Saying what’s on your mind isn’t always cool. It can often times be counterproductive or worse yet, harmful. Knowing when to not say what’s on your mind is important as a communicator. That way when you speak, it actually means something.
Buzzkill Feedback
When the work is done on a certain level — thoughtful, well-intentioned, focused on the goal — then the expectation should be the feedback is also handled in an equally productive way. A collaborative design process is a give and take, where both sides work the back and forth from positions of good faith and well intentioned motives.
This isn’t U.S. politics after all.
The most important software in my career since Adobe Illustrator
When I figured out how to use Illustrator, all those years ago, it was a game changer. As in, now I felt I could finally play this graphic designer game and learn how to play it well. It was like my arms reached into the screen and became one with what I was doing to those pixels. Mind, hand, mouse, creation!
It’s been a long, long time since that feeling of excitement. It’s not that I’ve been let down by Illustrator in the years since, it’s just become common. And I tried to do everything I could in it; logos, posters, share graphics, infographics, websites… All of it!
But now, I have that feeling again.
Figma has delivered. It’s just so light and airy. Again, I feel I’m reaching into the screen, taking ideas from my head and manifesting them into pixels. It moves at the speed of thought. It jumps with me. It opens quick, it loads quick, it keeps pace. Click-click-click-GO!
And I can invite you to join in the speed of light. Collaboration in real time. Enough passing files around just waiting for something to get corrupted. Enough!
It’s just a design program. Yet another tool. More software. But my oh my does it hit. With Figma, I can feel not only the design but the possibility without the program itself getting in my way.
And for that, I say thank you.
How To: Select the Hat
When you wear a lot of hats, it can sometimes be quite challenging to pick the right hat for the current job. Often like stumbling around in the dark, looking for the light switch. But it can be done. There are times it happens automatically, like a reflex due to years of experience. Others, it must be landed on, after pinging around from hat to hat, nothing fitting quite right.
The most important thing to know: understand there are hats and that different hats do different things.
Otherwise the light switch may never be found, and the stumbling will just go on and on and on.
Nobody else knows either
And that’s that. Proceed cautiously, yet forcefully. Ask questions, state answers. Get it done. Keep going.
How To: Keep things from taking longer than they should
How is it that something seemingly so simple can be made increasingly complicated to the point that it takes way longer than it should?
Is it the excessive use of language that does it? Maybe the “standard processes” that are supposedly what we all need to go through? Preferences for complication and dragging things out? A combination of those?
I don’t know. Dragging things out is not how I prefer to do things. I prefer things to take the appropriate amount of time. How is that done?
By keeping it simple, fighting the urge to involve people who don’t need to be involved, editing out unneeded words, and then, finally, understanding at a deep level that the thing that needs to be done is standing in the way of all the other things that need to be done next.
Get this done, then get all the other things done.
Done and done and done.
Clean, Organized
One very important lesson I got from my dad was to always clean your tools. In his shop where he kept his big rig, greasy and grimy as it was, no matter what the task was for the day, at the end of it, always clean the tools and put them away where they belong, neat and organized.
A huge contrast to the wildly messy rooms of my childhood friends who would go on to drive wildly messy cars, which felt oftentimes like you were just riding around in trash.
As a designer with lots happening at any given time, being clean and organized is how I get shit done.
