Designer!

Yeah, you!

Put that mouse down and step away from the computer! Yeah, I know Illustrator is awesomely cool to make comps in! I know Photoshop has really fantastically phat filters! But when it comes to designing and creating, shut down your Mac, get out your sketchbook, go somewhere else and design!

Like most designers, more and more I slowly started to rough things out on the computer- to the point that I hadn't picked up a pencil or pen in years. It's just so easy to make something from nothing on the computer nowadays. I'd open up a blank canvas in Fireworks and start laying out headers and navigation elements. Moving things around, adding this, deleting that... But in the end, that's all I was doing. Working with the same elements, in the same general layout that I'm used to, to produce something that's comfortably nice. True- it's workable and decent enough, but it's not really thinking things through. It's not really designing.

Today, I had a little revelation. You see- I've been getting over a bad cold the last few days and I was in one of those going-through-the-motions-because-pseudoephedrine-really-makes-me-a-zombie design sessions.  Yesterday, I was in Illustrator comping out the "People" page for mojoLive.com. I had spent 2 hours polishing out a cool little "search results nav" on a page that really had no thought.  I was noodling details on something that was (at best) in the thumbnail stage.  What the hell was I doing?!  No thought was really put into to the UI!  Sure it was a cool page- but how did one arrive at this awesome page [with the shiny navigation]?!

During my meeting with Eli today, I was pondering this while he was taking a call. I got out my trusty old Molskine pad & pen and noodled some thumbnails. The heavens opened up and angels started to sing! I was clear! I had vision again! I found what had been lost for so long. True freedom to design! When Eli had gotten off the phone, I started babbling how I had this down now- that yesterday I was mired in details that should not have been (but still showed him the awesome nav idea)! Eli, ever nice and considerate, nodded his head in affirmation.

When I got back into town. I bought a brand new Moleskine- the MojoSkine! Armed only with a pen, my MojoSkine (and my iPhone), I walked downtown to Nola, bought an iced coffee and dove in! I noodled UI pathways, wrote notes to myself why "some things worked" and why "others didn't." Sketches, thumbnails- horrible little childlike scribblings. With every hatched ink mark on that grid-lined paper, clarity was coming! It was wonderful!

If you can't see the forest for the trees, step out of the forest, damn it!

Environment has everything to do with clarity. If you have an office, get out to a neutral area (be it a coffee shop, park, library- any other place but where you work), then mentally get about 30,000 feet above your project and look at it as a whole.  Start there and dive in (but never too deep) occasionally coming up to see how it affected the whole.

Having started it last night, I finished this article this morning as soon as I hit "publish," I'm off to another few hours of true exploration. I challenge all of you to do the same!