I found myself nodding in agreement while reading Jason Snell’s piece about OpenAI buying Ive’s tech design startup:

So OpenAI and Apple’s legendary design lead are embarking on a journey to build some new AI-enabled hardware. They’re coy about what it will be—probably not a phone, definitely not a watch, maybe not ​“something you wear” — but my gut feeling is that it’ll be something we’ve actually seen before. My true prediction is that it’ll be more like the Humane Ai Pin or that AI Pendant but they’re embarrassed to be associated with those products, so they’re going to wait a little longer to let the stink clear.

I’m skeptical about OpenAI in general, because while I think AI is so powerful that aspects of it will legitimately change the world, I also think it has been overhyped more than just about anything I’ve seen in my three decades of writing about technology. Sam Altman strikes me as being a drinker of his own Kool-Aid, but it’s also his job to make everyone in the world think that AI is inevitable and amazing and that his company is the unassailable leader while it’s bleeding cash.

I think it’s important to clarify that OpenAI isn’t bleeding cash; they’re haemorrhaging it. This is all further reinforced by the fact that OpenAI is purchasing Ive’s company for an astronomical $6.5 billion, and all that money is in privately owned stock funded by equity firms, banks, and desperate venture capital companies.

With all that in mind, I find myself wondering what Ive and Altman’s new product could possibly be. Jony Ive insists that good design ​“elevates humanity,” but because of the current direction of AI in our society, I don’t see how it’s possible any AI-based product could. 

I am not anti-AI. I use it frequently, particularly for summarizing in-depth Google research (my most recent example: ​“what e‑sims should I consider for traveling around France and the Netherlands, and which options have the widest coverage?”). I also use it for rubber ducking, in which I copy and paste error messages from my code into the chatbot and get it to suggest potential solutions. (It never gets it right, but it at least gets me thinking.)

So I am not some sort of anti-AI Luddite or prude. I think AI chat bots have enormous potential for research, data analysis, and even as code assistants. However, it’s not clearly net positive for the world.

On one hand, I see many smart people I know fawning over this technology product that is often merely a very advanced version of Siri. I also see Jony Ive and Sam Altman making googly eyes at each other in a very awkward announcement video. Even Jony Ive, a man who makes product design sound like Aristotelian philosophy, is fawning over Sam Altman. 

It’s also become clear that many unhinged CEOs are sending outrageous emails about their expectations for AI. In summary: ​“AI is coming for your job, so get ten times better at it quickly.” Mostly, it sounds like they expect their employees to do ten times the work for the same pay as before, as a baseline for keeping their job. AI is already being used to exploit the workforce.

For the first time in our collective history, knowledge workers face an extinction-level event, not dissimilar to what happened to blue-collar workers in the face of factory automation and machining. And Sam Altman and Jony Ive think that the best path forward is to continue developing a product they claim will be ​“for everybody,” when all current signs point to AI mostly being a tool for incredibly wealthy CEOs to extract more value and productivity from an increasingly smaller workforce of disenfranchised employees.

How can an AI product ​“elevate humanity” when it’s often used now to oppress and exploit the working class? Jony Ive is a very smart man, but his most recent work includes $3,000 jackets and personal branding for the king of England. Ive has a long history of designing luxury products for wealthy people. It is hard to imagine yet another tech product solving (or even avoiding) the problem its base technology has already created.

Unlike certain technocrats, I am unconcerned about a Terminator-like future. I am far more concerned with a future where technology has created an even larger disparity between the rich and the poor. Unless we can all figure out Universal Basic Income, (and conservative governments the world over are uninterested in that notion), I fear that we are creating a society that values the contributions of workers less than ever before, while the cost of living continues to become more unaffordable.

Sam Altman and Jony Ive spend a lot of time in their self-congratulatory video discussing San Francisco. This is what Sam had to say:

“San Francisco has been, like, a mythical place in American history, and maybe in world history in some sense. It is the city I most associate with the leading edge of culture and technology. … The fact that all of those things happen in the Bay Area and not anywhere else on this gigantic planet we live on, I think, is not an accident.” 

This is true (even if it ignores much of the rest of the Valley and San Jose in particular), but it’s worth noting that this is all happening in the United States. Right now, the US is a country where ​“move fast and break things” is quite literally the political policy of the White House. America leads in technology for many reasons, but the Valley’s attitude of ​“move fast and break things” has become a global problem.

Forgive me, then, for being skeptical that ChatGPT and its competitors will change the world in a net positive way. Forgive me for having a hard time imagining Jony Ive ever again designing anything as revolutionary as the iPhone (which, for all its flaws, globally democratized technology, changed society and global commerce, and has created a ripple effect that will last decades). Forgive me for assuming that all this hype around this partnership is a lot of smoke and mirrors to make OpenAI’s investors feel like there’s still a fish on the line, rather than a hole in the boat.

