Viewing Category: Design
Last week I promised myself that I would get off my ass and get a version of the Emergent Task Planner ready to price out at a printer. I've actually ended up with a new design.
The Emergent Task Planner is, based on the number of links it seems to get, one of the more popular Printable CEO™ forms, so this seems like a good design to create a physical product from. The goal is to look into producing and selling nicely-printed ETP pads, to see if people find the cost and convenience worth paying for. Because this is a product test, I won't be making this specific version of the Emergent Task Planner available for PDF download right away; it's going to be tweaked for whatever press process I end up using anyway. Don't worry, though! There will always be versions available for download.
The purpose of this post is to get a bit of feedback from the public on the new design. I've already incorporated some feedback into this layout, but there are also a few new things that are worth going over. If you're not familiar with the Emergent Task Planner, the 2007 Updates post will give you some background.
NEW DIRECTIONS
For the past couple months I've been going to a coffee shop every day to do my daily planning. I brought a notebook with me to scribble in, and I found myself naturally working with the Emergent Task Planner layout.
Interestingly, I tended to draw the ETP in order of my thinking: first, I'd fill out the date, then I'd enter the list of things I needed to do. Finally, I'd draw a simple schedule on the right hand side. Notes I would scribble on whatever space was leftover. Because of this, I decided to swap the left and right sides; the major tasks + note area is now on the left.
I also got rid of the "hours" summary box because I needed the space lost from making room for three ring binder holes on the left-hand side of the paper. Personally, I never used it; it was a feature I introduced because one person requested it and I haven't heard back whether it was that useful or not.
Because this design will be printed on a real press, I am starting to introduce color sparingly into the design. Because I'm using small colored type, I have to be careful about the number of colors I use in the design so the screen frequency doesn't cause the letters to break up and look terrible. It's been over 10 years since I've had to have anything printed on anything, and we certainly didn't have the cool high-resolution digital presses that are available now, so I'm looking forward to finding out what's possible.
I've kept the idea of using 3 or 4 plates in the back of my mind, and they'll might be custom rather than process color. For example, I'd like to use a base gray plate instead of pure black; this will give me better solid grays. Then I might use a green plate and use tints for that. The question is really whether I should drop the blue plate, or change the orange time boxes for a variation of blue-green. Or, it may be that with a high-enough resolution, process color will be able to deliver the quality I want and will be cheaper. Sticking with one or two colors would be cheaper still, but that isn't very sexy.
ADDITION 5/13: The reason I'm thinking process color is because this opens up the use of more interesting imagery!
QUESTIONS FOR ETP USERS
It was suggested to me that I look into producing tear-off pads with the glue at the top for shipping reasons; you apparently can qualify for media-rate shipping that way. I haven't had much feedback at all from real users about the Emergent Task Planner, so this is your chance to let me know:
- If you're interested in some swanky pre-printed pads at all, and...
- How you archive your sheets (binders? envelopes?)
These sheets should work well in 3-ring binders and for those of you with Circa/Rollabind punches. I'm also open to suggestions for alternative form factors; I will get around to making an A4 version if I figure out European fulfillment.
Any feedback at all will be appreciated. Thanks!
NEXT UP...
Now that I have this design waiting in the wings, I have to turn my attention to this website to make it easier to navigate. The navigation here has been horrible for a long time, making it difficult for people to find things like the forms, what I do, and interesting content. So I have to do something about this quickly.
I also need to make a second writeup for the Emergent Task Planner, and provide some more succinct instructions for use. This would be a nice pamphlet to include in a shipping product; black and white will work fine for that to keep costs low.
MORE
As I was working on my text-file based tracking workspace, I remembered a kind of calendar I used to make back in the old days.
I think I first made this calendar sometime in the mid 90s when I was working for Qualia, Inc., a startup game company that I was part of as a game designer and project manager. I was so green, I didn't know what project management actually meant, and I still placed more value on what I could make with my hands rather than how I could lead a team. But we were young and our bellies were filled with fire; the team members have since gone on to have rich and rewarding careers.
