Mercury State

I am killing my iPhone wallpaper project; and I have posted all of my in-progress designs to Flickr. I leave this project with 51 design completed… all with a decent amount of hits. While it would have been nice to complete this project, I now have some bigger fish to fry. There are quite a few new projects flowing into my life and my attention is much better spent there. I will be placing a lot more projects on the chopping board in the near future.

Projects are good when they are pushing you forward, not when they are holding you back. I hope to cut all the things that hold me back… and soon.

Given the volume of emails and blog posts, I could argue that I am already a writer… even if a poor one. Somewhere deep down inside, I have always want to be an author… to write a few books. However, the furthest that I ever gotten is an outline and some mild research. I think the time has come for me to apply some real effort and go for the next level. It would be supremely awesome to head into being an author with a real printed book; but I need to be a bit more realistic, so I am aiming at authoring an ebook. I have a few topics in mind… so nothing to announce other that the fact that I have decided to write something a bit bigger… and hopefully better.

Most people are consumers… at least in America, it’s what makes this country tick. Consumption is the American dream. Buy more, watch more, have more.

There is an increasingly smaller group of people that produce. This tiny group of people is what feeds the rest of the population. It’s like a food chain.

The producers hate the consumers, but need them in order to continue producing — whether it be funds or an audience. The hungry consumers would starve without the trends started and goods made… and the circle of life is completed… and life goes on.

People also weave in and out of each group like phases of the moon. At some point, the producer becomes a consumer… even if for a short while. And consumers often create, even if just once for a select fad.

I’ve been watching people, and have yet to be able to identify when a person bonds to one camp over the other. But there’s a point at which it happens… and for the producers it’s typically a magical moment where life changes forever. Satisfaction disappears and money fails to fill any void; action brings a joy that stuff can’t touch.

If you’re creating things while other people are playing games or watching the tube, you’re a producer.

I love stereotypes. They save time, money and effort. They make it easier to reach a decision… and quite frankly, I don’t know that marketing or advertising would thrive without them.

Creatives… the people that are not so good at getting things done. They are great with the ideas, but not so hot on the execution. A creative will nudge a box left and then right for hours if left alone… and meanwhile the client is wondering where their website is. The pursuit of perfection is the paralysis of many projects.

Programmers often suffer from the same disease of perfectionism. I seen many projects rewritten that just needed a band-aid. Websites have been built to handle millions of visits… but only need to handle hundreds. Projects caught chasing a need that isn’t there.

So what happens when people that are prone to be unproductive, or at least less productive, really want to be productive… super productive. For example, let’s say they want to accomplish most of their big ideas… not all, not some… most. With this goal, they need to be productive; there is almost no choice.

I can often be found saying things like “bad marketing is better than no marketing” and “any website is better than no website”. The statements are arguably true… and most the time I’m talking to myself.  As a designer, I am always pushing for content first; and as a developer, I am always pushing for the low-tech solution. Why? It’s too easy to get caught up in “what shade of green”… even when deadlines are short and businesses are going under.

Having one foot in each camp, I’ve had to set rules for myself… and there are a lot. One rule that I follow religiously is making sure that most my draft/first-passes are complete enough that they can be used. I make things that their only purpose is to be used… ugly or simple… it must be useful. I work like mad to make sure that all the pieces are in place, and that I could print or post at any moment; and from that point, I rapidly iterate until I have something that’s less ugly and a lot more functional.

I really, really push myself not to nudge boxes back and forth and back again; and a try desperately not to throw out a page of code and start over… and i do this hourly. It’s no wonder that I am slightly mad.

It does seems that creativity and productivity are rarely paired together in the same person… and which ever one you have, you spend your life wanting the other. Not all stereotypes are true, but there are things to be learned from them.

Weekends and tim-off pose an interesting problem for me. This time should be used to rest, relax and do things that one enjoys. My list of things I want to do is a long one.

If I just limited my list to relaxing with a book, I’d have a massive stack. Sadly, I buy books at a rate of two to one (unread to read)… so I have no hope of catching up. I love to read and perhaps I love it too much.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my hobbies and work are very closely related, sometimes to the point of blurring the line between. I’m a designer, which is fun. I’m a developer, which provides a challenge. I’m a business owner, which floods my mind with ideas. With all of this, I’m never without a fresh hobby to enjoy.

So how do I fill my time? I bounce around more than I should, but it’s all for fun… so no harm, right? I, certainly, hope not.

From listening to my friends and family, there are four kinds of people when it comes to learning: those that just don’t learn anything new, those that have to take a class, those that learn from books, and those that learn by trial and error.

My people are the ones that buy books and do a lot of reading. I’ve always felt that college classes are little more than a book club where we all read together… so why not save money and buy the book, read it at your own pace, and rock that new knowledge. I’m a bookhead, and I think it is the best way.

