Don’t Play It Like the Flute An Article by Matthias Ott matthiasott.com Don’t play it like the flute. Play it as if it was the wind whistling through the desert dunes. No matter what you love to create, there is something to be learned from the way Hans Zimmer approached the Dune score. We are all striving to create work that is novel, innovative, memorable, and inspiring. To get there, however, we tend to focus on getting things right, on avoiding mistakes, on “being professional”. Yes, it is important to have the commitment, dedication, and attention to detail of a professional. But being right? That will only take you so far. What is much more important is to approach the problem in front of you with curiosity and an open mind. With an urge to explore what can be found beyond the ordinary, beyond the right way of doing things. If you want to create something that nobody has come up with yet, it is important that you try out all the crazy ideas others are afraid to try, that you build prototypes, improvise, and freely play with the materials and the technologies you have at hand. musiccreativitynoveltyexplorationcuriosity
Painting With the Web An Article by Matthias Ott matthiasott.com So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process. A constant dialogueConstant reflection and refinement How do you know when your paintings are finished?Designing with code artwwwcreativityprocesscode
A Dao of Web Design An Essay by John Allsopp alistapart.com What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world. Conventions of a mediumTo abandon controlThe journey begins by letting go Web History Chapter 6: Web Design wwwuxaccessibilitydesign
Conventions of a medium When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, “ritual,” and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don’t make sense. If you ever get the chance to watch early television drama you’ll find a strong example of this. Because radio required a voice-over to describe what listeners couldn’t see, early television drama often featured a voice over, describing what viewers could. It’s a simple but striking example of what happens when a new medium develops out of an existing one. filmmedia
To abandon control In print the designer is god. An enormous industry has emerged from WYSIWYG, and many of the web’s designers are grounded in the beliefs and practices, the ritual of that medium. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page. The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.” typographyconstraints
The journey begins by letting go The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible. wisdomzen