You can visit Colleen’s site to see my wallpaper design, and if you’re REALLY curious about how it came about, you can visit my newly-opened DesignThink process blog. Enjoy!

Head over to IndieGoGo to donate something to the girls. There are a lot of great rewards available.

I’m on a home cooking streak, so on Thursday I thought I’d try making tacos. I bought everything I needed for about $7.00, enough raw ingredients for 2 or 3 meals, which seemed like a great deal to me! The only downside was the tendency for the tacos to explode upon contact with my mouth. Ingredients would fall out as I tried to angle for a good chomp, and the crisp taco shells have a tendency to shatter. Sweeping up the ruins of my first meal, I got to wondering if there was a better way.

Over the course of the next few meals, I worked out some guiding principles:

• Finely-shredded cheese will fall off the taco if you put it on top, so put it on the bottom of the stack.
• Meat over the cheese helps hold it in place. Meat next to cheese is generally a good thing, taste-wise.
• Sour cream works well as a binder. Putting it over the meat creates a sticky layer that holds onto shredded lettuce.
• Diced tomatoes are heavy and wet, and tend to clump, so they actually do stay put if you put them on the very top.

I still had issues with the cheese being difficult to handle on the initial loading of the shell, as bits of it would tend to get displaced by the meat as I ladled it on. Since I had to warm the shells anyway in the oven, I tried melting the cheese at the same time, nacho-style. I figured the melted cheese might also help the taco shell from getting too soggy from the meat sauce; this is similar to the way mayonnaise can keep a hamburger bun from getting soaked with juice. The unexpected bonus is that the melted cheese forms a laminating layer over the brittle corn shell, increasing its shatter resistance by an order of magnitude. The result: a hard taco that not only holds onto its ingredients, but also is easier to eat because it doesn’t explode in your hand.

Since I am a huge nerd, I decided to commemorate my adventure with an infographic. You can also grab the PDF version of the taco building graphic if you’re so inclined. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Added hot sauce injection points. See the comments for discussion :)

I’m having a pretty good day. I have my checklists from yesterday (which I’ll post soon) and this got me through the morning with less fuss than usual. So I’m feeling ready to take on the first order of business for the day: design a logo. Yeah!

Oh wait, I’m stuck. I feel the resistances pile on. I haven’t even grabbed a notebook or popped Freehand up on my screen, and I’m already feeling half-defeated.

In times like these, it’s useful to remember the process, and since I’m being mindful of writing things down this week I’m going to say there are four stages of logo design that I go through.

• Stage 1. I don’t know how it’s going to come out. It might suck.
• Stage 2. Ok, THIS doesn’t suck so much. It could be BETTER, though.
• Stage 3. Ok, that is getting somewhere. But it doesn’t really SING to me.
• Stage 4. That’s not bad. But it’s MISSING something.

This post got LONG, and there’s more examples I’d like to add, so I’ve moved it to my upcoming reference area if you’re curious: Four Stages of Logo Design is the only way you can currently see it.

I’ve been working on the smaller-sized versions of the Emergent Task Planner with 50-plus testers who have kindly volunteered their time. The upshot of this is that I’m looking at an awful lot of Helvetica Neue, the typeface that I use for most of my productivity forms. It’s a slightly more refined version of the old workhorse typeface Helvetica. Since I tend to like denser data layouts, it’s Helvetica Neue Condensed that gets put to work. However, I’ve always felt that there was something about Helvetica Neue that bugged me, so I’ve been open to finding alternatives.

Enter Proxima Nova, a typeface designed by freelance graphic designer Mark Simonson. I stumbled upon it a couple of days ago, and it instantly caught my eye. After sleeping on it, I dug out the business credit card and purchased the Proxima Nova Condensed font pack (with the @fontface license as well) through FontSpring. I’m mentally committed to making this my new go-to font for work and my own business identity. I perhaps should have researched it a little more thoroughly as far as typeface trends go, but I figure it’s GOT to be an improvement over Helvetica, so I bit the bullet and went for it.

So what did I actually get? Here’s a side-by-side comparison (click the image to see a clearer PNG file if this looks too blurry to you):

Warning: I am going to describe qualities of these typefaces that will be invisible to the casual observer. While I’m only an average typographer, I’m highly aware of the way visual elements make me feel; this is what I will attempt to convey.

Shape

On first glance, both typefaces are fairly similar. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that the letters of Helvetica Neue Condensed (right side) look more squished.

Looking a little further, I find small details in Helvetica Neue that just don’t sit well with me. While it is an attractive font overall, it feels just a hair “pretentious”. The capital letter ‘R’, for example, retains a vestige of pride in the way the end of the tail curls up. The squished letterforms makes the letters look taller and thinner, which conveys a sense of data density and straightforwardness I like, but it also creates distracting vertical movement; in other words, I want to look up and down, not left and right, because it looks like each letter is stretching upward.