Those that don’t want to learn… yeah, I just don’t understand. I think this group feel secure, but are the first to suffer when change happens. One might think this group is just lazy, but I know some hardworking souls from this camp.

Those that have to go back go school for everything, I also don’t get. Unless it is a career path that requires a degree, you have just selected the slowest and most expensive way to learn. I typically flag this group as codependent.

Trial and error is for brave souls that have a lot of time. Some people through money at issues; this group tosses a high volume of time to accomplish anything. I have a lot of respect for this group and their lack of fear; I find they are the easiest to teach and are the most secure. It’s not a terribly efficient method, but it gets the job done.

In the past few days, I’ve fallen in love with a typeface named Diotima. It is an elegant typeface that has nit had the pleasure of being overused… like University Roman. I was a bit saddened when in noticed a lack of weights; however, further research showed that the typeface has been recently extended. It now includes light, bold and heavy… as well as a full international ligature set.

So what is missing? A sans-serif version.

Now that my mind is on fire with font making bliss, I am considering tackling this monster of a project. Diotima Sans seems like a wonderful idea that no one has pursued… and I might find out why quite quickly.

Been playing with jsPerf, which is a site for JavaScript performance testing. My quick and dirty testing says the following:

• Chrome is the fastest at rendering JavaScript by a landslide.
• Firefox 4 is much, much faster than Firefox 3.
• Safari and Chrome have a lot of the same test results, but Safari is much slower.
• IE is simply a joke. The results are so slow.
• Chrome is the clear winner with Firefox 4 running just behind.
• IE8 is dead last.

I did all of my testing on Windows 7. I don’t even have Opera installed, so it was not tested. I am seriously considering installing IE9 for more testing.

While drifting off to sleep, I find myself making making promises of change… all of which end in “tomorrow”. They are mostly promises to myself about doing this or that, or getting better at something or another, or my usual self-improvement madness. Enough, I am drifting off to sleep with little hope of accomplishing more that day, the distance of “tomorrow” bothers me. It is quite possible that my frequent failure to move on these promises is little more than the promises being lofty or not worth pursuing;. However, I have decided to make a bold attempt to remove the weakness of the phase “tomorrow”; I feel it give me an out and too much of a gap… or maybe just marks the commitment as worth less to start.

Regardless, I am aiming to move to change now, versus change tomorrow. If the promise is not worthy of adopting immediately, it is not worth considering for future adoption. With my eager nature to improve, what am I waiting for anyway? Six hours of sleep is hardly needed as a buffer to start anything… if nothing else, I gain six hours of success.

And the thing that started this…

My wife and I were recalling what we liked most about our recent trip to Italy; and, among my favorite things, was drinking espresso. Not just drinking it, but taking the few minutes out of my life to enjoy it. Watching people walk by, letting my mind wander, and letting go. It dawned on me that enjoying espresso was clearly not limited to sitting in the streets of Florence… but it was something that I could start doing in my daily life. I could stop kicking back coffee while I typed my life away at my inbox. I could step away from my computer… sit on my porch, sit at the park… the plaza… walk around town… do anything, except multi-task. The planet would not stop spinning, no one would die and I wouldn’t fall behind by taking a simple break… and enjoying an espresso. Given all that mad logic, I promised myself that tomorrow I would stop drinking coffee at my desk. Period.

Several days later, I am unhappy to report that this promise has not kept. This new habit died as soon as it was spoken. And while it could have been a million things, I blame “tomorrow” as a big enough gap to allow for… forgetfulness, a bad habit, being busy, whatever… to sneak back in. May tomorrow die and change start now.

I love perfection; however, I’m firm believer that having something completed is of far greater value. In my industry, a website, a font or a postcard that is hiding on a designer’s monitor is the same as nothing. Whatever the designer creates does not really exist until it is released into the wild.

I’ve noticed this theory to be proven true among my friends that claim to be photographers and writers. Owning a camera… even a really nice camera… doesn’t make a photographer; it makes a camera owner. I have many non-photographer friends that shoot a hundred-times more than photographer friends. Who’s the photographer?

The writers are the ones that frustrate me most. A writer that doesn’t write is just a person that talks a lot about ideas they have. While they might be mighty fine ideas, they’re not a book, novel or article until the fingers make it so.

That said… I like to produce… and I love it when I can produce with quality and perfection. However, I typically aim a lot lower. I aim at having a finished, functional deliverable that someone can use… and hopefully, they can use it to make money or share their ideas/concepts.

For example: when I write blog posts, I hit publish before I proof read. A collection of my typos published is far better than a pile of drafts that are never seen.

And from that deliverable, we have a starting point for aiming at perfection… or at least something better in the next round.