http://jschlossberg.com/new/index.php/articles/ en jon@jschlossberg.com Copyright 2010 2010-04-10T16:40:50+00:00 http://jschlossberg.com/site/websites_arent_real/ http://jschlossberg.com/site/websites_arent_real/#When:16:40:50Z Websites are purely virtual. I’ll never be able to touch the things I work so damn hard making. Shouldn’t that bother me? The first day of real, honest to goodness sunshine in three months. Sixty degrees. A cool breeze. Perfect weather for not making websites.Our team is having lunch at a favorite restaurant underneath the Brooklyn Bridge. There aren’t many product designers at HUGE, so we’re sure to welcome the new guy with a hearty meal on the company dime. He asks about the skyscraper under construction across the East River in Manhattan. The question startles us. We work in DUMBO every day, but none of us had given the giant new building a second thought— surprising, considering how it fills the precious skyline real estate previously occupied by the twin towers. I shove chicken parm in my mouth and think about the long hours I’ve been pouring into my current project. Looking at the surprise skyscraper across the river, I can’t help but pause and reflect on the difference between what I create and what those construction workers build. Those construction workers, they’ll spend two years crafting a structure that stands hundreds of feet tall and is both perfectly functional and visually spectacular. Buildings exist in real life. But I make websites. Websites are purely virtual. You can’t gaze out your window at the website across the river. They’ll exist on the Internet for a short while, only to be summarily replaced and, if we’re lucky, cast off into the annals of the Internet Archive. I’ll never be able to touch the things I work so damn hard making. Shouldn’t that bother me? Does it bother you? Design, New York, Personal 2010-04-10T16:40:50+00:00 http://jschlossberg.com/site/excuses_excuses/ http://jschlossberg.com/site/excuses_excuses/#When:01:00:34Z It’s been more than six months since I moved to Brooklyn and joined the fine folks at HUGE. Feels like yesterday. What the hell happened?It’s been more than six months since I moved to Brooklyn and joined the fine folks at HUGE. Feels like yesterday. What the hell happened? Over the half year I wrote six articles, published two and judged one actually worth sharing. Poor show. You see, I write to answer my own questions—in Talent is Overrated, I was simply trying to figure out how I got good at anything. In Good Ideas I desperately wanted to justify my annoying questions at the outset of projects. I find this method of writing incredibly insightful, but it often produces essays my mother won’t even read.This entry is no different: I’m trying to figure out why I didn’t write more. The existence of video games looms as an easy answer, but the armchair psychologist in me is unconvinced that Modern Warfare 2 is the true culprit.About a month into my tenure at HUGE, something happened. Something epic. Something necessary. And it forced me to put my nose firmly to the grindstone.He was perfectly political about it, but my boss told me to stop being an asshole. Not just a design asshole—an asshole asshole.Funny thing about assholes is that they usually don’t like being called out, especially when office hierarchy prevents them from responding as an asshole should. But this was different. I honestly didn’t know I was being a jerk. In hindsight, I suppose that just makes me jerkier. I was close to being fired and it was great. I loved it. It was fantastic. I was given a chance to grow a pair and change, or else. This was the type of task that would challenge all of my skills—not just design or usability or coding, but everything that makes a good human being. Fuck HTML5, this was the type of challenge I signed up for. Four or so months later, they say I’ve done well—“like a whole new person,” my boss says somewhat regularly. I don’t know about that. I’ve just used my ears more and my mouth less. Special Agent Jethro Gibbs, shown here, clearly would not have put up with my shit.Even so, it was hard. Draining. I could deal with designing all day and writing at night—those are different enough activities, despite their overlapping skills. But trying to be a better person challenges ALL of your skills. I’d come home from work and want only to watch Leroy Jethro Gibbs be an awesome dude. I do wish I wrote more. When I decided to blogify my personal site, I did so with the inward promise that I would write with some regularity. But this was a half year of significant and admittedly unexpected personal change, so I'm taking a mulligan. I only hope the next six months will be as incredible. HUGE, Personal 2010-02-01T01:00:34+00:00 http://jschlossberg.com/site/good_ideas/ http://jschlossberg.com/site/good_ideas/#When:02:48:11Z When you're working with smart people, there's never a shortage of good ideas. Every project spawns dozens of them. The problem with good