Then there are certain letters that bug me. The big dot in the “DAVIDSEAH.COM * COPYRIGHT” line at the bottom, for example. GIGANTIC and it attracts too much attention to itself. And I have always hated the colon in Helvetica, which looks like cheap stitching on an otherwise nicely-proportioned pair of leather gloves. And don’t get me started about the oblique characters (I don’t worry about…), which visually don’t really seem to belong. They are awkwardly tilted into place, and the proportions don’t match the feel of the regular characters. I find it pretty jarring. Ugh.

The Proxima Nova Condensed (left) letterforms, by comparison, are more visually rounded. It is less squished, and I think this is due to the slightly lower x-height (the ‘top’ of the lower-case letters compared to the top of upper-case letters). Because it’s less squished, the text visually flows left-to-right as it should, without the distracting vertical bias. At least, that’s how I see it.

I also think the letters of Proxima Nova Condensed flow together more smoothly, with more unified proportions from letter to letter. Compare, for example, the word “common” in the fourth line of the paragraph text. The Proxima Nova version is quite pleasing to my eye, but the Helvetica Neue version looks like the ‘mm’ characters are swollen; I’m not a fan of the Helvetica Neue ‘n’ either. Another improvement is the use of “real” italics, as opposed to the “slanted” version in Helvetica Neue. The colon, while still kind of bugging me, looks a little more integrated into the neighborhood, and the type color just seems much more even overall.

Linework

Helvetica is one of the first commercial no-nonsense fonts to come into existance, and it’s no slouch in the “lack of superfluous ornamentation” school of design. However, there are little things in the letterforms that remind me of old world machine tooling. The shape of the S, for example, looks like it was hand-shaped on wooden molds by hammer-wielding craftsmen; there are some interesting compound curves in it. The R, as I mentioned, drives me a little crazy in Helvetica Neue with its wriggly little tail. The lower-case ‘a’ also has something going on, its enclosed part pointing defiantly in a direction shared by no other letters. And what’s up with the lower-case p? It looks like a wombat trying to pass as a cuter animal at the local petting zoo.

Proxima Nova, by comparison, feels more relaxed. Proxima Nova would meet you in the garage while he was setting up the charcoal grill for the BBQ later that night, passing you a cold beer without you having to ask for it. I also think it feels more relaxed because the curves in the letterforms aren’t as tightly formed. The S, for example, is under less tension to maintain its shape, and the shape is simpler too. Proxima feels like common sense and plain-spoken language, whereas Helvetica Neue feels like it has a slightly neurotic edge in the design of its letterforms. It also has a kind of celebrity sophistication because of Helvetica’s long association with the tradition of Swiss / International Style that dominated communication arts. There’s a hint of international drama in Helvetica Neue, while Proxima Nova just gets to work without telling you a story about how his ex-girlfriend doesn’t understand him.

I’m probably reading way too much into this, but I not surprised to see that the type designer is from Minnesota.

Utility & Identity

Proxima Nova represents my desire to be clearer and more plain-spoken. I licensed the 14 fonts of the condensed family, which cost me US$244.00, but for an additional $67 I also got the web font version of the font for unlimited domains on the Internet. That means I can incorporate the type into my webpage and maintain some visual consistency. I made sure that the licenses allowed me to use the fonts for creating my PDFs (allowable if the PDF is uneditable); as I’m planning on selling more products in the future based on PDFs and print, I think it’s important for me to be using licensed fonts to make sure I have that covered. I probably could have found Proxima Nova as a free download somewhere, or transcoded into a poor-quality imitation, but as an entrepreneurial creative professional I believe that I should be buying my tools from people like me. What goes around comes around, you know…if you want to make money selling something you’ve made, you should buy your tools legitimately.

From a function perspective, Proxima Nova carries all of the word-density capabilities of Helvetica Neue, and it’s also more legible. It has real italic letters, and is available in a broad range of typeface weights and sizes should I need to expand. There’s also something a little bit 20th century about the typeface design with an additional sophistication in the way the letters are “fitted” to each other, like a curated collection of modern furniture. It also feels more approachable, instructional and factual, which are qualities that I would like my own products and services to have. Helvetica Neue Condensed can be a little overbearing because it’s associated with governmental graphics (signs, tax forms) and snooty art magazines.

What it really comes down to is this: I just really like the typeface, and I find that it gives me a little thrill of pleasure everytime I look at it. I still like Helvetica Neue Condensed for the period authority it oozes from its association with important design principles from the 1950s-1960s. However, while it satisfied my design needs at the time, it has never made me happy…

Typefaces…they do affect me in strange ways :-)

The short answer: decide one day that you are one and see if anyone buys it ;-)

The longer answer may be interesting for those of you on a similar path of discovery.