I am an optimist about humanity, but I am unsure technology is always for humanity’s betterment. I do not see how, to use Sir Jony Ive’s words, AI ​“elevates humanity.” Right now, it looks to me like the only person who’s been elevated in all this is Sam Altman.

I loved this video, where director Ryan Coogler breaks down all the aspect ratios for his new movie, Sinners. I’ve been trying to explain all this to friends for years, and it’s so helpful to have a short video like this to send to people who ask me what tickets they should buy for the movies they plan on seeing.

There are three things that interest me a lot about this discussion:

1. Film projection, in which old-school film prints are actually projected, is truly an amazing way to see a movie. Like Coogler, this is how I saw movies growing up. When I was 13 or so, our local theatre got digital projection. It looks worse, and it was obviously worse at the time too. We got the chance to see Oppenheimer in 70mm IMAX when it came out, and while that wasn’t my favourite movie, it was an incredible way to see it. Film has some shortcomings (you can see the flickering of light between frames if you know what to look for), but it’s also got a wider dynamic range than any other projection format, and a level of detail that is far beyond what film projection otherwise achieves.
2. Related to the first: Dolby Cinema is listed as an option in the video. In Canada, we call it AVX. It’s basically digital projection with HDR. It’s a common misconception that film isn’t ​“shot” in HDR. Film has a much wider dynamic range than even digital, so HDR, with its wider dynamic range, gets you closer to the actual experience of seeing a film negative. This is why HDR TVs are great. HDR projection is also great, but it’s still nowhere near as bright as HDR television, and HDR television often isn’t as bright as a real film negative. Dolby Cinema/​AVS is still far better than seeing a film on a normal screen, though.

3. I wish we talked more about the director’s intent in all this. IMAX has some really incredible marketing, but it’s often a bit of a sham. Coogler talks a lot about aspect ratios. He’s shot Sinners in IMAX’s native format, much like Christopher Nolan does when he makes movies. When folks shoot in IMAX’s native aspect ratio of 1.43:1, they usually are composing the shots for those aspect ratios. But it’s practically impossible for an entire film to be shot in IMAX, because the cameras are very loud and expensive. Typically, every shot is framed for a wider aspect ratio that matches the rest of the movie.

   In the case of Christopher Nolan’s films (and probably Coogler’s Sinners), that means you see the most essential elements of the frame even in a wide presentation. If you are fortunate enough to see the IMAX presentation, you get to see the entire frame, and you see it as the director fully envisioned it.

   This isn’t always true for IMAX movies, though. Let’s say you went to see Dune: Part 2 in IMAX. It was filmed digitally, and composed for a wide aspect ratio of 2.39:1. The IMAX presentation was in 1.9:1, not 1.43:1. When a film is presented in that aspect ratio, it usually means that the extra height of IMAX isn’t really IMAX. It wasn’t shot with IMAX cameras on IMAX film. What you’re seeing is really just the extra, un-cropped portion of the 35mm frame. Basically, you’re paying for the equivalent of a book before the printer chops off all the bleed around the margins. It’s unessential, and the filmmaker absolutely wasn’t concerned during shot composition with that portion of the visual. It’s just there so they can earn extra money off your ticket.

   This bothers me tremendously, because I want to unequivocally tell friends and family that the IMAX presentation of a film is the best way to see it, but that’s only true for the rare times that a film is actually shot with IMAX cameras (see Christopher Nolan movies and Coogler’s Sinners as examples).

All of this brings me to my final thought: ironically, I think, the best way to see most films is now on home video. A normal digital presentation in theatres is in 2K with no HDR. Still looks great, sounds good, but it’s lower resolution than what’s available at home and on video.

A Dolby Cinema/​AVX presentation is better, but still not as bright or as colourful as film or most home televisions. The sound will blow your socks off, though, for what it’s worth (Dolby Cinema also uses Dolby Atmos, and their theatres can have 21+ speakers throughout, creating a truly mind-blowing experience if you have the right seats).

IMAX isn’t worth it half the time, but when you can catch an IMAX presentation for a film shot with IMAX cameras, it will look and sound great. If you can catch one of those rare 70mm IMAX film presentations, then that is far and away the best way to see a movie that is available, bar none. It’s life-changing if you’re a lover of film, a truly revelatory experience

There are only ten theatres in the world that allow you to see Sinners in that IMAX film presentation. For the rest of us, we’ll see it in IMAX digitally — still good, but not as bright as your typical HDR television. 

What this means is that, outside of ten theatrical presentations across the world, every other screening is compromised in a way that 4K HDR televisions is not. On top of that, people in theatres today are typically on their phones, kicking your seat, or (in one particularly memorable instance for me) nearly getting into fistfights while they yell at one another.

All that to say it’s not a wonder theatres are starved for moviegoers.

This season of life is particularly busy for me, but I’m fortunate enough to live close-ish to the 70mm IMAX theatre in Toronto, and I might see about driving down to catch Sinners in the next week or two.

