Howells.

Brooklyn-based designer and developer Jonnie Hallman (a.k.a. Destroy Today) said in a recent interview:

I like the idea of making an application and just building it for yourself first. Because then it’s successful no matter what because it makes you happy. If it reaches 100,000 users that’s great; that’s just a bonus though. But if you’re able to use it years down the line, that’s the ultimate goal.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as I try to get another project off the ground, called Shorthand. It’s a link-sharing and commentary tool that I’m building because I haven’t yet found a link repository tool that I genuinely like. Delicious is horribly over-complex and and over-designed, and Pinboard–as much as I love the rationale behind a completely utilitarian bookmarking tool–doesn’t fill me with any pleasure whatsoever.

So Shorthand is in essence a tool that I’m building just for myself.

There will be a social layer that spans the application, but the most important thing is that the tool will work well for a user-base of one.

This is a different approach to how people approach building web apps in that most web apps are built for a user-base of 30million (to use Instagram’s figure)., because ultimately that is what will sell when the tool gets acqui-hired. This is how I approached building Fiftytwo, since it’s value is derived from a group of people showing their work and feedback to others.

But the best pieces of software and tools are built with a very single-minded purpose, for only a single individual. This is how a hammer is designed, and few have ever complained that a hammer doesn’t quite satisfy a user’s needs.

If you bear this in mind when building a product, you’ll reap two main benefits:

• Lifecycle testing a product becomes directly relevant. Using the tool again and again and again throughout development and making it work perfectly and enjoyably for just yourself means the tool has been built correctly and has achieved its goal already, regardless of however many people end up using it.
• The product will work without the catch-22 situation of requiring a broad user-base from the get go. Of course, some products demand this (dating websites, for instance) but if you look at your product, there will almost always a way to simplify it such that the benefits can be enjoyed by a single user using it alone.

(Incidentally in the interview, Jonnie also talks about killing old projects, and moving onto new things, which echoes my recent post about doing lots of things.)

I have been sitting on the theme of this post for a while, but I stumbled across two great articles recently that convey my point quite brilliantly. I’ll talk about their ideas, and then cover it off with a few opinions of my own.

Firstly, while browsing General Assembly’s site, I came across On Learning to Code, pt. 1 by Mattan Griffel, a strategy guy from New York City:

When I first quit my job to start my own company, all I had was an idea. The goal at that point was to find someone with a technical background to actually execute my idea. I suspect that many of you are in similar situations. There’s something you should know: it’s never going to happen.

…

Please don’t want to wait around trying to find that perfect technical co-founder. If that’s your goal, then you’re bound to fail as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs don’t look for people who are able to execute for them. They improvise and make things happen in spite of being under-equipped.

…

Very quickly, society is becoming divided into two groups: those that understand how to code and therefore manipulate the very structure of the world around them, and those that don’t – those whose lives are being designed and directed by those that do know how to code.

(He subsequently turned it into a Slideshare deck, which is well worth a browse.)

Secondly, Spencer Fry–founder of Carbonmade–wrote a great piece on his blog, From Business Guy to Programmer:

While being a successful Business Guy can be tremendously important for the company, and has more impact than many developers and designers acknowledge, there are times when you cannot contribute to the product as much as you’d like. In the meantime, the makers seldom have a free moment, as a product can always be improved. A new design tweak here. A refactor of code there. The Business Guy is left with an internal struggle: wanting to do all they can do for the company but knowing deep down inside that pulling out a code editor or Photoshop would often be the most helpful thing they could do — and realizing they can’t do it.

…

It’s at those times when an hour in code or design is what’s needed that I’ve wished I hadn’t stopped programming so that I could fire up a code editor and hack away. It’s that feeling of always wanting to contribute to the most critical part of the company at any given time that has returned me to programming.

Spencer’s article touches on my reason for wanting to learn development. I go into this in more detail in a blog post I wrote for Offscreen magazine. 10 years ago, some friends and I wanted to create a website when the idea of a “startup” was barely known, and in fact was a time when people barely used the internet. We knew no programmers or designers, yet I relished the challenge to learn something during my down-time doing my psychology. (Spencer–who switched to psychology from computer science–is right: you get a lot of free time if you do a psychology degree: I would recommend doing and liberal arts-based programme to any aspiring hacker for that reason alone…).

The feeling of being able to execute an idea through to a finished project is enormously satisfying. I admire designers who are also proficient screen printers, or fashion designed who cut their own cloth; who conceive an idea, creates the product (and perhaps even sell) within the remit of her own skillset. It’s really exciting to see a product come into being by yourself.

