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- March 1, 2012
Designing a Big Picture
March 1, 2012Read moreAs Groundhog Day Resolutions is fast-approaching, I’ve been spending about an hour a day trying to crack a giant nut: how to represent what I’m doing in way that can be tracked in a satisfying way. I’d started to outline the mechanics for a game-like approach in Plotting for Motivation II, but as I reviewed it last night I wasn’t convinced this was the right approach.
This is the difficult part of design for me, when I don’t know what to do that will deliver a result. I’m used to thinking through problems to come up with a hypothetical solution, but in this case the solution isn’t clear or obvious.
The trick to get past this is to just do something anyway, and count on spending a bunch of time on it. I know from past experience that it takes me between 40 and 80 hours to create a polished prototype of a brand new idea. That time is spent trying a lot of things until you find a few pieces that seem to fit, and then those fragments crystalize into a whole organism. Sometimes that organism isn’t viable, but it’s a stepping stone to the next design.
So here’s my first stepping stone, only partially complete and not organized, but it started to give me an idea that the big picture is like a game board divided into realms and portals.
I think the big picture I need becomes a place that can accept attachment of ideas and activities. It’s the missing bedrock of my to-do list landscape. It reminds me a little bit of the visual model approach to business planning, but highly personalized to what I need to do. Perhaps it’s more of an operations map.
So, it’s slow going, but I’m posting this as a reminder to myself of how far I’m going to have to go, one idea at a time.
- February 29, 2012
A Logo for “Functional Stationery”
February 29, 2012Read more
I spent part of Tuesday doing some personal logo work for an upcoming business concept: a brand built around the idea of “functional stationery”. It seems like a more engaging way to describe what I do more tangibly, as people know what both words mean, and I think it leads to conversation that is more concrete than my past self-applied labels investigative designer, communications designer, and information graphics designer. Plus, it’s a lot easier to imagining buying stationery than, say, buying some “investigation time”; it fits with my desired move from services to product.
You can read more in yesterday’s Design Process Journal entry: Logo Design Day: Functional Stationery.
- February 29, 2012
Logo Design Day: Functional Stationery
February 29, 2012Read more
I spent part of the day doing some personal logo work, and though I didn’t get to a place where I can call it DONE, it was a surprisingly enlightening exercise. I don’t usually take on logo work for other people because I think they are such personal things, and my approach to this kind of design can be very drawn out, and therefore expensive in terms of my time. There are other people who are much better at it than I, anyway.
That said, I figured it might be interesting to share the process. Read onward! (more…)
- February 24, 2012
Fluency
February 24, 2012Read moreToday’s thought nugget comes from WIRED contributor Dave Mosher and his article Easily Pronounced Names May Make People More Likable. How much more likable? You’ll have to read the article, but what caught my eye was this line:
Fluency, the idea that the brain favors information that’s easy to use, dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that people most liked images of Chinese characters if they’d seen them many times before.
It seems obvious to me that the brain would favor easy-to-use information, but I didn’t know that there was a whole field of research around it. After a bit of digging I found a Wikipedia article on Processing Fluency. It’s an interesting bridge between marketing and science, and it looks like a fruitful area for further exploration. Noted to self!
- February 23, 2012
The Possible Productivity Perils of Living Single
February 23, 2012Read moreMy sister forwarded me this New York Times article: The Freedom, and Perils, of Living Alone. I’m guessing she found it amusing and relevant to me, and indeed I was struck by the eerie similarities between “secret single behavior” and my own daily patterns. For example:
- The “indulgent work style” of working 24/7, letting the entire house fall into domestic chaos. There’s no one there to see.
My weird sleep cycle, which starts by going to sleep later and later until the day cycles around. I’ve written about this before, alternatively fighting it and giving in, depending on the nature of paying work I have on deck.
My eating habits, which are irregularly based on whatever food whim has me in thrall at a given moment. One day, it’s exploring the mysteries of duck roasting so I can try making mashed potatoes with duck fat (allegedly amazing), while other days it’s testing the thermal conductivity of chicken to calculate the optimum cooking time and temperature.
The tendency to get “quirkier and quirkier”, as evidenced by my indulgence in making printable productivity forms to stand-in for actual bosses. Would anyone who had a real boss even think of such a thing? Perhaps they are not talking to their cat enough.
Apparently I’m not alone in experiencing these behaviors, as the NYT article cites numerous examples from a variety of long-time “soloists”. The interesting thing is that until now, I’ve subconsciously felt that these behaviors were unique personal problems; for the first time, it seems possible that there’s just no one around to help me establish patterns. And since most people, myself included, have assumed that well-defined habits of eating and sleeping are prevalent, therefore normal, and by extension desirable…well, I’d assumed that I was just constantly screwing up. It may just be that there’s no one around to help me set patterns. (more…)
