in which I rediscover life
I was a naive child/woman/ch-man/wooild up till the moment a sudden need to read something got me to go onto my normal design blogs for some inspiration. Inspiration means looking at other people's works and then feeling "FUCK, there's no way I can do something like that." Ok, that's not really what got me to go onto Smashing Mag in the end, but basically looking at people's works made me feel that shitty and somewhat motivated, but mostly still shitty.
So I had enough of really wierd inspirational stuffies (courtesy of Abduzeedo, which really, really, needs to rethink what they consider inspiration, other than the pretty sometimes), so I went over to Smashing Magazine, which is probably the most credible design website/blog on my bookmark list. Scrolling down and skipping the randomly BORING and "how could they be relevant to me?" posts like "the disappearance of Flash from the Net" or "Holistic Web Browsing: Trends of the Future", I found an article that finally piqued my interest.
Is Design Dying?
And I thought, "NAWWWWWW".
Then I actually READ the article and I thought "Oh shit, that guy's right, We're so fucked." Or at least I am. I feel kinda bummed about it. Previously I knew that there was still so much that I needed to learn. I always treated my UI classes like "WTF is this" because a lot of it made sense to me. But looking at the contents of the article, and following the links to the references and all, I realise that it takes a lot more than pretty to make a good .. well anything. Then I see the stuff that I learnt in school all popping up.
User Experience, Personas, Prototyping, Sketching, User Studies. I mean, an integral part of my interests lie in design and user interface design but to see how misled my approach to the subject has been a really rude awakening. If anything, I don't blame the way the curriculum I follow is designed, rather I blame my own inability to get past the pretty. I guess the one example that really hit me hard was the use of the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way". I basically learnt to draw from that book when I was 14, and it formed the very basis of why I'm doing what I'm doing now, but it never occured to me that I follow tutorials and "how to"s so religiously without questioning "Why do they do this?". Like I said, I haven't been able to get past the pretty and this shames me.
If anything, this is a reason for me to get my act together. It's been two years in university already, and I'm still stuck at what I'm working for. Laziness is one of my major flaws and honestly, I haven't been too good at dealing with it have I?
So I had enough of really wierd inspirational stuffies (courtesy of Abduzeedo, which really, really, needs to rethink what they consider inspiration, other than the pretty sometimes), so I went over to Smashing Magazine, which is probably the most credible design website/blog on my bookmark list. Scrolling down and skipping the randomly BORING and "how could they be relevant to me?" posts like "the disappearance of Flash from the Net" or "Holistic Web Browsing: Trends of the Future", I found an article that finally piqued my interest.
Is Design Dying?
And I thought, "NAWWWWWW".
Then I actually READ the article and I thought "Oh shit, that guy's right, We're so fucked." Or at least I am. I feel kinda bummed about it. Previously I knew that there was still so much that I needed to learn. I always treated my UI classes like "WTF is this" because a lot of it made sense to me. But looking at the contents of the article, and following the links to the references and all, I realise that it takes a lot more than pretty to make a good .. well anything. Then I see the stuff that I learnt in school all popping up.
User Experience, Personas, Prototyping, Sketching, User Studies. I mean, an integral part of my interests lie in design and user interface design but to see how misled my approach to the subject has been a really rude awakening. If anything, I don't blame the way the curriculum I follow is designed, rather I blame my own inability to get past the pretty. I guess the one example that really hit me hard was the use of the book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way". I basically learnt to draw from that book when I was 14, and it formed the very basis of why I'm doing what I'm doing now, but it never occured to me that I follow tutorials and "how to"s so religiously without questioning "Why do they do this?". Like I said, I haven't been able to get past the pretty and this shames me.
If anything, this is a reason for me to get my act together. It's been two years in university already, and I'm still stuck at what I'm working for. Laziness is one of my major flaws and honestly, I haven't been too good at dealing with it have I?