Of course, it won’t be perfect. I’m not a great developer nor a great designer, and luckily I’m not a perfectionist (at least not when I’m doing client work). That doesn’t matter - it’s the doing that counts. And if the product or idea is a winner, that’s when you bring in a team of experts to help polish it into something great. But because you were the person pulling the initial pieces together, you have more context and knowledge to sell your idea and get people to believe in it, and subsequently, you.

In my mind you need two things to become a nerd. Time, and an idea. That’s all: no specific knowledge or expertise. I didn’t know nor was taught about development or design when I started.

People who complain they don’t have time are paradoxically procrastinating. If it’s something you want, you’ll find the time to do it. Get up an hour earlier, or go to bed an hour later. Hack away or read about hacking away during your lunchbreak.

Then comes the idea. It needs to be simple, but it needs to be something you want to see (something you find useful or which entertains you). It also needs to be something that excites you, since with excitement comes will. If you’re not excited about something, you’ll get bored and give up pretty quickly.

You may need a bit of a kickstart. I’m thrilled that General Assembly has set up in London, and they have a super range of talks and courses to get you started. In fact you might decide to do a full front-end development course with my genius pal Rik Lomas. There are equivalent courses in New York, and I’m certain you can find courses in other cities.

If not, then seek out a nerdy community who will inspire and motivate. If you’re a designer, I wouldn’t choose to attend the nearest Ruby Hacker Group, but increasingly there are groups of folk who span creative and code. In London, check out Dalston Digital; in New York, check out N.Y.P.D who I believe occasionally have meet-ups. Everyone at both is super friendly. If they’re not, tell me and I’ll kick their ass.

Conferences are great too, and are as bountiful as biscuits these days. Brooklyn Beta is an especially good one, who this year are running Brooklyn Beta Summer Camp: an amazing opportunity to get involved with a super crowd of people. $25,000 is a great motivator to learn how to develop while executing your idea.

However you start you’ll get immense satisfaction, even if you find it daunting. Give it a try, it’s fun being a nerd.

I caught up with a friend of mine the other day who works in the industry at a prominent and successful startup. And he told me about something that really frustrated me about the web design industry.

As one of the best designers I know, he has been put in charge of a group of designers as a creative director. The only problem is, he can’t call himself a creative director.

That seemed odd; I asked him why.

It turns out that the group of designers have such big egos that they hate being managed and directed by someone with many years of experience over them.

Traditionally, creative directors at any company have tended to be the most experienced, who have risen the ranks by doing great work and being able to handle egos deftly; leading by example. (That’s probably an idealised notion of meritocracy, but you get my point.)

But the internet has changed that quite fundamentally, because these guys were defining themselves and their worth essentially by their ranking on Dribbble (who are all highly regarded players), not by the work and contribution they were offering the team.

I’m not hating Dribbble - it’s a great tool to find talent of quite a specific aesthetic which the web seems to be aligning to right now. And if you get your work hearted, that’s awesome. If you get really liked, with loads of lovely comments, that’s even more awesome.

My biggest advice for any designer would be to leave their pride at any echo-chamber’s gates. The web is much bigger than a single community or platform, and it’s full of people with far greater experience and knowledge who don’t care who is ranked higher than who. Many won’t even know what Dribbble is, or come from unusual backgrounds. Yet these are the people who are probably defining the next web aesthetic paradigm shift, so it’s a good idea to seek them out, listen to them, and learn.

This is not a big industry, and the demand for web designers outstrips supply like you wouldn’t believe, as you probably know. If you’re good, we’ll know about it. But you’ll never be the best designer, however many hearts and comments you have. The best designers adapt and change all the time.

A little confidence in your work goes a long way, a lot of ego goes nowhere.

People who know me don’t know me as Fashionable Dan, so I can’t indulge in the finer points of being a Mr Porter customer.

But I love everything about the brand. Mr Porter is the sort of brand you end up having when you really give a damn about your company.

The investment the company has made at every customer touch-point makes the brand shine:

• The website doesn’t just look great but is functionally brilliant (it’s important to have both). And anecdotally (since I’ve never actually handed over my card details) the experience doesn’t end at the check-out. The way in which your order is packaged, along with a personalised thank you note, is a simple extension of the online experience.
• The company spent a lot of time and money on the branding, even commissioning a custom typeface which has become unmistakably Mr Porter.
• 99% of the site’s success is down to editorial content of unrivalled quality. This is a driven by a permanent, on-site staff who create stories and produce wonderful videos like this.

