Then & Now

Andy Whitlock’s blog Now in Colour posed a fun, collaborative project for designers – post some images of your work as a student and compare & contrast with your current professional work. I couldn’t resist, so here goes.

Reflection #1 – What a difference real live developers make!
As a student, I spent a lot of time making elaborate simulations of interactive environments. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing…there’s only so much time you have in school and it made sense to focus on design rather than trying to master javascript & actionscript.

But…it’s great designing things that actually work. It was extremely satisfying to start working with professional developers who can bring a design to life (especially when they’re very creative and open-minded—shout out to the Tierra dev team). Now that I work in collaboration with developers, instead of making numerous simulations of a chat environment, we can design and build a functional application and then test it out by using it ourselves.

Reflection #2 – A big, interesting problem will never be solved.
I’m still intrigued and challenged by some of the same core topics. My class once spent a semester studying chat environments in an education context. That semested kicked my butt, but it also kicked off what will probably be a career-long interest in online communication and design for education environments.

Reflection #3 – Sometimes the most satisfying design is a simple study.
I always go back to something that my one of my professors said over and over again – “slice it thin,” meaning look a very small, isolated part of a problem and deep-dive into it. Sometimes that means starting out making a super simple study. Sometimes that simple study opens up an entirely new creative direction, or turns out to be one of your favorite parts of the whole project. As part of a much larger school project, I made this study exploring the relationship between typing and visual feedback. It was quick & loose, but among a bunch of other overwrought attempts, it was one thing that people actually responded to.

Simple studies are all good when you’re a student, but when you’re working as a professional, they may never see the light of day. Clients don’t often ask for simple studies. It’s easy to skip them entirely because it feels like there’s no time, no budget and no need. But I find that almost every time I pause within a larger project to work on a simple study I’m glad that I did—especially if we figure out how to use it somehow later on.

Voila. It’s been a nice trip down memory lane. Thanks Now in Colour!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 2:48 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Then & Now”

1. Alex Says:
   April 2nd, 2008 at 12:33 am

   I’d love to try out the chat system when you get a chance….!

   - Alex

2. Aaron Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 1:45 pm

   I’m super impressed you posted your college work–and by its quality! Mine is so embarrassing; pretty sure I burned it all. haha.

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