I recently got the opportunity to attend Smashing Mag’s Conference in NY this June. The conference is geared toward web designers and developers with speakers speaking about topics such as web page performance, design specs and assets, CSS hacks, creative inspiration.
Aside from learning more and getting re-inspired about the digital design and development profession, it was so great to see the usual spots that seem to have been frozen in time as well as how much many parts of city has changed. It’s also slightly refreshing to reflect on how much I have changed since I’ve last visited even though it’s only been a little over a year. Sad to feel that my days in NY may soon be just a distant memory. Natural process of life, I suppose.
Anyway, here are some inspirational notes from the conference:
Good is the Enemy of Great
- Overall theme: “Details make the design.” - Charles Eames
- Good is the enemy of great, perfect is the enemy of good.
- What you see on the outside at Disneyland is perfection. Everything is presentable, colorful, polished. However, when you look underground in the utility tunnels or behind the curtains, it doesn’t look so nice. Lack of craftsmanship is like Disneyland’s utility tunnels.
- Sometimes you want to go to Mars, and you don’t make it, but that’s okay because you still left Earth.
Design Below the Surface
- Design is simply intent.
- Design is about rendering intent.
- We can see look at black/white/gray and see the beauty. We see how the world can be. How can we get the rest of the company on board with ideas that aren’t polished yet? Think of how we can leverage and help the rest of the business and speak their language.
- Measure twice, cut once.
Guerrilla Design Tactics
- Don’t wait for an invitation to do the work you want. Guerrilla artists make things happens in a pre-set world in an impromptu way often without authorization.
- You often have to get bad to get good.
No More Pixel-Perfect Comps / Lessons from Kanye
- “Art is to be free. Design is to fix.” -Kanye
- Everyone on the team should create goals together. Ask, “What will make this project successful for you?”
- Have confidence in your work. “I’m going to do dope things.” - Kanye
- “What do Elon Musk and Kanye West talk about? The Futch.” - Kanye
Vision, Hearing, Brain
- Although this talk just touches a bit of the surface of cognitive science, it provided factual and compelling information on how brain works.
- Vision happens in the brain. Our senses perceive, but the brain attends and interprets. Peripheral vision gives the gist of the scene, and it also decide where we want to look next.
- Fun fact: Research on beauty shows that people prefer objects with curves!
- FACT: Hard to read text is hard to do. When people read instructions of black text on blue paper, it is hard to read, takes them longer to read, and estimates a longer time to complete the task.
- HOWEVER, hard to read text is better learned and better remembered. This is called “System 2 Thinking” (hard, effortful, slow). Your pupils will also tend to dilate when you’re thinking really hard. When they constrict, it means you’ve given up and reverted back to “System 1 Thinking” (easy and effortless).
- Vision and hearing are connected to social and emotional processing.
- “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” -Anais Nin
- It’s not a lie if you believe it!
It’s Great to Create
- John Burgerman is an English artist/doodler living in Brooklyn. It was a treat to see him end the day with his presentation- his humor uplifted everyone’s spirits.
- Embrace the pens, they are your friends. You can create anything and everything. Then sometimes you feel like you have to sell your soul to unethical shoe companies, but you have to remind yourself that you’ve not sold you soul- you’ve just licensed it.
- Ignore the idea of failure.
- Cheap and quick is better than expensive and slow.
- Collaboration will allow for crazy to stuff to happen because people are nuts.
Native vs. Browsers
- Native wins the audience of generation selfie.
- Browsers and the web are stepchildren of mobile platforms
- The cool factor of the web is no longer- people want cooler mainstream stuff (examples = wearables, IoT, automated interfaces and devices, etc.)
- Unlike native, web is a continuum, NOT a platform.
- We as designers and developers all want recognition, but it’s all B.S.
- Examples: “If I can just get 12 more likes, I can save this little girl’s life…”
- Star ratings, likes, TechCrunch stories = all meaningless, but we constantly compare ourselves to others. When do we start producing things again?!
- Stop the echo chamber (another article is written that includes 12 other quotes from other articles).
- Stop trying to impress and do some work instead.
- Use the best tool of the job.
- Let native run its course.
- Play to your strengths- don’t need to be a jack of all trades.
- Let’s stop trying to engineer, let’s develop and create.
Magical UX and IoT
- When we look at IoT, it’s really just simple interactions connecting 2 platforms. Physical environment meets digital. If you think about it, the phone was the first IoT device for everyone. It has sensors, smart connectivity- the mobile phone introduced this! The phone is destroying entire category of products (paper maps, books, clocks).
- Everyone is constantly on their devices on the train, while walking on the street, at the dinner table… We are failing to see that we are disconnected when more connected.
- Taking selfies all the time is like staring in the mirror all the time, which I though was only available to evil queens like in Snow White!
- Let’s think more contextually! How about we think of giving info at the right time rather than getting people engaged more? How about we make the technology invisible? How about we return interactions to the physical environment instead of mobile? The best interface is no interface, yea?!
- Do not forget that we are the makers of the future. Focus on the human aspect, not technology.
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Overall, I really enjoyed the conference as it was a nice break from work and inspirational in the sense that we as creative technologists are here in this world to ideate, create, and execute on innovative ideas.
Sure, we may all experience stress, systemic problems, and setbacks, and fail a lot, but that doesn’t mean we should ever stop creating.
It was also comforting to feel that yes, I may not be a true classically trained artist type that can create beautiful and sexy things, but I am a designer rooted deep in customer empathy, solving complex problems and creating simplistic user experiences.