[Note: this is an slightly-edited excerpt from the original email I sent]

Hi [Reader's Name Withheld],

Thanks for writing! The term “communication designer” is the latest in a long line of self-applied labels, as I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how to bridge my interests and marketable skills with prospective clients. I arrived here by a tangled process of exploration, observation, and elimination. It’s been a long progression:

1. When I was in junior high school, I liked to write stories and draw pictures of spaceships. English was my best subject, and writing came fairly naturally to me.

2. By high school, I wanting to make computer games, and had taught myself how to program.

3. I went to engineering school to learn how to build computers, figuring that was the big gap in my knowledge. The computers of 1986 were still very primitive in their graphics capabilities, so I figured I needed to know how to build better ones.

4. By the time I graduated, computers had advanced significantly and the need to build was no longer there. I thought I needed some kind of career, and knew that engineering wasn’t it. So I applied to engineering grad school, with more of an emphasis on doing user interface work; this was a pretty new field back then.

5. In grad school, I developed improved intellectual rigor, but not of a type that was compatible with the program I was in (Electrical Engineering). However, I did learn more about Human Computer Interaction and audited a course in it.

6. After graduating from grad school with a barely-deserved MSEE., I had the epiphany that I had never wanted to be an Electrical Engineer. I wanted to make games. The big clue: throughout my entire college experience, I had made artwork for games on the side, and had even paid my rent with this during grad school.

7. I applied to another grad program down the street, this time for a Computer Graphics Design program in their School of Fine Arts. They waived the studio artwork requirement for me and let me in the program to see what would happen. I was terrified because I had no idea what an artist was, and felt that I was an outsider. But I slowly loosened up, just a tiny bit.

8. After graduating with an MFA in Computer Graphics Design, I joined up with a friend of mine who was starting his first video game company. We worked for 2.5 years, working with a couple of well-known game companies, before closing shop and going different paths when the company became unsustainable.

9. I moved to another well-known game company in Florida, entered middle management, and found that making games in that environment went strongly against my own emerging moral core. I decided to leave the industry, completely clueless as to what I would do next. I was depressed for the next two years, my faith in destiny shattered.

10. Fortunately, the skills I had made it easy to transition to designing for the Internet and corporate multimedia, which paid better and was not as technically demanding. I freelanced and worked part-time for a couple of web design companies, in hybrid roles like “new media designer” and “creative technical director”.

11. I discovered I liked talking with clients because I could ask questions that got to the heart of what they wanted to do. My writing skills became more important, as this helped me explain technical mumbo-jumbo to clients in their own language, which helped smooth things out. I also found that writing was how I did my thinking. I also realized that my thinking was one of my core differentiators.

12. I was faced with a crisis of identity: was I a designer or a developer? I had used the label “digital media designer” and “new media designer”, to distinguish myself from pure visual designers without the programming capability. I also didn’t want to pigeonhole myself as a developer, because I cared about how things looked. Above all, I wanted things to make SENSE.

13. I started blogging after leaving the last company I worked at, when I developed a severe allergy to marketing after a good friend there passed away from cancer. The blog was a way of having a website (essential for freelancing) that wasn’t the usual “hire me” or “design agency” type of presentation. I knew that my writing was the core of something unique to me. So, I wrote about what caught my interest, and hoped to see the patterns later. No one was reading anyway, right?

14. Blogging took off. I discovered that this writing was a powerful engine for breaking the ice with new clients and new friends, who stumbled upon me via incoming links. But I still didn’t know how to describe what I did, and this was important in selling myself to prospective clients so I could, like, not starve to death.

15. After writing for a while, the patterns I saw in my blogging reminded me of an investigator or private detective, and I coined the term investigative designer to try to stand out and stake my own claim. This intrigues certain strategic types, but it confuses people who are looking for “someone who can make something”.

16. There is also another concept that I have about the importance of story, narrative, and motivation. This is, surprisingly, related to my interest in computer game design, not writing. I see storytelling as the backbone of the kind of design I want to do. What does the design SAY? It depends on context, the background of the audience, cultural associations, and so forth. I find design that doesn’t say anything to be lame, but am unable to really find anything so I coin the term storytelling by design and write a few blog posts on this.

17. I realize that compared to the general design population, I can credibly claim that I am a graphic designer, which is a term more people seem to understand. However, I also know that my design style is more toward information or explanation, not ornamentation or style. So I also use the term information graphic designer.

18. One day, I am looking up what a “Copy Editor” does on Wikipedia, and start looking up the different roles. I stumble upon the term Communication Designer, and upon reading the description, realize that this is the closest existing label to what I do. Because I’m not driven by design I make or code I write; I’m driven by the desire for people to really understand what is being communicated to them, so they can react according to their own nature.

19. After working on a couple of game development projects for clients, I realize quite belatedly that the thing I liked about computer games in the first places was storytelling. This reinforces my understanding of what I do, and the “communication designer” moniker still seems apropos.

