Week 1005
It's week 1005!
This week I spent some time on our annual New Year's piece, which is always a little pet thing I get to run. I had a big, bold vision for what I was going to achieve - ambitious, clever, filled with delightful callbacks to the history of interaction (both design and development), referencing exactly the kind of workmanlike craft that BNB strives to attain, and using some cool analog processes to turn into a physical object. And you know what?
It sucked.
I think it was such a cool idea! But in practice, actually turning this idea into a real thing, I found all the ways that my vision just couldn't be pulled off. I tried executing this big vision, and it was just: lame.
And that's OK, really! That's part of design - you get a cool idea, it seems perfect in your mind, you envision this perfect incredible thing. But then you have to start actually making it, and sometimes it works! Sometimes it doesn't.
John Hendrix has this diagram about the Pit of Despair - this exact process where you start making your beautiful idea and the result is 'off-the-grid horrendous.' It takes a long, difficult struggle to claw your way back to 'Bad' and then 'OK' and finally arrive at 'Good, but Different.'
But I've got a deadline, baby! And I also have enough design experience to know a bad job when I see one. This is something that every designer ALSO has to face. Sometimes you need to pivot! That's fine! Save the beautiful butterfly for when you've got the time to claw your way up the slope.
Time to pivot. It'll be fun.
