Nevolution

Closed up shop

In case anyone of worth is still coming over here hoping for something to happen, I've moved. 

You can now find me at danielneville.com.au or follow me on tinyletter at Systems and Surfaces.

It's great over there, but this will always be my first. Man I had some times here; some really good times. But I ruined the CSS here and then it was all too much and I wanted more granular control and it's slowly getting there in fits and starts. I'm going to miss this place now that I've made it official. 

If only I had the original Nevolution sophisticated ape image lying around to properly say my goodbyes. 

 

Fidelity

The fidelity of a deliverable is always a tricky proposition. The business need to standardise a system is always going to be a bother, especially to solely fill spaces in a spreadsheet. I like exploring the possible fidelity of the deliverable, and seeing what I can get away with. If I can explain and convince the need for a loose assortment, especially when it goes against company policy is a great use of an hour.

Some projects only need a loose prototype, others, a rigid user flow map and a few key animations. High resolution prototypes with state transitions - photoshop comps with built in transition animations. Others need a very broad overview of the app but with an indication of a branding style guide to give the tone of the app. Standing in front of a white wall with coloured squares loosely stuck to it and walking back and forth with a Draper-esque assuredness and a fat sharpy and let someone else work on the details. 

Finding the right mixture is important, and usually pretty obvious once the texture and grain of the project is evident. While we zoom in and out in our work - as part of our work - we also need to be zooming in and out across time. Grabbing possibilities that the finished project might entail and sprinkling them together, seeing what sticks. The perfect deliverable is complementing layers of time, quality, and interaction. Bouncing up and down the fidelity stack. 

Dogfooding

It's fairly clear to me that the redesign doesn't really work. The text doesn't read well on small screens and it doesn't read well on this super amazing 15inch macbookpro retina. Typepad just isn't cutting it anymore either. Making this decision isn't easy but it's been hanging around my head for way too long. 

On one hand: yay for blogging. On the other: le tired. Ideas for posts keep on coming up that I never end up writing and then the moment is gone. Also, this self flagellating tone of voice is bothering me.

So I'll just eat my own self referential navel gazing dog food and blog about blogging. Get the hands moving again and use this as notes for it's own demise. Worst case scenario is I start blogging again. Best case scenario is I start blogging again.

Things I want to be able to do:

Maintain the balance between quick notes and more designed text pieces. This balance should be kept in both workflow and output.

Have a home on the web, not a mixture of different sites with slightly conflicting experiences.

Work well across all mediums, screen sizes, etc. This requires further thoughts on content strategy. It needs to look as shit hot on a retina laptop as it does on a janky phone and an ereader.

Text as interface. This is already the case, but needs to be more considered. No reliance on photos

Be subscribe-able in some manner. I don't really bother with RSS feeds, it would be disingenuous to expect the same.

Have as much control over the html/css as possible without this semi-false desire get in the way of actually doing the work.

Durability/maintainability. I don't want to have to fiddle with plugins later down the track or find out that I can't get it to work on a different computer. Also, see: Exporting data.

Be worth the time it takes to make.

Be worth the time it takes to read.

September 7

Thoughts that were in my head on September Seventh that I desperately needed to get out of my head where each line is probably a whole post that will never happen. These have been reorganised to make sense for the future and fix spelling.

Materiality. Mass. The weight of the digital. Japanese aesthetics. New job. The kindle. The weight of digital reading. Flows. The broader picture. Scaling out.

Actually working. How to work. The act of working. How best to organise the time of a group of people so that they can be productive but also bring in money. Integrity. What is the point of working if the work is not very good. Wearing new clothes. Not exercising. running a bit. Getting soft again. Work Life balance. The idea of actual balance. How to fit it all into your life. The idea of sacrifice. Doing one thing means not having the time to do something else. Finally understanding how time is a valuable resource.

Understanding cycles on life. How long these cycles last for. What they entail. What cycle I am in now, when will it end. How to deal with clients that need to have their brief rescoped. How to broaden the problem out. Having the cognitive free space and depth to "get" this, but then also, how to fit in the time, and to convince the client to go this route.

Shoes. How to define and describe shoe trends, particiularly the shoes that I am wearing right now, and the shoes that I want. How to use this as a way of looking at trends.

The monastic traditions of the Franciscan monks. Rule of Life. Live values. How to construct a good life. Forma Vitae. The form of life. Reflecting one one thing learned each day. Using that as a way of marking time. How to reflect various form-lifes through digital and analog objects, products.

Not thinking about how to embed this into work I create. The finer details of interface design. The rough details of interface design. Perhaps I will do some weights this afternoon instead, or after all.

How twitter makes me unhappy. How it creates massive spikes of FOMO and not using it is the only way to counter this. How this is a shame and even if I'm mindful of using social media it will still cause these feelings. How having this coffee and typing right now makes me really want to have a cigarette and physical activity or the passage of time is the only way to counter this.

Blogging like nobody is reading. How the aesthetics of a light and airy japanese cafe is influencing my thought patterns. Moving up in the world. Speaking to new people at work and havcing the vague notion of a career trajectory. Not having the time to do this anymore and what it means for my mental health. Could a lack of reflection be a good thing for once. Being surrounded by people and working almost kinda with them. How this differs from working alone. Just remembering that I used to be trapped in here all the time and now I am now. How weird that kind of is. Not being in this room for a long long time. 

Content Structure

 

It's been way too long between posts, so I want to explore that as a soft landing into the unfinished drafts sitting in my patch of the cloud. I'm torn between differing versions of blogging; different mental models of how content should be structured. Should this space be a formal placement of essays: edited, constructed and refined with care. Perhaps each essay should have it's own design language, each an attempt at merging form with content. Or revert to the blogging days of yore, where each post could be banged out in half an hour. Just a quick look at something and half a paragraph of poorly thought out words. I've been tempted to move even more towards tumblr: the tempting mix of paragraphs, lack of an obvious permalink, a url and a half sentence enough to be considered a days worth of work.

Even more, how does this fit into my workflow, my ideal writing environment. I've found that bluetooth keyboard, ipad propped up on a chunk of wood, and ia writer to be a near perfect mix. All there is for my hands to do is type, the screen is too far from my fingers to move to a different app, nothing else distracting on screen. But it almost pushes me to write too much. I get too comfortable and start churning out the noise with very little signal. The joy of my fingers running across the keyboard and making the klickety clackety sound too enjoyable to think about what I'm writing.

I'm sick of Typepad but not sure how to go about changing. Deep down I'd like to roll my own. That desire is tempered by the self awareness of my pendulum swings of productivity and procrastination. I wish typepad didn't punctuate the url, but it's too late to move out of it. Moving away from it would lose all of this traffic that I don't have and don't care for. The guilt of linkrot would be too much to bare when I eventually close this shop.

What exactly is blogging supposed to be these days? I don't even read blogs anymore, and I'm impressed as hell if you've gotten this far. Aren't you bored? No one really knows how to approach blogging like we used to, there's too many ways that the medium has died for us to continue this way.

It's too easy to scroll and swipe, but I'll be darned if I'm going to let shortening attention spans or the time to carefully read something affect the form and content. The recent redesign of this place didn't really work out how I thought it would, but there's something here that could work if pushed and prodded a bit. More focus on text, less focus on large slabs of it.

I think what I'm getting at here is the need to loosen up and put more effort into this thing. But there's some content strategy that would need to be reevaluated before I get to that point.