So, the way I became a communication designer, if it’s not clear, was by discovering that was what is most important to me through plenty of hindsight. I like ideas, and I like to see people empowered by information. I also happen to have a good eye and have taught myself something of personal motivation and desire. I understand the nuance of wording, and the power of storytelling. I like knowing how to create with a variety of media in service of telling the story, and I am delighted when I see sparks of understanding ignite excitement in a person I’m interacting with.

Once I understood that it was the search for message that drove my interest in skills, rather than the skills themselves dictating what I did for work, the correct choice of label made a lot of sense to me. It felt right.

As for how to get started on this path, you can skip the 20 years of mucking around and start specializing on communicating the message. Heck, any message! What I can’t help you with is how to get a job as a communication designer. That’s because I’m not looking for a job working for someone else. Instead, I’m looking for an identity to serve as the foundation for a freelance business. I would continue to reach out to people who seem to be doing what you’d like to do…who knows, they may respond.

As for resources:

• I’d start by reading the Wikipedia definition of the term, and seeing the list of skills that are considered part of this multi-disciplinary field.

• The creative side of advertising is interesting; talk to art directors and creative directors and see what they think. The advertising magazines sometimes have interviews, but they are often shallow.

• It doesn’t hurt to look at graphic design either; Marty Neumeier was one of my inspirations through his publishing of the now-defunct Critique Magazine.

• Director commentary on DVDs are often a goldmine of insight.

• Motion graphic is an interesting hybrid of design and narrative; start with Imaginary Forces’s reel and then start exploring Vimeo for reels from other freelancers.

• Concept designers and Experience designers do related work.

• Investigating what the Industrial Design firms do may be fruitful as well.

• Ask “Who out there is creating MEANING? Who out there is defining THEIR OWN CULTURE?” Who is doing something that goes mere style and surface appearance?

I’m not sure if this is helpful in the way you expect, but if you are interested in communication design you might see it as a challenge. What is it that you can draw from this, and how can you re-express it? A communication designer (as I prefer to understand it) is a kind of communication sorcerer, able to draw from life and all forms of media to express an idea exactingly across multiple levels of consciousness. But that’s just my opinion.

• Dave

I was looking up the etymology of the word “copy” as in “copyright” and “copywriter” and of course “body copy” and “display copy”. This took me down a convoluted path of Wikipedia-enabled edification. I finally found out what copy editing really is: Copy editors are “responsible for improving the formatting, style, and accuracy of the text”. And this led to a review of just what an editor does, which is “editing”. I hadn’t given it that much thought before, assuming I knew what it meant, but I liked how Wikipedia expressed it (emphasis mine):

Editing is the process of selecting and preparing language, images, sound, video, or film through processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications in various media. A person who edits is called an editor. In a sense, the editing process originates with the idea for the work itself and continues in the relationship between the author and the editor. Editing is, therefore, also a practice that includes creative skills, human relations, and a precise set of methods

Now, I like editing, because it bothers me when things aren’t clear. Perhaps this is a vestige of my old “I’m going to be an English major” life, before my brain got hijacked by the computer revolution and I decided to study engineering. And perhaps “like” is too strong a word; it’s more of a compulsion to correct and clarify. I feel better when things have been clarified. I feel like crap when thing are NOT clear.

Anyway, copy editing seemed to reflect the organization part of me, so what is copy writing?:

Copywriting is the use of words to promote a person, business, opinion or idea. Although the word copy may be applied to any content intended for printing (as in the body of a newspaper article or book), the term copywriter is generally limited to such promotional situations, regardless of media (as advertisements for print, television, radio or other media). The author of newspaper or magazine copy, for example, is generally called a reporter or writer or a copywriter.

That’s not quite me, because I’m not so much of a promoter at heart as I’m someone who likes to find the truth of things. In fact, that very insight made me think I’m not quite in the right line of work. So I quickly looked up the other stuff that I seem to be doing. Take graphic design, for example (again, emphasis mine):

Graphic Design is a collaborative process between a client and a designer — in conjunction with producers of form (i.e., printers, programmers, signmakers, etc.)— to convey a specific message to a targeted audience. The term graphic design can refer to a number of artistic and professional disciplines that focus on visual communication and presentation. The field is also often referred to as Visual Communication or Communication Design.

Visual Communication is the art of using only visuals to communicate, but Communication Design was a new term to me:

Communication design is a mixed discipline between design and information-development which is concerned with how media intermission such as printed, crafted, electronic media or presentations communicate with people. A communication design approach is not only concerned with developing the message aside from the aesthetics in media, but also with creating new media channels to ensure the message reaches the target audience.

