Made with Paper; trio trio trio.
Made with Paper; my cosmic black heart.
During my flight back from Los Angeles today, the stranger in the center seat chatted me about Sociallist. (The dear side project I won’t shut up about; I was drawing frames during that terrible few minutes of no electronics ;)
He loved the idea and pitched one of his own to me: a vinyl app. Intriguing…
The best part? Turns out he wasn’t an ideas guy, but simply a guy who’s been traveling the world for the last decade enroute to Yosemite National Park. Has no stake in this industry.
It was clear he had a great grasp of the vinyl world (for the record, I know nothing about vinyl, pun intended) since it was enough to get me to sketch up his thoughts.
That was refreshing. The 1:25 flight passed very quickly as a result. A conversation between strangers who came from different worlds united by an inkling of wanting to create. No ulterior motives aside from a fleeting connection.
I parted with knowledge of his whereabouts for the summer and he parted with my sketch.
Sketches: a product design
Not sure why this one ended up on the (now eradicated) personal blog! Adding it retrospectively.
“Product Designer” is an interesting title these days. When I hear of it, I usually assume we are describing a software designer who is product oriented. Or, a pixel designer with a good big picture sense. To most, it still aligns closer with industrial design: one who crafts objects of everyday use. I just find this shift interesting, now, to the main attraction:
Chosen from a series of rapid iterations.
With some preliminary and scrapped forms, of course.
Complete with object rotation studies…
As well as hand studies.
Theme of life: Ther is barely enough time to keep up with everything, especially with regards to all your ideas. Thus, there remains even less time left to document and share it! Prioritize, prioritize, and don’t forget about the rest of the world.
Source: susanl
Glad I didn’t listen, part 1.
When browsing the folks featured on pandolist, especially the 2 student sections, many answered 4) similarly.
4) What is one piece of advice you’re glad you didn’t take?
You hear it over and over again. Parents: go be a doctor, lawyer, or something traditionally prestigious! Classmates: take a stable job! Friends: come out and play with us instead of working!
The answers, though with their own contexts, all point to the same thing: Glad I didn’t listen.
This is a sound mantra.
~
Similarly, in my own little life, Raincat just enjoyed a spike* in visitors, because of an awesome mention. (Thank you James of Programming in the 21st Century!)
But you know what’s funny? While making any effort to put a public face on it, I was told it was a waste of time.
Dissenters: You aren’t even planning to go games full-time anymore, why bother?
So here you go, 2.75 years and ~15,000 total unique views later: Glad I didn’t listen.
Raincat is still discussed and loved despite being an older piece. And while it may never evolve beyond janky student-made indie game, it is an attestant to building it and shipping it.
Here’s to many, many more adventures in building and shipping things.
-
* These numbers are obviously nowhere close to big big, but really, this is something that hasn’t been actively promoted beyond conception. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ll only take shit from you if you’ve shipped something. ;)
A handful of more sharpie sketches of various projects I’m thinking about: sociallist and a future portal page, susanl.in. I pulled the trigger for the .in domain when I learned the awesome namecheap offered it for $2.78 the first year, so cheap!
* SQUISH *
We’ll show you the real thing once it’s ready. Ah, speaking of which, I should set aside a teeny bit of time to clean-up the sociallist blog design.
Late night wireframing for alpha.
Source: sociallistme
Compound growth: by improving yourself 1% a day, you’ll be 37x better after 365 days.
on building things
When I try out new products, especially productivity products, I find the greatest overarching flaw is this:
The creators always force their mental model onto their users.
I don’t mean to say it in a bad way; I believe the creators have good intentions. (I mean, I’d love it if anyone adopted even bits of my mental model, but that’s not always going to be the case.) It’s just that no one has the same exact mental model for what works. I believe this is why most fail. Sure, it may sound great in theory, but, in the end, it won’t stick if the user can’t emulate their ideal productivity schema into the product.
This is why I believe for productivity tools, it needs to crafted with the idea of not just powerful, but flexible. The tool needs to be powerful in order to be valuable in the everyday, yet flexible so anyone can start using and loving it.
Your own schema is a good starting point, but you need to abstract one level higher to figure out how to get it right for your users. I believe there should be this addendum to the saying: Build something you would want to use and then evolve it to something your users would want to use.
Made with Paper; fatal attraction.
In other news, I beat the first 2 dungeons in Skyward Sword, finally. The only one stopping me from taking it easy is really myself.
the sociallist.me* branding: logo and colors. there was a lot of ugly before this. rather proud of this. it has a css3 shape and animation. :)
will post more process, but for now, sleep!
#latenightdesigningftw
* for onlooking strangers, (hi!), sociallist is a side project of mine.
Made with Paper; when technology gives you a good user experience, give it kittens!
(was gonna keep this one to myself, but it still give me the squees!)
An update on 2012
2012 is about simplifying. Going to be assuming you’ve seen my 2012 resolutions.
Wins.
- I don’t read Hacker News anymore. I don’t miss it.
- I’m rarely on Reddit now. With the occasional exception of r/aww, because AWW.
- This wasn’t on the list, but I also removed the Sparrow and Adium icons from my menu. I am so. much. saner. without the notifications in my face at all times.
- Likewise, I don’t use push notifications (or have disabled badging, depending on the app) for things like iPhone email or Facebook or social medias for that matter. Also much, much saner.
- Have been rather prolific about thinking, crafting, executing other things now. I’d like to speed this up, but it’s an improvement!
Working on it.
- Still a prolific tweeter. I need to make a point to simplify my following list and not worry about offending someone over it. Consuming it isn’t a terrible thing since I’ve went through a serious round of axing already. There’s much less in the feed at all times.
- Pinterest usage hasn’t been hampering me too much actually. It maybe even helps in the big picture. Curating pretty clothes, shoes, and bags has rendered me less willing to spend via choice paralysis. It’s weird, I know. But it’s still less and not ‘at all.’
- Facebook, ah, so the problem is I feed it with Instagram and Paper all the time, so it’s hard not to go bask in likes. I really should stop this one perhaps after overcoming an unexpected thing. Need votes of confidence right now.
- Total fail on the unplugging thing. It hasn’t happened nor has a session been planned. Also filed for after unexpected thing.
Additions.
- Learning is constant, so I discovered more things which should be on this list, such as…
- Stop drinking so much koolaid. Don’t take to heart everything you read.
- Stay neutral. It’s easy to get fired up, but you should investigate things as candidly as possible before casting judgement. Everyone does everything for a reason, even if the reason is silly.
- “Remember your roots.” No matter where you end up, don’t forget the people and principles which were there all along.
/end, rambly rambles. thanks for listening to me think outloud.
Updated portfolio, 2012!
There were two things I really wanted to get away from:
- The 3x3, NxN, or what have you grid.
- Lightboxes.
The fancy interpretation of this effort:
- Trading the familiar for an immersive and experimental take on the portfolio.
& the frank, and quite honest, interpretation:
- Curbing my selfish desire and dreams of a fancy hand-coded portfolio. A website for the scroll and click happy. Giant canvases!
Addendum.
Someone helped immensely on the scripting side. Also used the same someone’s animations library. ♥ :)
I plan to post sketches, mock-ups, thoughts about the whole process.. er, later.
Enjoy and report bugs! You can tweet bugs to me, @bysusanlin.