Of course, high fashion is a high-margin industry, and Net-a-Porter is a successful cash-flush company, so it’s easy to get the best people and agencies on board. But even in a small way getting these three elements right and caring deeply about them is such a simple way to kick-start a business, and I’d love to see Mr Porter’s thinking replicated in other consumer industries that generally suck: food, travel, or finance.

I feel the same giddy feeling about Rapha who have also created a pitch-perfect brand. Monocle too, if you see it for what it is.

☛

There are now a billion articles and tweets about the Instagram acquisition (one for each dollar spent by Facebook, interestingly). So I’ll keep my thoughts on the acquisition brief:

• Facebook is full of awesome people. I know a few of them, and they work hard to build an unbelievably good product. How the product is used and by whom is an entirely separate issue. Remember that every time you criticise the product (not the community), think about the folk that are part of our industry who make it.
• Facebook owning Instagram in and of itself is not the sad part. The sad part will be when they monetize Instagram: when I’m shown an ad for the first time will be the last time I use it. This is especially sad since I’d be more than happy to pay a few bucks per month for the app, or as a one off (a la Instapaper). Until then I’m still going to use it. It’s a great product, and I can export all my photos out of it whenever I feel the need.
• Whomever criticises the guys for selling the company to Facebook is a fool. You and I would both sell our product for $1bn. If you don’t think you would, don’t kid yourself.

Finally, here’s a sensible and insightful Quora answer from Scoble about the why element to the acquisition.

I use Buffer to schedule some of my tweets. Some people hate it, but I like it because it means I don’t overbear my followers with content when I feel I’m at my most perky (Twitter-wise).

A happy benefit of using it reveals some interesting themes that my followers seem to enjoy. I’m listing them here just for my own personal reference, but you might find some of the findings interesting.

• Tweets about info-graphics. The promise of a new info-graphic is like catnip for the geek/design community that seem to like what I talk about.
• Consumable insights into UX. I get less interest from a tweet about a deep, in-depth study, but a quick “try this” or “do this” UX tips seem to be popular.
• Design and tech combined. Vector icons vs bitmaps, font-embedding, and so on, get much more response than pure tech or pure design related tweets.
• My opinions of web design trends that I have noticed, usually as an offshoot from my role as siteInspire website-picker. I’ve posted a few examples of what I think are insane, “scrolly” sites recently which seem to pique my followers’ interest.
• Anything to do with food gets plenty of attention (oh have you seen wholefooddiary.com?), but as long as it isn’t a straight-up recipe link. Good restaurants, food articles, or general food websites are popular.
• Productivity links and hints, along with career-oriented links. Some are my own blog posts, some are of others that I find interesting. I’m no productivity expert and overtly dislike anything the theme but some do seem to creep into my reading material and seem to be about issues that many others care about.
• Tweets about new web-apps that I like or find promising. Everyone loves a potential beta invite.
• Good old-fashioned link-bait articles about technology - mainly Android bashing, Apple fan-boying, or those dismissive of Microsoft.
• Tweets that start with “Woah…”. People who know me in real life know I get giddy with excitement about random things. If I precede a Tweet with “Woah”, I’m being serious.
• Anything about start-ups. It seems that we can’t get enough of the next big thing or the thing that was supposed to be the next big thing.

These are things that are unpopular:

• My links to Spotify. Probably due to my bizarre taste in music.
• Links that look like they should be straight retweets, without an opinion.
• Links to what sound like boring articles about production, manufacturing, or finance that I find fascinating.
• Flippant “Here’s a dog smiling” tweets. It seems that people have enough sources of flippancy from elsewhere, but smiling dogs are important to me.
• Tweets where I give quite a dismissive or negative opinion, even though I feel they are well worth sharing.
• Links to esoteric-sounding art installations or pieces, which only the title provided. I guess they sound pretentious or without context.
• Links to tech articles that people think they have seen before. These aren’t the link-baity ones, but the ones that provide meaningful analysis into important tech and startup themes.

If you want more of the former and less of the latter, you should follow me on Twitter.

☛

I switched the date order on my inbox the other day, which made me realise I have kept every since piece of “proper” email (i.e. not newsletters, and so on) since July 2006.

That means I have, right now, 34,746 emails in my Apple Mail inbox (about 17 being worthy of keeping a day), which is an amalgamation of 2 main accounts - personal, and work.