Wow! Did I actually discover what it is that I’m doing? Reading further:

Communication design seeks to attract, inspire, create desires and motivate the people to respond to messages, with a view to making a favorable impact to the bottom line of the commissioning body, which can be either to build a brand, move sales, or for humanitarian purposes. Its process involves strategic business thinking, utilizing market research, creativity, and problem-solving. The term communication design is often used interchangeably with visual communication, but has an alternate broader meaning that includes auditory, vocal, touch and smell. Examples of Communication Design include information architecture, editing, typography, illustration, web design, animation, advertising, ambient media, visual identity design, performing arts, copywriting and professional writing skills applied in the creative industries.

I think I hit the jackpot! This encompasses so much of what I think about, and it’s exciting that there apparently is a field that I can say I’m a part of. Which means it’s time to look for other communication designers and see what they’re up to, and from that perhaps find rich veins of opportunity to mine for new insights. What on EARTH did we do before Wikipedia?

That said, there is one very important distinction I noted in the description of the copy editing process: that there are authors and editors. I would much rather be an author; that is, a creator of new things. I perhaps have mistaken the tools I need to create as an indicator of “where I should be working”, instead of properly looking at them as the means to do what I want to do. This certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made that mistake. And given that I want to find the TRUTH of things, that suggests that I need to be looking for clients that deal in truth as a product to sustain me in the meantime.

Hm. I think it is time to adjust my niche yet again.

After years and years of not having a dedicated design website for myself, I’ve finally gotten something up at design.davidseah.com.

I started the process of figuring out just what I offered as a designer last October in this post. I liked the idea of being a boutique of some kind, rather than a full-service design shop. But a boutique of what?

Soon afterwards I started the Agenceum Project to try to make low-cost websites, and while this didn’t turn out to be very profitable (admittedly, I didn’t push on the marketing/sales side), it did give me a much-needed kick in the pants to start mastering CSS/HTML.

And in January I started putting together a master list of service offerings as evidenced here:

Still, I dithered. There were a LOT of possibilities, but they seemed confusing and esoteric; as a hybrid designer/developer, my work tends to be a little hard to define.

I got it into my mind that I should narrow my focus to three basic offerings: a sounding board, a designer, and a “productivity caravan master”, as these all seemed like things I could do. After feedback from my friends, I learned that this was still confusing. The issue was that these categories are more about me trying to figure out who I was in a unique way, which is a hopelessly-complex exercise in futility. At least with the Agenceum approach, I had a well-defined product: inexpensive websites.

About a week ago, I happened to be talking in The Google Wave with Colleen™ and was reminded of her approach to marketing, and she laid The Formula on me once more:

1. Are you this person with this problem?
2. I can help!
3. Here’s how…

Simple, to the point, and incredibly focusing. It’s just about everything I am not when it comes to writing about myself, and so I sheepishly set about trying to get this messaging into my hastily-cobbled together design shell. For once, I was not focusing on expressing my entire identity, but on what people needed and how to package it. I’m not sure why this never really hit with me before, but thankfully Colleen’s influence is starting to sink in.

The biggest challenge after getting the index page whittled down to a page was actually selecting images and writing content. Image selection went fairly smoothly, taking about 3 days of archive searching. Figuring out what to write, though, eluded me until I remembered the Formula again. Just WHO was I trying to help?

It turns out that the “who” I’m trying to help isn’t the high-powered super-technical companies and their projects. I’m really more interested in helping people who are just getting started, because I love seeing that happen. Entrepreneurs like me, artists, crafts people, solo professionals…these are my people. I decided that they would be my target, and then I just started to write as if I was writing a blog post. It’s long-winded, yes, but it’s conversational too. That’s the way I like to work, and I figure that people who are willing to put up with reading are more likely to be people I work well with.

So the next scary step is to swallow my own medicine and tell people about the new site. I’m still assembling pages and proofreading, but here’s a sneak peek. CMS? HA! It’s all static hand-coded, messy CSS and HTML…but it’s UP. I may convert it to Code Igniter later, since I’m starting to get into that environment.

For the record, design.davidseah.com is the URL for the design subsite. And now I need to go to sleep.

In Monday’s post I went through a process of recentering myself, and identified four areas to focus on and track. The trickiest one was DESIGN AGENCY, because there are a LOT of different tasks.

I just finished creating a “process diagram” that outlines a high-level roadmap of agency operations; just about any task I can think of fits somewhere the diagram. You can read about and download the PDF over on the Agenceum Blog, which is where I am running my “open design agency” experiment. Although this diagram is labeled for Agenceum, it really is for ALL of my design-related business activities.

Read more about the diagram on the Agenceum blog.