Anyway, at the time I needed some way of showing elapsed calendar time on a monospaced display, as our project intraweb used PRE tags to avoid doing a lot of HTML markup while updating our project files. I haven't thought of this calendar style in quite some time, but it's great for text files if you need to provide monthly context.
Fitting Days to 80 Columns
My goal was to fit as many days as possible onto a typical 80- to 132-column text display. 80 columns is the magic number that's burned into my head from the 80s, and most printers of the time assumed this when printing (all printers had the ability to print text straight as a teletype back then...I'm not sure if this capability has gone away). These days you can print graphically at very high resolutions or make your web page really wide, but back then a typical monitor was probably 640x480 to 800x600, with 1024x768 starting to really push the limits of what CRTs were capable of displaying with reasonable quality. Anyway, an 800x600 screen gives you about 100-132 characters to work with, assuming a character matrix of about 6x8 pixels and margins for the various application windows. My point is that resolution was precious.
If you want to make a compact horizontal strip calendar in text, the first instinct is to do this:
APRIL 2007
.. Mo Tu We Th Fr .. .. Mo Tu We Th Fr .. .. Mo Tu We Th Fr .. ..
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Unfortunately, each day takes up three horizontal characters. If you compress the numbers vertically, you can get one day per column:
APRIL 2007
.mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwr
0000000001111111111222222222230000000001111111111222222222233
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901
This actually fits TWO months in less space than the first example. Admittedly it's hard to read, but this is where the application of toning and grouping can make a big difference.
Here's an example:
In order from top to bottom:
Text Editor: I'm using a font I like called Vera Sans Mono, which is open source licensed by Bitstream to The Gnome Foundation. In short, it's a free download, and it's one of the nicest monospaced fonts I've come across. It's much nicer than Courier, which is the default monospaced font for a lot of Windows text editors.
While Vera Sans Mono helps legibility---I should note that the use of periods to replace Saturday and Sunday also helps visually group the week---, there's little control over spacing between characters and between lines. What we want to see is the days reading as single units grouped into a strip that represents the month.
Microsoft Word: While Word gives us the ability to color-code text, that's about it. We can't control the interletter spacing or shrink the linespacing between the two rows of numbers; that would have allowed us to make the numbers read a little better. This example is also using the Courier New font, and you can see while it's legible, it has a kind of looseness compared to Vera Sans Mono that makes the entire strip into a gray blob. Using a lighter gray for the weekend days helps bring back the sense of grouping, but it's not great. The biggest crime is that the vertical space between the rows of numbers is greater than the horizontal space between them, which breaks the grouping that we're trying to establish. Bah.
Adobe Illustrator CS2: When it comes to adjusting type, it comes back to Illustrator. We can not only add more space between all the letters, but we can adjust the line spacing so that implied grouping through adjacency is working. I could have increased the inter-letter spacing more to make it more obvious, of course, but this felt about right. You could import the EPS into a Word document if this is the way you want to go, though it sort of defeats the purpose of having a nice way to insert compact calendars in-line with your text document. On the other hand, Word is a terrible program for maintaining formatting, so using EPS might be the way to go.
Of course, once you're making EPS files, you have the option of varying the size of the text a lot more, or flipping the numbers on their side, multiple fonts, and using background colors to push the legibility of the design even more, so the point of the exercise becomes rather academic.
Takeaways
So what's the point of all this? Sometimes it's handy to be able to quickly make a calendar in your text document for reference. They're easy to make because you can copy/paste the ..mtwrf characters and paste it over and over again. Same with the 1234567890 characters. The tricky part is knowing the starting and ending days of the month, but it's easy once you have any given date. Use the knuckle mneumonic to know how many days there are in a month. You can quickly generate the calendar in whatever application you happen to be using.
