t, because of its open, casual nature. All in all, a brilliant invention.

• filed under
• Life

New York hits you over the head with its monstrous size from the moment you cross over into Manhattan. It’s a city absent a sense of scale, ironically — everything is so enormous, so in your face, that you can get no perspective on it at all. Little bacteria struggling through the veins of some immense beast. You can’t comprehend it.

And you have to slice it up. Everyone slices New York up. The buildings in New York are tall, but the streets are lined by tiny storefronts, little slices of giant buildings, people trying to get their own (tiny) little storefront slice. It’s how the city works, I guess. All jammed in.

Coming back to New York, now, I feel like the time when I could’ve fallen in love with the city has passed. It’s not my kind of town any longer. Maybe it’s that I’ve come to belong to DC, or maybe it’s just that as I grow older I also feel settled in a way I didn’t before. But I don’t think I’ll ever become a New Yorker.

A few of my friends were born New Yorkers (even ones that weren’t born in New York). But a few of them really aren’t of the city.

It manifests in weird ways. I stayed with a friend in Brooklyn, and his apartment sits over a subway line. Every time a train runs below, the whole apartment shakes. It’s loud. Bottles clink in the drawers. You feel it. The New Yorkers who’ve roomed with him, and who visited, tuned it out quickly, just got used to it. Almost two years later, he hasn’t.

New York’s very much about the impact of sharing the little space you have with the other eight million or so people who are also trying to inhabit it. It’s all compromise.

I guess I’m not interested in that sort of compromise any longer. I don’t see the need. I once would’ve loved the roar of the subway through my bedroom, I think — the impersonal intrusion of an enormous community into daily life, gently reminding you it’s there, waiting for you.

I think now I’d rather keep things on my own terms. That’s just me. If you’re still the sort who wants that, be my guest. I sort of envy you. In its own way, it’s quite an appealing romance.

• filed under
• Life

Oops.

I kinda forgot to post for a couple weeks. Been very busy. (I have this twitter thing now, that I’ve been posting to a lot. It’s at twitter.com/futuraprime.)

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately on various projects (plus a few I can’t link yet)—often they’re big projects and they take a lot of time to build and put together.

These projects often seem really daunting. Things—especially things you’ve never done before—can seem quite intimidating. I’ve found myself putting things off and dealing with smaller projects first, because that big scary project, off on the horizon, is too big, too difficult to tackle now, and I could do it next week instead.

You know what? Once I actually sit down and start designing and coding, it always turns out to be a lot less challenging than I expected. They’re much more complicated in my head than they really turn out to be on the screen.

I think this is in part because when everything is still in my head I have to wrap my mind around the whole project; it’s hard for me to break it into pieces and see each little bit of the project as an individual task to be done. Once I’ve actually started working on it, though, it becomes much easier to break things up—I have to, there’s no way to work on the project as a whole, all at once. And once I can see all the little things that will make up the big project, it’s much easier to see how it’s doable.

I guess the moral of the story is I should quit putting stuff off. Things are a lot easier when you try to do them.

• filed under
• Life
• Politics

Yeah, there were sort of a lot of people.


(from the NY Times)

A lot of people.

You can see me in that shot! I’m just past the World War II memorial, sharing a pixel with approximately two thousand others.

• filed under
• Graphic Design
• Web Design
• Life

So, since I’ve come back from Christmas (and for a reasonable bit before that), I’ve done almost nothing with my free time save study web design.

It’s been fantastic.

I’ve gotten a lot better at it. The (many, many) mistakes I made designing this thing, and a number of the things I built at work, I’ve learned to work around. I’ve gained a lot of skills. I’ve looked at a lot of designs. I’ve tossed out several and started from scratch a lot.

This is a dangerous thing.

For one thing, designing for yourself is really hard. You can tweak anything, and so you do. Learning when to stop and be satisfied is very, very hard. (It’s seeping into my time at work, too, where I’m beginning to get impatient knowing I can do things better than I could last month, and wishing I could fix them.)

For another, it makes me less tolerant of the failings of others. I’ve already touched on my perfectionist tendencies a bit, but when I look at something that I can do well (like cooking pasta sauce), I get even more obnoxious about my standards than might otherwise be the case (which is really saying something). Bad design always drove me nuts, but now even mediocre design gets me a bit steamed.

Ah well, I’ll get over it. For now, though, I’m glad I’ve gotten better.