I haven’t added any to folders, nor have tagged them in any way. Occasionally I use Smart Folders to simply group emails from certain individuals depending on what my current projects are (though I only have three smart folders active right now - it’s never more than this).

When I have to get back to an email or respond to it, I flag them. This effectively becomes my to-do list, and I can see all the flagged items at once using the Flagged shortcut in mail. (The flagging functionality introduced in iOS 4.something was the single greatest advance in the iPhone in my opinion.)

As soon they have been responded or actioned, I un-flag. I usually start from the oldest and work my up. If a flagged message is really old, and nothing untoward has happened or the message is now irrelevant, I un-flag it, and will never return to it again.

At any given time I have less than 50 flagged items. If there is more than that I just have to make a concerted effort to go through them, but it’s never a case of trying to achieve “Flag Zero” - there will always be flagged items there, and accepting that means I’m never overwhelmed or stressed by it.

If I need to find something, full text search across every single email has never let me down, and it’s always super fast (in Mail, or in Gmail).

Ultimately this works if you accept you’ll never achieve inbox zero, and aren’t interested in the administrative overhead that comes into filing messages, this works well.

Finally, because of this - I don’t understand why so many people and companies are trying to fix the “email problem”, since email is only really a problem for the <1% of people who receive hideous amounts of email.

Email works fine if you just accept what it is: mainly messages between a person to person. If you use email to handle support requests, blog submissions, and so on, there are much better workflows you can use to help. Email won’t help you here.

I’m often criticised for doing too many things and not focusing my time a great deal on a single project.

Because of that I used to worry that I should stop doing too many things and focus on the products I make which were the most likely to succeed.

But you’ll never know which ones actually will succeed. To do that, you need to do lots of things, and the best will bubble to surface.

It’s also useful to do lots of things at the same time, in parallel. The one that you look forward to working on the most is an easy test of whether it will succeed.

And while you should focus your time a bit more on the one you enjoy working on, don’t ditch the others: keep them simmering away to return to later.

NB: By “succeed” I don’t necessarily mean valuable in a monetary sense: a successful product is something that you and others enjoy or are engaged with. Money is a happy side-effect of that.

Frank wrote this insightful comment on my recent post about Svbtle and on copying, which I felt deserved to be brought from the comments section into its own post, as it touches on some important aspects of the copying argument:

I think once you publish something, you lose control of it. At worst, you inspire mockery and parody. At best, you become material for future work, because what you’ve made is successful, interesting, or relevant. Usually, it is both.

All work produces spill-over repercussions that usually go against the will of the work’s creator. The creator wishes to retain authorship and control the work, while those in the culture wish to use, transform, and remix it. If the work is truly successful, it will defy authorship and turn into a shared experience for everyone. Those works are the hardest to control, because they diffuse, and spread wide by permeating into the air. The become a shorthand for those who make or enjoy similar work, becoming a shared vocabulary.

The situation requires things from both those who create the work, and those who wish to use it.

For the initial creator, they must resign most control upon publication, especially on the internet. Their work will be used to say and do things they don’t intend. Ideas, in truth, go further when others carry them, and this usually means they will go in directions the original author did not intend or imagine. For instance, I’ve had a quote of mine (“People ignore design that ignores people.”) taken out of context and used to justify two completely contradictory design methods. So it goes.

For those that use the things made by others, they should credit where possible, and have their work be transformative in some way. They can carry the ideas of others, but they must to take it further or a new direction. Then, they are obliged share alike. To not do both is to go against the goodwill initiated by the work’s creator.

And for both, we should recognize that all creative processes use materials from those who came before us, and respect the meaningful influence of others. We’re part of a long line of people who make things. It is a privilege to get to use the work of others in our own.

☛

Twitter tells me that it’s time for the Webby’s again, and the judging is taking place right now.

And it’s this time when I feel disappointed that a vast canon of great digital and interactive work is going to be ignored and not celebrated (much of which I post on siteInspire).

The fact is, the Webby’s is a profit-making organisation who charge up to $495 per entry. Entrants therefore tend to be large agencies with even larger FMCG-budget work (and–if I’m going to be cynical–those agencies desperate to show off their digital chops to gain relevance in a fast-changing industry) massively skewing the quality of the work to be judged, I feel to the detriment of the industry.

Of course congratulations in advance to the winners (the Webby’s do sometimes highlight good work), but for the rest of us, see this as a remember of what’s involved behind the “…we are an award winning…” claims on most designers’ creds docs: just a lot of money and a fun awards after-party.

☛