ideas, though, is that they're hard to ignore. $(document).ready(function(){ $("p.intro a").click(function () { $('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: $("div.scroll").offset().top }, 1500); }); }); When you're working with smart people, there's never a shortage of good ideas. Every project spawns dozens of them. The problem with good ideas, though, is that they're hard to ignore. Read There's no doubt that good ideas power innovation. Without good ideas behind them, most projects are bound to waste a lot of man-hours getting nowhere fast. But good ideas are only half the battle. The other half? Well, it certainly isn't lasers. Whether you're working at an agency crowded with talent or freelancing out of an apartment crowded with cats, good ideas tend to come in droves. There's no stopping the flow of ideas when passionate people get to work on interesting projects, but the river of possibilities we create is often too deep to cross. It can end up drowning our hard work at every turn, diluting our product until we're left with something that barely resembles our original intent. Staying Focused When we're working for clients who expect a return on the investment they're making in our work, spot-on layouts and intuitive interactions don't have a lick of value if the product we've created isn't actually solving anything. "So what the hell is the other half of the battle?" you ask? Staying focused. When there's a plethora of excitement over the good ideas we've developed, it can be very hard to focus on the best idea for solving the problem at hand and ignoring the rest of them. It's human nature to latch on to the latest and seemingly greatest product of our creativity and defend it at all cost. Blinded by the shininess of a new idea, even the best designers in the world have difficulty staying focused on exactly what it is they're trying to accomplish with a project. But this is a challenge that must be overcome, lest we forget the problem we're trying to solve and instead focus on raising our baby to a mediocre, watered-down reality. The Question It's a simple question, but one that is asked far too infrequently in meetings where everyone is just trying to add their two cents and promote their ideas: "What's the point of this project?" It's quite possibly the most important question a designer can ask, as the answer should govern every decision we make. Stay focused on the point. Stay focused on solving the problem. That fancy design stuff? It's just a matter of putting in the work. The hard part is letting go of all of the cool things we could do and focusing on what we need to do. When the light bulb of a new idea flashes on in your head, take a deep breath and ask yourself two questions: what's the point here? Does this idea help us accomplish it? If you can do that, you've already won the battle. No lasers required. Design, Work 2009-08-26T02:48:11+00:00 http://jschlossberg.com/site/talent_is_overrated/ http://jschlossberg.com/site/talent_is_overrated/#When:02:25:28Z People very often tell me that I’ve got the design gift: that I’m naturally talented at whatever it is that makes a good designer. I disagree. We like to give all the credit to natural talent. It helps us sleep better at night. Take, for example, my brother and I: he's an incredible illustrator, while I can hardly draw rectangles. Growing up I attributed his success to a natural aptitude for drawing, but that's a load of bologna. I played with Matchbox cars 10 hours a week, he drew superheroes. No wonder he's a better artist.I designed my first logo at age seven for a company that didn’t exist. Three years later, I had graduated to designing websites in my underwear for Internet friends I would never meet. Fast forward twelve years and I’m still designing websites, only now I wear pants and the companies are 100% real. Back in the day, I designed because none of my other friends were designing. (They were outside pretending to be astronauts or whatever it is ten year olds are supposed to do.) I didn’t call it designing then, obviously, as the word has too many letters and too ambiguous a definition for a ten year old in his underpants. I didn’t call it anything—I was simply having fun on the computer. I’ve been having fun on the computer for a while now. I'd say I’ve spent more than 9,000 hours fooling around. That’s a long time. If I’d have spent 9,000 hours practicing the drums like my mother insisted, I’d be one hell of a drummer. People very often tell me that I’ve got the design gift: that I’m naturally talented at whatever it is that makes a good designer. I disagree. I’m not naturally talented at anything, except maybe creating awkwardness at inopportune moments. I’ve simply trained for more than two thirds my life to be a designer. I had fun designing and, as a result, I did it all the time, slowly practicing the skills necessary to make things beautifully useful. No gifts. No talents. Just a lot of practice. Find something you enjoy and