November 17, 2009
One Big Mistake that Could Ruin your Projects
Just read the latest article at Fuel your Interface entitled “Three Big Mistakes that Can Make or Break your Design Career.” Super informative; one of the three tips were to never sit around waiting for work to come – go find it! In this day of social media, personal branding, and transparency, there’s no reason to wait for anything. Go out and get it!
The third tip was to not stretch yourself thin. I’ve personally committed this foul many a time. And everytime, it results in me stressing out, having a lesser quality of life (dramatic, but serious), and most importantly, my work suffers in one of two ways: It’s either terribly late or not as good as it can be. And both of those are unacceptable flaws; so don’t ever take more work than you personally can handle! Try to find someone who you can outsource work to; they may come back to you with work just when you need and don’t expect it.
But the second tip really interested me. Jokingly, it’s referred to as the “Garmon principle” – Garmon being some friend of the author (sorry to belittle your existence, dude named Garmon). From the article:
The first thing you should do is close your laptop, put away your cool bag of tricks, and think. Think, “What would be the perfect site for this? What would it look like? If there were no boundaries, what is the coolest thing, or the most functional way, to make this happen?” Also think, “What will make this worth existing as much or more than the next guy’s interface?” Once you have decided what the best possible solution would be, figure out how to do it. If there is something in your original idea that just simply isn’t possible, then amend it. “Re-idea,” if you will. But never, ever, EVER sit down and start doing things simply because you know how to do them. Because the truth is, no one really cares how much you know about coding or development. The people who are looking at this site aren’t thinking about what it took to make it, or how many advanced lines of code you wrote. They’re thinking about how it is now, as a whole.
So much sense! My feedback after the jump.