What’s appealing about this video is that it confirms what is behind my own progress: make stuff, show it to people. This is my mantra, and it’s it’s the reason I keep sharing all those productivity forms. By comparison, many people follow the mainstream mantra of get hired to make stuff. There is nothing wrong with that if you are satisfied making what you are told to make, but if you have creative aspirations it comes right back to those two things: making what you have the crazy vision to make and showing people your expression of that vision. And you don’t have to be a freelancer like me to do that. The workplace is receptive too, if you have guts and have a credibility amassed from a solid record of production. It’s actually pretty hard to get fired from a job for demonstrating a new idea, but the potential for embarrassment and political fallout keep many from even trying it.

I’d be closing this blog post right now, self-satisfied at making a connection between Ralph Bakshi and what I’m doing with my life, if it hadn’t been for two recent experiences:

• Last week, I had a really interesting chat with my friend Gary, who is a successful self-made industrial designer, about his continued befuddlement at what I’m NOT doing. He sees what I’m doing as the precursor to creating a line of products, which is something I’m taking my time with, but the really interesting observation he made was that I was a new product creator with a team of associates, not a solo writer/designer. I apologize to Gary for perhaps misrepresenting the specific tonality of his observations, but what I took away from it was yes, it is possible for me to create a package but I’m not doing it and I don’t have to do it alone.

• Talking to my bud Sid this afternoon about some of the comments on Bakshi’s YouTube video, I made the observation that some of the naysayers who said Bakshi hadn’t achieved anything near the kind of success that Walt Disney did were poop-heads, but they had an excellent point. Walt Disney created a package experience for a market he envisioned, and he built a business to make that happen. Can’t take that away from him.

About an hour ago I realized that my mantra was incomplete. From the conversation with Gary, I realized that my intention to create packaged versions of my work were half-assed and incomplete. If I wanted to stop waiting for success, I would have to engineer it for a specific market. That would take my vision even further into what might be actual success. Then, if I am totally serious about this, I should follow what Walt Disney did and create the process to ensure that what I package makes it to the market; in other words, that’s creating a business. It’s a different mindset.

So I’m expanding my mantra into a two-step theory; consider this version 2.0:

Step 1. The way to artistic integrity through self-discovery is making what you envision and showing what you made to people in-person. If you keep doing this, you’ll grow in unexpected and interesting ways, guaranteed. You can stop at this step if all you’re looking for is artistic integrity and finding out who you are.

Step 2. The way to financial success through artistic integrity lies a few steps beyond: apply the experience you gained in step 1 to create a beneficial package for people and then find a way to reliably deliver that package to the masses. At a reasonable profit.

I’ve practiced Step 1 for the past five years, and have been wondering what was next. Now I know: Practice Step 2 with the same aspiration to integrity I did Step 1. What is interesting is that both steps are actually the same, except the emphasis is different. In both steps, you are “creating then showing”. In Step 1, however, it’s mostly about you building a body of work that is refined through exposure to a critical audience; from each iteration you typically gain a small percentage of new opportunities. In Step 2, it’s mostly about you creating a “product” that is refined to meet a particular need, and then shown to a consumer audience whose needs are addressed; if your audience gets it, a certain percentage will buy.

In other words: Create and Show. Package and Distribute. Each complete iteration produces results that can be applied to the next one, which results in a refined product. Seems so obvious, but I had to learn this the hard way for it to stick :-)

In the meantime, over at Agenceum Intranet, I’ve been working on logos and sell sheets. Agenceum is the pseudo design agency I’m working on to give myself a focus for targeting super low-budget clients. My main focus at the moment is to just create some sellable templates that I can show to a few people in my local area; for that, I need to have a handout (the “sell sheet”) that makes sense to them. Of course, such a handout should have some kind of logo on it! Whee!

• Logo Round 1 – the first pass at a “column” idea
• Logo Round 2 – a wrong turn, and a new design idea
• Sell Sheet Draft – pulling all the information together

If you’re interested in process and how I am thinking about the design business, check it out and leave some comments.

Anyway, back in 2006 I was talking to my good friend Senia, who edits the website Positive Psychology News Daily, about the stories she was posting on her personal blog. She had “story Tuesdays”, and I volunteered to write one. She gave me a theme, [a boy who finds something he wasn't meant to find][, or something like that. The result was a fairly long story, which surprised me. I hadn't written anything like this since High School, and I was highly encouraged.

A month later, I asked readers of this blog to throw out 10 random ideas that I would then attempt to weave into a story. The result was a story about a Bee named Ulrich in four parts, incorporated the following elements:

• Bees facing management challenges.
• Bee dancing and finding new pollen sources in the face of two suns! (sorry I missed that one earlier, Avram!)
• Einstein & Relativity.
• An overachieving college student with height issues.
• A Hamster seeking Lettuce and Bee Companionship.
• Gojira on the loose.
• Some kind of “meta-pun”
• A flower in a field of flower. The coastline of an ocean. Both or either.
• The French.

I only got the 9 items before being ready to start, and so off we went. Here’s part 1; you can follow the links at the end of each article to read the subsequent three parts.

