Pixel Paper Yarn

“ There is less experimentation than there used to be. In part it’s because designers who used to do a lot of experimenting on their personal sites are busier these days – busy with client work, or creating products, or branching into areas such as publishing and conferences. Ten or 15 years ago, maybe you were single, with not much work and no family. You had loads of time to play with the design of your website. Now, not so much. As for younger designers, there are so many brilliant ones now. I’m constantly impressed and inspired by them. But many younger designers are more into social media than blogging – “social media killed the blog star,” as my friend Jeff Croft put it in a comment on my site. So they’re less likely to have a personal site that needs redesigning and experimentation. Also, it’s a different time. Companies such as Twitter and Google and Facebook are snatching up young web designers. They don’t have time to experiment on their blogs – they’re too busy helping Mark Zuckerberg get rich. Then, too, a lot of younger web folks are more into UX than designy-design, or more into coding than design, and so if they have a blog they may be satisfied using a default Tumblr or WordPress template. Finally, the web is no longer ‘underground’, no longer ‘the wild west’. It isn’t the province of a few crazy rebels. It’s filled with professionally professional professionals who follow widely endorsed best practices and standards. That’s very good in a lot of ways, but it tends to create an environment where there is less experimentation. ”

“ Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. ”

“ And there it was. My secret serum for education was finally present. Faced with the fact that I had promised to deliver a product, I realized that I had given myself no out, no room for slacking off or getting distracted. The situation I had created was strictly sink or swim. I was staking my reputation with some important people on this project so I took the only available course of action that I could see: I worked my butt off. ”

“ It’s been my experience that designing within the browser can unintentionally influence design, making it too ‘safe’. Letting design occur outside of the boundaries and constraints of the browser environment allows designers to repeatedly push and challenge the implementation process, which in turn ends up sparking evolution in the browser environment that would potentially be missed otherwise. ”