If you're interested in the source files, there's a link below. They're nothing fancy, but you can get a feel for how you might create your own text strip calendar in your own documents.
» Download TextCalendar.zip -- contains TXT, Microsoft Word, and EPS versions of this file. The EPS may require you to download the vera sans mono font.
I like to know where things are, so I again made some maps for this year using a couple different styles.
The first shows the street numbers of venues around the Austin Convention Center. If you know the address of the party you're going to, you can just look for the number on the map.
The second is a simplification that uses the streets as a coordinate grid. The way you would use this is to look up the name of the event, find the street, and trace along it until you find the address of your destination. This part of Austin is fairly regularly gridlike, so it works.
Each block isn't that big, so you can also estimate time to get from one block to another (it's probably something like 2 or 3 minutes). I figure if you're walking, you just want to know how to get in the approximate vicinity of your destination, then you can start looking for other cues like street numbers. By making the order of street names obvious in the top and left columns, it's also useful for figuring out where you are. It might be useful for my Friday morning exploration walk, when I'm planning on looking for interesting stores.
Here's the excel spreadsheet if anyone wants to customize it.
Cowboy Hats!
A reader also wrote me about a place called Shepler's which will fit you for a "real hat". Leaving a note for myself: 6001 Middle Fiskville Rd, Austin, TX 78752 (At the corner of I-35 & Hwy 290E) (512) 454-3000. A friend of mine has been trying to get me into "Cowboy Action Shooting", and you need an entire pseudonym---maybe "Deadeye Hong", in honor of James Hong?---along with a kit of shootin' irons and leatherwear.
Today is the last Friday of the two-week experiment, and it's been very illuminating. I think this is probably the first time I've actually documented a habit-building routine, and that may have had something to do with it being so interesting. It's also very cool to read about other people's experiences with the process via comments...thanks everyone for participating! I've allocated 30 minutes to write up my thoughts on the past two weeks, and by the end of this I'll probably know if I'll continue doing this or not.
An interesting insight is that creating a routine is not unlike graphic design.
It's Actually about Routine
Waking up early was a focal point for...actually, I wasn't sure. It just seemed to me that if I woke up early, increased productivity might follow. I had the vague idea that if I had a morning routine, that would help me get my body and mind working enough so that I would stay awake. Plus, I figured morning exercise would be good for me.
What I actually discovered was that forming a routine is its own reward. An analogy that comes to mind is graphic design. Think of your day as a big blank sheet of paper to be filled with an "interesting" design. If you're like me, big blank pieces of paper are terrifying unless you know what pieces of information need to go on it, then you can prioritize and arrange them and make things look nice. That's essentially what graphic design is to most people, even many designers. There's a little more lurking beneath the surface.
To make an effective piece of design, you need to understand who's going to be using it (psychology), and understand how people are hardwired to perceive certain visual arrangements. There are certain things that we can not help but notice, and I would divide them into to broad camps: things that "stand out" from the rest, and things that look like groups, figures, and lines. The things that stand out---say, saber-tooth tigers rushing out from behind the sawgrass---tend to grab our attention until the phenomenon no longer "stands out" in our minds (we get used to it, or we identify it as a non-threat). The things that look like groups, figures, and lines...our eyes tend to follow them automatically without thought. A good designer knows how to combine the attention-grabbing to create a starting point for moving your eye all around the page, in the order that she wants to appeal to the particular psychology of the anticipated audience. You won't even know it's happening...you're just experiencing the design and digesting information. It's like telling a good joke: by controlling the sequencing and timing of information, you can create a bigger and more entertaining impact.
The reason I bring up design is that I'm seeing daily habits in the same light, and I think that time is analagous to the blank page. Without habits or routines, what I end up doing is filling up the page with a lot of things that happen to come to mind. Because I'm not thinking ahead, I end up filling the page with a ton of little things that just happen. This is much like just pouring a ton of text and images onto a paper. The result is unstructured and difficult to read. The only thing that's apparent is that a lot of things happened, but the utility of the result, as well as the legibility, has suffered. This is very similar, in feeling, to having what seems like an unproductive day.
