I’ve made a lot of mistakes in love and relationships. I’ve caused and felt more than enough suffering. When a relationship is in termoil, or terminates, it can feel like the end of the world, but it’s actually just the beginning of a new one. In time, the ashes of our past fertilize new plants that will grow, and may even bloom if we take care of them.
I want to be a gardener.
A video promotion for a food journal app called Foodshot. The app was created by my designer friend Vinh Tran, and co-staring the lovely Helly Tong ^^.
Contributions: Copy editing, Acting, Voice Over.
For most of my life I was very opinionated about place. For a while I was like “I have to live in SF, I could never live in LA.” Later I was like “I have to live in Saigon, I can’t even imagine ever living in the USA again.” But after a recent trip back to the USA I now feel that I can find happiness and a sense of belonging no matter the place.
This is in large part due to the social interactions possible, regardless of location.
So here is a heart felt “thank you” to all friends — past, present, and future — who have shared and will share their good times and bad times with me, giving me a place of belonging.
Even players fall in love, opening themselves up to the opportunity to have their hearts broken. When you play with fire you expect to get burned but that’s part of the excitement too.
I knew what we had wouldn’t last forever but I always wanted it to last just one more day.
We didn’t care about the rules of society; it was all about communicating honestly. Being happy when we were together and learning to deal with complex emotions when we were not.
You triggered my enlightenment with your words “I’m happy when I’m next to you” and for that I am eternally grateful.
It is hard to keep balance in life while trying to meet all expectations;
Disappointment and sadness are inevitable when we overextend
and probable even when we don’t.
I wish I were better at life and responsible for less suffering;
Avalokiteshvara vows to save innumerable beings with her 1000 arms
but I only have two and wasn’t there for you.
Simplify, closer, simplify; Embrace, further, embrace;
The path to eternity is to die 1000 times today
and to find your smile in time to die again tomorrow.
Design is about providing solutions to problems. When I talk to engineers they say: “that sounds just like engineering” and when I talk to marketers they say “that sounds just like marketing”. There is indeed a lot of crossover.
Design is a human endeavor, it isn’t just for designers. Whenever you decide to do something one way instead of another, because you’ve determined that it is better, then you are engaging in the act of design.
Janitorial staff engage in the activity of design when they have a choice of several cleaning agents and several scrubbing utensils like a brush or a scour pad or a cloth. If they do not use their power of discernment, and just use the same solution to every problem, they will damage a surface.
When you do steps 1 through 3, just as your boss instructed you to do, you are not engaged in design but instead in menial labor. When you exercise your powers of observation and discernment you are engaged in design.
If everyone can design, then what is the difference between a professional designer and any person engaging in the activity of design?
It might be helpful to think about the difference between a professional athlete, an amateur athlete, and someone who is able bodied but not athletic.
Take a moment to visualize what the differences might be.
Taking tennis as an example; any able bodied person is capable of swinging a tennis racket.
An amateur or enthusiast tennis player probably plays with their friends every weekend for fun, they’re so much better than the non-player but still the difference between them and the professional player is pretty big.
The professional player practices every day. They practice with the intent of getting better, not just having fun. They practice serves over and over again. They practice returning serves over and over again. They do simple drills over and over again. They are committed to their craft.
Their craft is burned into their muscle memory, and their perspective on life is changed forever.
A professional designer is just like this.
The difference between an amateur and a professional is their mindset. For the amateur the activity is fun, for the professional it is life or death. The professional has made a commitment to improve their craft every day.
If you would like to become a professional designer, or a professional anything, the first step is to change your mindset. Say: “I am a designer and I want to become a great designer”, then set about practicing your craft year after year until you one day wake up and realize that you are a professional.
If you don’t have this kind of passion or commitment for your current occupation — stop — pick something that you really want to become better at and throw yourself into that activity.
Of course one mark of being a professional is that others are willing to pay you for your services. It is hard to imagine a world where a non-professional tennis player can get paid to play their game, but people without this kind of commitment get paid to work as designers all the time. Tennis is perhaps more honest.
You can be a master at something without being a professional, but you still need the same commitment to continual self improvement.
You can be a professional at something without being a master, you just need to provide value to your client, customer, or employer.
There are professional monks who perform funeral rites. They may not be zen masters at all. There are zen masters who never perform services for patrons.
Professionals and masters both have high levels of skill. While mastery implies the highest tier of skill, it carries no financial or client satisfaction expectation. A professional is someone who strives to provide value for their services. They must look at the bigger picture.