The writing itself is stiff in places, and it’s not great prose, but looking back at it I’m kind of marveling at the stuff that just fell out of my head. Each part was written in one sitting, with no planning. The Bee Story, in particular, was written without any editing or proofreading afterwards, except to change grammar errors that other people pointed out. I wanted to preserve the raw quality of the writing and be transparent about the process. It still makes me laugh in places, and thus is worthy of being part of Recycled Content Saturday. If you’ve got nothing to do, have a couple of free stories from me :-)

A few days ago I posted the latest progress on the Day Grid Balancer forms, a line of inquiry that has attracted very high-quality commentary from you all. Special kudos go to John Ballantrae for using Tarot cards as a tool for design reflection. Instead of using the cards to “read me”, he used them to reflect on the direction that the Day Grid Balancer might go. Despite what you might believe or not believe about the “psychic power” of Tarot Cards, the symbolism nevertheless does span a variety of human desires and anxieties; just by considering the interpretations of each drawn card, one can gain some insight by seeing how the symbolism might fit with the situation on your mind.

John posted his video tarot card reading for everyone to see, and in his 12-minute video he came up with several interesting insights. One that resonated was the sense of anxiety and frustration that is driving the development of the Day Balance Grid; he suggested that perhaps focusing on that would provide some new direction. It is very true that I have been feeling that I’ve not been keeping balanced, and that I was potentially forgetting important things. I had started to write up everything that was on my mind, which works fine when I’m doing it for other people. This time, though, I was stuck. The thought of seeing all those unfinished tasks and unfulfilled dreams was incredibly demotivating. Nevertheless, it had to be done.

When I went to re-watch John’s video, the first three minutes suddenly stood out to me. He’s doing nothing but shuffling his cards as he’s explaining his approach to the reading. It’s rather mesmerizing to see someone who is adept with cards shuffle and spread a deck, and several thoughts came to mind regarding the appeal of a card-based form factor:

• There is something cool about manipulating a deck of cards so much that they become familiar friends. John’s Tarot deck is obviously well-used, and he’s quite familiar with how it handles.
• Tarot cards use strong symbolic language that carry the power of self-reflection in them. The Rider-Waite Deck, with its illustrations of the various meanings of each card, is particularly fascinating to look at.
• Physically, cards are very easy to group, sort, and flip through. This is a huge boon to organization, and you don’t have to rewrite anything.

I also just happen to like cards. A few years ago I had made something called the Task Order Up! that included index card versions of task cards, though the system was originally conceived in the spirit of order checks and check rails used at fast food restaurants. This system assigned a card to each task, which you could then array in front of your desk so your coworkers could see what you had going on. You could also prioritize task cards by putting them all the way on the side. But really, the driving force behind the Task Order Up! was that I thought check rails are cool, and I built the process around that.

card stacks versus to-do lists

What I have so far is a deck of personalized task cards for everything I had going on. Instead of standardizing the look-and-feel of each card (as they are in the Task Order Up!), I am allowing them to have individuality. My thinking is that the cards will take on greater representative power the more I scribble and draw on them.

One issue I had come across in the use of my Emergent Task Planner was that I had so many outstanding tasks that it was getting hard to review them all. I am going to make this easier in the next design by reverting to the “right hand side for notes” layout; this will allow me to fold the “to-do” list backwards so I can transcribe it more easily into the next day’s task list. However, even in this case I’m forced to retranscribe data, which is a design no-no in my productivity form philosophy. With index cards, I can keep a master list in the form of a hand-held card deck.

Previously, I have maintained a master list electronically. For example, I recently used Google Tasks with Google Calendar. Results were mixed; Google Tasks is a little simplistic at the moment. An even older system I have used was a text editor to-do list, but since this is a local file I can’t share with other computers. However, web-based to-do lists have the requirement that I am connected to the Internet, which limits the places where I can access them.

The advantage of electronic media over paper, of course, is the ease of reordering data. However, electronic media suffers when it comes to direct manipulation of overlapping data; there is a lot of clicking and dragging of the mouse, which is slow and makes comparison of data sets cumbersome. Cards do not have this disadvantage, and their tactile qualities make manipulating them a pleasure. They naturally lend themselves to manipulation; when you’re dealt a hand of cards, the first thing you do is order them according to your strategic intent. Cards can be grouped, stacked, stuck together, taped, glued, and shuffled. Cards are also more pictorial, more solid, and make soothing noises as you shuffle them. Cards also afford a far richer repertoire of physical manipulation than the mouse, which I think is more helpful when thinking (I don’t have any kind of citation for that, unfortunately).

design and process

I sat down with a blank pack of index cards and wrote out everything that I could think of that I needed to do.