In graphic design, one of the best things you can do is prioritize what you really need to say in the fewest number of elements, and then lay down some strong structural elements. A strong left-aligned edge of text, for example, creates order and a natural direction for the eye to follow. If you've placed a striking image somewhere that stands out, drawing some lines (or implying them through grouped elements) out to the right creates a natural place for your eyes to go. By introducing clear linear elements in the layout, you establish conventions for your viewer to follow, and it is from those linear elements that you can attach other pieces of information. The creation of these lines are the supporting pillars or framework of your layout; this part of what composition is all about. If you create a good framework with clear lines for your eye to follow, you have something that is capable of supporting your content. The result: clear and effective information transmission. This is just what we want in a productive day of our own.
I would go so far to say that events are the equivalent of "things that stand out", and routine is the equivalent of "lines, shapes, figures". In design, you generally pick the places you want to emphasize first (I think of these as "anchors") and string the structure through linework and grouped elements from them. For daily planning, planned events like waking up, going to the coffee shop by 8AM, and lunch become convenient anchors, and the little routines that support them naturally help structure the time around them. At least, that's my theory. I have a few more weeks to go before I can say for sure.
Things I Liked about the Routine
The morning exercise. I've varied this in length, but it's based around something my sister gave me to follow and gets my entire body moving with a low-stress routine. I've started to even look forward to it, doing large body movements. There's something really nice about it...it helps me connect my mind with my body, or something. Over the weekend I didn't do it, I felt groggy and stuck in my head. So now I'm more inclined to do something...I had lapsed on this.
The coffee shop. This may be actually the most important part of the routine, though I didn't anticipate it: talking to people early in the morning. Just 5-10 minutes of idle conversation help keep me in-touch with the world, and it's nice to see people you recognize every day. Today was the first day that the morning shift manager, Pat, acknowledged me for the first time, so now I feel like I'm a "regular". That feels surprisingly cool.
The morning planning. The coffee shop is a good place for it, away from email and computers, my mind fresh and ready to face the day. There's nothing else to do but think and focus, and it's a little like meditating. Right now I have to admit I am feeling like falling asleep (I probably shouldn't have had that muffin sandwich). Having the notebook is helpful in providing continuity too for the week. I only use it for planning the day, and it's giving me some ideas about a new version of the ETP that is in Rollabind format. I'll have to look into that.
What's Been Hard
Getting out of bed. Waking up at 6:30 seems to be happening by itself, but getting out of bed takes some doing. It varies between 15 and 30 minutes of lolling around. Lately the cats have taken to pushing the door open and arraying themselves on the bed, and their efficiency in snoozing has a splash effect on me. I think I probably need to get to sleep before 11AM at the latest...I am feeling undercharged every morning. Napping has helped in the afternoon, but this morning I'm feeling distinctly fatigued. The question is: power through it and have an unproductive morning, or take a nap and get enough of a charge to have a more productive late morning? Tough call.
Maintaining wakefulness after 1PM. I get sleepy around 1PM, and by 4PM I am getting pretty fried. If I take a 30 minute nap, that seems to help. I'm amazed that people do this EVERY DAY and raise children at the same time. Maybe another couple weeks of the routine will help...I gotta toughen up!
Staying focused. The luxury of waking up early is having a lot of time to get things done. This hasn't exactly lead to goofing off, but I am noticing that my decision to write this blog post in the morning is actually sapping my focus energy for the rest of the production work I need to do today. I should probably write later in the day, or in the evening, and not allow distractions to occur between the Morning Planning of First Designated Task and the Actual Performance of the Designated First Task. I've broken the continuity between planning and execution...it's surprising how fragile it is. It is easily re-established with a minute of refocusing, but if I can avoid having to refocus I could have been done by now.
