Keep your contact information in a prominent location.
Write for yourself and for posterity.
Write pertinent field information with every new entry. You should enter the date, time, and location at the top of every page.
Add information on your location.
Record your methods.
Make backup copies.
If you use abbreviations, make sure there is a key in your field notebook.
Don’t leave home without it.
Form a writing habit. Thomas Jefferson was such an inveterate chronicler of daily events in his notebooks that he even took the time to record the weather four times on the day he helped write the Declaration of Independence. So unless you have something far more pressing than writing the Declaration of Independence, you have no excuse for avoiding your field notebook!
Set up a structure for your field notebook.
Create an index.
Treat your field notebook like a scrapbook. You should view your field notebook as a central clearinghouse for miscellaneous information that is relevant to your research project. If there are related bits of information that you will find useful later on, sketch them, write them down, photocopy them, and staple or tape them in your notebook.
On the early web, there were thousands and thousands more personal homepages than weblogs.
Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)
Not all that many readers go to the back matter and look up the source for a single sentence. But the back matter can also be read as ordinary text, revealing a history of content and sources. And images and illustrations from the book in the back matter create a lovely visual/verbal summary quilt of the entire book, enjoyed by all.
Directories aren’t surging. There isn’t this nascent directory movement fomenting - ready to take on the world. Directories aren’t trending.
But there is a certainly really sweet little directory community now. From the Marijn-inspired stuff listed in Directory Uprising to the link-sharing ‘yesterweb’ collected around sadgrl.online - or the originals at Indieseek and i.webthings.
Barnsworthburning (by Nick Trombley) is a very formidable addition to this community - a clean, multilayered design and an innovative bidirectional index.
Since we launched FigJam back in April, teams having been using it to grow all kinds of ideas into great designs. We recently caught up with Figma's VP of Product, Yuhki Yamashita, to hear what it was like to build FigJam and how things have changed since then. Here, he reflects on the evolving role of design and product management, what it means to welcome “non-designers” into the process, and the future of FigJam.
When we’re thinking about where to take our product next, we actually take a lot of inspiration from our customers and the Figma Community, to see how they’re stretching our product in interesting or unexpected ways. We saw this happening in the early days of the pandemic. Our users were starting to use Figma for everything from brainstorming ideas to running team warm-up activities, to even putting on social events for people to get to know each other. We saw a lot of use cases that got us thinking.
The boundary between engineering, design, and product management is blurring. Some of us used to have a mental model in which roles and responsibilities dictated how things work—that designers do one thing and engineers do another, for example. Increasingly, more people are crossing team lines to problem solve together...Now, it’s not about who “owns” what—it’s more of a collective endeavor. And the roles have become more interlocked, and I think that’s fundamentally a good thing.
Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.