I am starting to develop a visual vocabulary for the different kinds of tasks. Some cards are reminder cards that I will come across when I want to keep something on my mind. The “WAAH I’M FAT” card, for example, reminds me that I want to do something about that. There are some cards that I’ve marked with a symbol that means this moves you toward completing a strategic goal, and there’s another symbol that means this supports other things you are doing. Some cards just have the names of people and projects on them. Some of them are process cards that describe how to do the laundry, and assign point values to the card.

There are lots of ordering and prioritization possibilties with a deck of cards. I can extract cards to prioritize tasks, putting them on the top of the deck. I can also group cards with small clamps or paper clips, which gives me a sense of the magnitude of a multi-step project. I can sequence cards in the order they need to be done. I just started this on Sunday, but already I find it comforting to know that everything that’s on my mind is in this deck; I’ve found myself just shuffling through it seeing what was in there. It is like a portable version of my pickle jar. And I haven’t even scratched the surface of the gaming possibilities around a custom-designed deck of cards. Collectible Color Card Task Management Gaming, anyone? Balance your Day by trying to get a Three-Of-A-Kind or Straight Flush? Unique Cards, with Webkinz-style Card Tracking and Social Media Integration via 43Things? Oh, my goodness.

Right now, the process I’m using is very simple: I’m just writing down stuff on index cards as they come to mind. The designs are sparse, but are already functionally evolving into distinct uses. When a task is completed, I’ll pull the card from the deck and retire it. There are all sorts of neat index card hacks out there that could help as well. There’s a nifty index card board on Unclutterer, for example, and Levenger makes those sweet index card holders and docks. However, what I’m more interested in doing is making a deck of beautiful, personalized cards that can be manipulated in my hands. We’ll see where this goes.

I’ve been redesigning the prototype Day Grid Balancer based on the excellent feedback on draft 1. The overall consensus was that while the color and grid were very playful and attractive, their use as a day-to-day tool was limited. And confusing, because my categories don’t line up with other people’s categories. What seemed to work, though, was the idea of weekly balance. I guess the name of the form will have to change eventually, but the implication for right now is that this creates a LOT OF ROOM to play with on the left-hand side.

I was thinking of biorhythms, DNA spirals, and other patterns, so I drafted a version of the balance grid that, well, is kind of a mess but might give y’all some ideas in brainstorming an approach to make the thing work. I think there needs to be some kind of auxiliary marking within the grid itself, and some obvious place to leave notes, but I haven’t gotten that far ahead. I’m planning on printing this out and just scribbling it on it sometime to see if anything pops up.

Thoughts? Here’s a editable PDF file to play with, saved with Adobe Illustrator CS3. Creative Commons license applies, as before.

The visual history of my website header is documented in my post Inadvertent Branding, but the short version of the story is that the bottles (see below) were a joking commentary on my cavalier attitude about moving my website between servers, live, without doing a whole lot of testing. At the time I was also rather fond of the colors in the image, taken with my previous-previous digital camera (a Canon PowerShot G2). Looking at the image now, I can see the nasty contrast issues. Check it out, preserved below for posterity:

The picture in the new header was taken at Starbucks with the 40D to illustrate a blog post, and was serving as (wait for it) a placeholder in my new website design. The new design, sadly, has not been going anywhere since January, so I decided to just grab the image from it. At least the new photo is somewhat informational in its subject matter. Plus, it has my two favorite pens in it (a Lamy Safari and Al-Star) laying on my favorite notebook (a Cachet Classic Graph). The eventual plan is to shoot a new header image depicting a ton of my favorite bits of gear used in support of my identity and design agency philosophy. But first, I’ve got to write it. So for now, this header will serve as a transitional brand image. That probably is some kind of no-no, but as I am also in a transition period, I am allowing for poetic license. So there. So much for growing out of my childish preferences.

Another transitional element I’ve deliberated added is the shift in colors toward the orange-blue palette that my latest business card is using:

The evolution of my business cards has never really matched the evolution of the website, but there’s no more excuses now that I’m settling in a “design niche” I think is suited to my peculiar skillset and personality. To help, I’m using some language from the cards (“investigative designer”) while retaining some of the keywords that the site has become known for (“productivity”). I also am using the gestalt dot story as a bullet for the design portfolio” button, which is now a little more obvious than before. I’m not sure if I like the bullet, but at least we’re starting to get some repetition of elements between the business card and the website, which helps make it seem more like a “brand”. It’s not great consistency, but then again my so-called brand identity has always been somewhat “ambient” as opposed to “direct”. Certain elements like proportions in my design work, color choice, typography, and use of photography have been fairly consistent over the past few years. The explicit use of my name has also been consistent; I demoted the original name of the blog, Better Living through New Media, to a subheader quite some time ago. This probably was a lucky decision, as I’ve discovered that I really do prefer to engage with people one-on-one, representing me-as-me.

So that’s that. I’m giving myself another 10 years to fix the rest of it :-)