Miscellaneous Things
Snoozing. I love snoozing, especially when it's cold out. I probably wouldn't miss it as much if I actually went to sleep early enough.
I miss my night owl friends. It occured to me this morning that I haven't talked to several people via IM in some time, because I'm usually away from my computer by 5PM or so.
Dramatic pacing. In the past, my sense of productivity tended to come from spending 12-16 hour shifts crunching on one thing, sleeping a lot, then getting up and doing it again. It also came from impulsive acts of creativity. By establishing a routine, I'm learning to pace myself, but I have to reassess the way I qualitatively gauge my productivity. Looking back at the week, I did do work every day, kept in touch will various prospects, and got a few chores done.
I am probably still wasting 10-15% of my time doing things I don't have to do (blogging doesn't count as a time waster for me), but even if I could achieve higher efficiency I am coming to believe that there is a finite amount of work I can do in a day. When I worked without a routine, it felt like I could do a LOT in a day, but this impression came from working 20 hours in a row. That is not sustainable. To maintain a sustainable pacing, I have to settle for getting less done in a single 24-hour period, but trust that overall productivity will improve due to the establishment of good process. The natural energy patterns of my day may also dictate doing things like household chores after work, because I'm mentally tired after 5PM...this would be quite a bonus.
Blogging and spontaneous creativity. With the unstructured day, I would sometimes drop things and make up a new form, or write a new widget, or research some topic of interest that came to me and then write something up and stick it on the blog. This post is an example of that old spontaneous behavior. You may have noticed that I haven't been posting anything like this in the past two weeks, and it's probably caused a few people to drop their subs. What I need to figure out is how to bring back these projects as a regular activity, instead of something that's superceded by paying work.
I think that this routine I've established is a separate issue from scheduling project work; having a routine starts to make accurate scheduling possible, but it does not provide a methodology for creating a system that encourages both business and creative development.
What's Next?
My schedule will be hugely disrupted come next week, when I end up in Austin, TX for South by SouthWest Interactive. I have a lot of prep to do, and I may have to spend some late nights getting all my gear together. I can't believe it's coming up so soon. I'm going to try to obey the daily wakeup routine for the next four days, and maybe through SXSW. We'll see what happens.
Earlier this week I'd been working to create a nice typographic template using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This is not my favorite kind of work, but having identified my methodical process challenge a few days ago, I pushed myself through it without the usual two scoops of drama. I ended up with something I felt good about, a solid bit of code that I can reuse in the future.
For technical people, the production of useful code is not a big deal, but it was notable to me because of my shift in perspective. The way I had approached the challenge was like that of an industrial researcher, which isn't surprising given I'd just seen a documentary about the life of African-American chemist Dr. Percy Julian. I have a natural curiosity about the way things work together to achieve some end, but I find the implementation to be more of a chore when I'm working by myself. Having seen that documentary, however, I could recast the drudgery of working around Internet Explorer's CSS bugs as part of a greater process. I was, in fact, applying the scientific method to my creative work, which is a methodology that I am naturally drawn to.
Perhaps the missing creative methodology I lamented over in my earlier post has been with me all along; do I just need to broaden my views on creativity and science?
A Detour through Design
The work-for-hire I've done has historically been in the areas of interactive media and graphic design, and this lumps me into the creative class. As much as I love looking at high-end creative work, I've personally been uncomfortable labeling myself as a "Designer" or a "Creative". Not that this hasn't kept me from wanting to reach the lofty heights scaled by Capital D Designers like Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, and Craig Frazier. And then there are the scores of incredible visual artists that I come across every day who somehow produce works of transcendant quality. It seems that everyone I meet in the field has no problem getting on with the act of creation. I tend to rev high in the ideation phase, which precurses the practical business of creation. This has always bothered me.
