If I describe the scene from the Goonies where they’re in the well-cavern, and Samwise Gamgee says, “The next time you see sky, it’ll be over another town…down here it’s our time..”, and my description is so good that it paints the picture perfectly in your mind, the drips of the water, the golden light of the cavern. Will the fed shut your brain down?

I’m just making a note of SOPA here so that when I look back at this in the years to come, I can just laugh at how silly we were back then.

Truffle Shuffle

Designing websites is more like the culinary arts than the visual.

Thinking about your designs for the web as these permanent artifacts that will be discovered and referenced in the future is probably not a realistic venture.

I think it better to think of our designs as a piece that we toil over then hand to the user to experience and enjoy. And when they’re done, figuratively, that’s it. As the designer you then create that dish again for a new client or product.

Printed works on archival paper, crafted prints and paintings in frames displayed on walls. These are how we experience tactile visuals. Even the discipline of print design has a reprise where the design can be experienced outside it’s given context. For example, hanging adverts from the 50s on your wall as art. This will never happen with design on the web. We have yet to look back at web designs from yesteryear and appreciated them in that same vain. I don’t think this will ever happen.

Ol’ Thomas Edison persevered through over 3000 iterations of a light bulb filament. This is what we teach kids. This is what we think to ourselves when the going gets tough. Just stick it out a little longer. Like the motivational poster of the cat hanging from a tree: “Just Hang In There”.

Persevering with a terrible idea is stupid. If you’re persevering purely because you have persevered for a long period of time, you’re stupid. I think we latch on to an idea and just keep pushing at it. Then after a year of labor, you’re still pushing. And you think, “I’ve already spent a year on this, If I give up now than that entire year is wasted”. Your motivation has just shifted from the idea to your wasted time. You’re now working on debt, which has zero connection to the idea. It’s dumb.

Now you’re chipping away at this massive amount of time debt that you’ve falsely created for yourself. You start to fall into a hole of indecision, every little decision now has false power to make or break your idea, you think every detail has the potential to relieve your debt. This is when you really start to suck. You start to fill this void of indecision by working nights, weekends, you start to ignore your your friend’s calls, your wife leaves you, you think about suicide, you’re eating out of dumpsters, you wake up with you clothes on, you find cereal boxes in the fridge. You now suck at life.

But in your mind you have a fantastical sense of accomplishment, you feel the project moving forward, I mean, you did just spend all that time working nights and weekends, things have to be going well.

This scenario is true with both money or time. In either case, we feel the need to persevere to substantiate the investment, which has nothing to do with the actual success of the idea.

Yes, Thomas Edison iterated thousands of times. But he felt strongly that the lightbulb, once perfected, would lead to the mass adoption of electricity in homes and businesses. Regardless of the details, he was not working on debt, his idea was amazing. The low barrier of entry in this flat world makes it too easy for the aforementioned scenario to manifest. Keep your wits about you and don’t work on dumb ideas for too long.

…engineers, designers, scientists, we’re all trying to make technology disappear. That’s the truth, just like we go through the toll booths on freeways using E-ZPass, we still have that box but we don’t think about it. That is how life should be, so we can focus on real human habits and human needs, as opposed to focusing on the technology.

This time last year I was buying a plane ticket to Buenos Aires while delirious with meningitis. I bought the ticket and woke up the next day in a nightmarish pain wondering if I had dreamed it. Just thinking about that trip this month, perhaps it’s time for another excursion to South America. 

The picture above was taken by Keith Conway, at one of our many cafe work sessions.