My zen master (who is a senior consulting architect) once told me that design is the balance of form, function, and cost; three legs of a stool or table, if you neglect one the project will fail.
I’ve thought about this model for years and think I have an improvement to it: design is the balance of form and function within constraints.
The balance of form and function, this is the observation and discernment skill mentioned before. This is the core design skill. But what separates a professional designer from an enthusiast designer, more so than the commitment or the pay check, is the stoic consideration of a project’s constraints.
Constraints are all of the issues that producers and project managers concern themselves with:
As a professional designer you can’t just make the building or game or car or website that you want, because you think it is cool. You must fully take into account your proposals’ impact on — and adherence to — the project’s constraints.
I once read: “A designer’s job is to ask for more and a producer’s job is to say ‘no’.”
If you’re designers are not professional, then sure, your producer will have to enforce the constraints, but good designers should have taken those constraints into consideration in the first place.
One of my best friends is the most talented designer that I know. He has been doing paid design work since he was 15 and has worked in senior and director level positions at top fashion magazines and international design thinking firms. He is a professional today, for sure, but as a youth he wasn’t. He lost a huge client in his youth due to missing a deadline.
Talent isn’t enough, you need to mature to become a professional. No one is going to hold your hand. You have to deliver value, which means you have to deliver the expected quality on time and on budget.
If you’re young, you probably won’t take this seriously enough, and it won’t be until you lose your job or your client that the sting of failure teaches you. That’s ok. Maturation is hard to force, so please focus on the rest of this article: commit to your craft, provide value, consider the big picture. Do this day after day until one day you realize you’re already a professional.
In my own journey as a game designer I frequently find myself not exploring an idea because it isn’t cleaver enough or original enough or mind blowing enough. I’m guilty of spending far too much time in an “arm chair” philosophically waxing and not enough time getting my hands dirty.
As people working in a creative field it is easy to fall into this trap. It is easy to forget that the greatest works aren’t great because they crawled out of a genius’s mind but rather because they are refined products crafted with attention to detail by hands well practiced in their art.
So this post is a call to arms to myself, and to anyone else likewise afflicted by this delusion: Stop trying to invent yourself as a genius and start thinking of yourself as a competent craftsman!
I’m reminded of this rant from Chris Hecker where he tells indies to fully explore their ideas.
Or Neil Geiman’s commencement speach advising students to “make good art” no matter what’s happening in their life.
Chris Hecker specifically calls out Jonathan Blow’s Braid as an example of an indie game that fully explores the depths of a game mechanic. It is incidentally a very polished product all around, it isn’t just the game mechanic. Braid, while seemingly a work of genius, is actually a refined products crafted with attention to detail by hands well practiced in their art. Like the Sistine Chapel it was a feat accomplished after many years of labor. Or to put it another way, genius is hard work.
And you know what, if you just want to release a bunch of not fully explored ideas, a bunch of experiments, that’s fine! In fact, if you’re just starting out, that’s what you should do. But please do something. Do something, and refine your craft!
Infinite gratitude to lovers;
who have shared their body and soul with me.
Infinite gratitude to mentors;
who have shared their wisdom and skill with me.
Infinite gratitude to friends;
who have shared their good times and bad times with me.
And infinite gratitude to death;
who patiently waits for me in the void.
There is a new Android based game console on the horizon called Ouya. There are plenty of people excited about it and plenty of people saying that it will fail. I had some thoughts while commuting on my scooter (seems that’s where most of my thoughts occur these days) that I’d like to share.
First, I’ve identified three threats to Ouya.
Second, consumers and developers win.
First a quick background:
The threats:
Actually these are threats to any platform providers. But while all platforms face the risk of piracy, 3rd party stores, and competition from other platforms, Ouya feels particularly at risk since there is nothing proprietary about their system. They’re offering virtually nothing other than “good will” and — we’re promised — good industrial design.
Regardless of Ouya’s potential success or failure in the marketplace, both consumers and developers will come out on top.
Why developers win:
Why consumers win:
Consumers will win because they will have access to television gaming experiences that may not have been created if Ouya hadn’t cleared the path for Android based TV gaming. People are excited, I think the genie is out of the bottle, and even if Ouya fails someone will pick up the baton and keep running with it.
I’m having one of those mornings where
you didn’t get to sleep
you punished your body
and you have some regrets
but the cool morning light
washes it all away
and you’re so damn happy
to be alive
namaste