When it's time to sit down and crank something out, I sit staring at the screen thinking of all the things I know I need to do. Then I get sleepy. Or I am readily distracted by some other thought. When I catch myself doing this, I usually use the trick of writing a paragraph about what I need to do. This linearizes the processes of my mind (writing demands this, if you are writing to make sense), and this is a form of focus. When I have to write about what I'm doing, I find that it's a lot easier to get in the spirit of things.
This is not what terrifies me, though. What scares me is being creative. That is, creating something that is deftly original, insightful, witty, entertaining in the first few hundred milliseconds of exposure to an audience. That's what I'm aiming for when I am faced with a design task, and up to now I wasn't sure how to do it on purpose.
A major insight came to me a few months ago, when I realized that a lof people are entirely happy with design that does the job. For example, a web page that's easy to read is delightful, and the ability to line things up to make sense is very much in demand. This insight was the genesis of my current business card design, which graphically illustrates the stages of information graphic design as I perceive it. It stops short, though, of promising that scary high-end creative stuff.
A Collision of Processes
Why stop with information graphics? Can one scientifically approach creativity? I have been approaching it from this angle all along, because it's the most accessible route for me. However, I've always thought it was the wrong way, as most of the highly-talented and creative people I know don't like thinking about methodology and science. They just do. They feel the urge to create and **express*. Me, I'm always thinking of the ramifications before the paint even comes out of the tube, and then I have to ask what the paint is made of.
I have been looking for a unifying model of my various interests for a long time, and the idea of being a creative that practices the scientific method to achieve his ends is very appealing. Now that I think about it, artists and designers already do the same thing**, learning, pioneering and refining techniques through a critical iterative process. What's different are the **props** and **metrics** used to create and evaluate the results of the process respectively. Designers use graphics, engineers use technology, writers use words, and apply different criteria for judgement. The ways of discovering new forms, however, are fundamental processes. While the scientific method is generally understood to use **rational** metrics, the creative process emphasizes **emotional** impact. It's the old quantative versus qualitative argument again.
The Scientific Creative Method, then, is the application of both rational and emotional criteria in the pursuit of research and development. This is a significant realization for me because it tells me that creativity "comes from out of thin air". It might come in a flash of inspiration (an emotionally valid source), or it might come from the "lab work" of pushing around pixels on the screen until something happens.
The Process as Responsible Entity
An artist friend of mine told me that when he started drawing, he had no idea what was going to come out. That he's comfortable with this knowledge in a production design environment is really fascinating...he trusts the process. I can do the same thing. Before I used to worry if I was really creative or not, and this made me worry that I was misrepresenting my abilities.
No more. I have a process that works for me, and I need to trust it. The ability to be professionally creative isn't the result of "being born that way", it's the result of having a process in the first place. And---this is very strange---it's process that is responsible for creating results, not me! I am responsible for channeled the process through myself, otherwise nothing will happen. It's also my job to be the "best" person I can be, and it is this that shapes process in sublime and wonderful ways.
Conclusion
This is a very round-about way of approaching the productivity and creativity, but I hope that some of you out there get what I'm talking about. I am also, in a way, addressing certain forms of procrastination-perfectionism. I am often demoralized by the sheer number of details I can envision and plan for (this is when I'm working solo). What I can tell myself now is that the endless task list is not just a lot of drudgework: it is fundamental process, and that to be a good practitioner of the scientific creative method, it is where I must go. It is no longer a question of laziness, but one of principle and character. I feel I am drawing on the spirit of the great applied researchers past and present, driven by curiosity and eager to apply my newfound understanding. It is, for me, the right thing to do.
The idea that I am pursuing a "science of applied creativity" gives me a framework around which I can agregate my interests in media, technology, psychology, and design. My desires, however, are still the same: to be around positive-minded, conscientious, kind, and empowered people. The way to achieve that, I believe, will be by creating the reality in which we can thrive. Until now, I didn't see how that might be achieved without getting better at being creative, but now I see a glimmer of light.