do it. A lot. And then do it some more. Michael Jordan always said, “Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.” If only my game paid as much as his. Design, Opinion, Personal 2009-08-19T02:25:28+00:00 http://jschlossberg.com/site/getting_HUGE/ http://jschlossberg.com/site/getting_HUGE/#When:19:15:09Z After months of pouring sweat and tears (no blood, thankfully) into finding a job, I ended up taking one I never even applied for. Ironic justice dealt swiftly by the closet procrastinator in me, I suppose.In college, I started final papers after the midterm. My design projects tend to ship well before the deadline. I've never pulled an all-nighter. I'm terrible at procrastinating-- not because I don't want to wait until the last minute, but because I can't. If I procrastinate, my work suffers. Oh, how I wish it didnt. Unsurprisingly, I started my post-graduation job hunt in early February, a full four months before the big day. I spent countless hours grooming my resume and portfolio. I checked a half-dozen job boards on an hourly basis. When something picqued my interest, I transformed into a cover letter-writing barbarian. I was absolutely dedicated to knowing where I would begin the next chapter of my life before the college chapter had ended. If I graduated jobless, I feared that my future work would suffer-- that I'd be forced into settling for a job at an organization I wasn't in love with. I flew to Philadelphia, to San Francisco, drove back to Boston more times than I'd care to admit and Skyped with firms in Mountain View, Chicago, London, Australia, and Germany. The offers steadily flowed to my inbox, but not one of them blew my socks off. I really wanted my socks blown off. When graduation came and went and I hadn't yet gotten an offer I was absolutely thrilled with, the anti-procrastinator in me kicked and screamed bloody murder. "I can always freelance," I begrudgingly told myself to ease the anxiety, and while this was technically true, I knew deep down that I wouldn't be happy freelancing. This post-college chapter was for venturing outside my comfort zone, and freelancing sat squarely inside it. People around me told me to relax. "Why are you in a rush?" they'd ask. "The economy sucks." And while they did indeed have a point -- why was I in a rush? -- I remained steadfast, continuing the search despite popular opinion, a shitty economy and an increasingly embittered group of companies awaiting my reply. I didn't know why I felt rushed any more than I knew why I started research papers months ahead of schedule. It just felt like the smart thing to do given how much I suck when the deadline looms. Not having a job made me anxious, but so did not listening to the opinions of everyone around me. A few days after graduation, I heeded the advice of my parents and turned down the offers I had worked for months to get. Literally moments after sending out the batch of difficult emails, a friend encouraged me to contact a buddy of his at HUGE, a firm I admired but hadn't considered. They were too big, I estimated, and I was sure that I didn't want to be a lost cog in the corporate design machine. I emailed the friend-of-a-friend with a mixed air of desperation and curiosity. Having played the dating game with my fair share of companies over the past few months, I decided be frank: I didn't want to work at a big firm. He reassured me that HUGE was, ironically, not huge-- they had a decent number of employees, sure, but professed that individual ownership was at the forefront of everything they do. I thought that to be a pretty quality line of horse shit, but he offered to prove it to me in person. I didn't have anything better to do, so I hopped on the train to New York City the next morning. I interviewed with what felt like half the company. They all said the same thing: if you don't own it, you lose it. They were a level of a genuine I hadn't experienced and a level of passionate I could only admire. Six hours, a stroll around DUMBO and a few beers later, a partner made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I start next week. After months of pouring sweat and tears (no blood, thankfully) into finding a job, I ended up taking one I never even applied for. Ironic justice dealt swiftly by the closet procrastinator in me, I suppose. If I didn't know any better, I'd say life was telling me to procrastinate a bit more. To stop rushing. To sit back and go with the flow. But that's never been my style, and no matter how hard I try, I'll always be the guy working hard to end up holding the itinerary. Fortunately, I've been given a position at HUGE that will challenge the entire breadth of my skillset. I look forward to applying my work ethic towards game-changing products with the very talented people in Brooklyn and, when I can, writing about them here. HUGE, Personal 2009-07-06T19:15:09+00:00 http://jschlossberg.com/site/list/ http://jschlossberg.com/site/list/#When:03:50:05Z 2009-06-22T03:50:05+00:00