Adobe announced last week that many popular typefaces from Monotype are now in Adobe Fonts. This is a huge deal to me. 

In their press release, Adobe calls out Helvetica, Gotham, Avenir, Times New Roman, and Arial (I am not sure who would be excited about Times and Arial, but okay). I thought it would be worth sharing a few of the other standouts:

• Akzidenz-Grotesk Next (one of Monotype’s crown jewels, along with Gotham and Helvetica)
• Benton Modern
• Century Gothic
• Hoefler Text
• Neue Frutiger World, which is Frutiger (more or less) with support for additional script languages
• Neue Haas Unica and Neue Haas Grotesk, which (if I recall correctly) were previously part of Adobe Fonts
• Sentinel (another great Hoefler typeface)
• Univers Next (!!!)

This is a great list of typefaces. I was hoping I’d see Frutiger and Univers, but didn’t honestly expect them in the list.

I wish that Adobe would be clearer about their licensing arrangements, though: how long will these typefaces be a part of Adobe Fonts? Will they perpetually be a part of the service, or does Monotype plan on making changes down the line?

I ask because I am increasingly wary of subscription services offering content via license deals. I am immediately tempted to start using Univers for my studio’s brand — because I am a thirsty designer and my use of Graphik is starting to feel stale — but if Monotype pulls Univers Next from the lineup in two years, that would defeat the purpose. Branding should evolve around the needs of a company, not the whims of a type foundry.

I’ve become more familiar with this issue because of services like Xbox Game Pass. I like Game Pass well enough, but every time a third-party game was licensed for the service, I knew there was a secret timer attached to it. I knew I’d be halfway through Lies of P when it was removed from the service — and indeed I was. I never finished it.

I don’t begrudge third-party offerings for leaving a service. I merely want the terms of use and their expiration date to be clear — especially because we’re talking about typefaces used in corporate settings. 

This conversation is even more true because we’re talking about Monotype, a company owned by flea-ridden dirtbag corporate executives and banker types who believe the fastest way to buy a new Lambo is to become litigious about typefaces. (They’re monopolistic buttholes is what I’m saying.)¹

As summer finally breaks and gives way to fall here in Canada, I’ve spent a lot of time at work. The fall is always a busy season for me. It feels like we’re all bracing to huddle up, buckle down, and close up shop for winter mentally.

In the mornings, I catch up on a little reading. I thought I’d share what stood out to me over the past couple weeks below:

1. Cabel Sasser’s talk at the last XOXO was incredibly inspiring. If you haven’t seen it, and you’re interested in art and what we leave behind, I implore you to watch it all the way through to the end.
2. Canada has a long heritage of good design. I’m not joking! There is great stuff everywhere. We have cool brand identities dominating our grocery store aisles. But there is almost nothing more Canadian than the CBC logo. Richard Baird’s retrospective on the history of the logo was illuminating and itself well designed. 
3. Dan Mall, one of the most pioneering digital designers working today, goes on a fall photography trip every year and shares his photos. His photos this year are stunning.
4. “I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.” The Bob Spotter is cultural surveillance designed to capture the music that makes us bob our heads, without anyone’s consent, in an effort to graph our taste culturally rather than individually. I love this experiment; it reminds me of the internet of old. As Alex Cranz recently wrote for The Verge, the internet used to be for horny weirdos and college students, and Bob Spotter feels like it’s reminiscent of that time.
5. David Sparks noticed something at the British Museum in London: the ancient craftsmen were uninterested in perfection. They’re making art that is good enough, but even that art we call timeless. (There is hope for us yet.)
6. Stephen Robles, a YouTuber whose content I don’t watch, recently hit one hundred thousand subscribers. He made a video about getting started on making something with a key message: it’s never too late.
7. In what has clearly been a theme for me over the past two weeks, It’s Nice That published a feature about perfectionism and the way it helps and hurts us, seemingly simultaneously.
8. Nintendo has a music app now, in case you want to listen to any of their absolute bangers from a collection of classic games and franchises while you work.
9. On the topic of music, Apple published a press release this week about how it developed the new hearing aid feature for its AirPods Pro. Granted, this is just a press release, but it’s an inspiring story that reminds me some technology, even in our current age of AI consuming and subsuming all of humanity, is still worth being optimistic about.
10. I recently discovered Hyperessays, the home of Michel de Montaigne’s translated essays on the internet. They’re all very good, but so is the website’s design, which achieves the rarified status of feeling like you’re reading a book.
11. Tim Kreider’s 2012 essay ​“The Busy Trap” is a great read about separating ourselves from our work and our incomes. The entire thing is immensely quotable, the sort of thing you might read aloud to your spouse (if they were into that). My favourite quote is this: ​“The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.” This essay is as strong an argument for Universal Basic Income as any could be.

Until next time: stay relentless.

Your creative work does not require output to have value. To put it differently, your creativity doesn’t have to result in a product to have personal value for you.

As kids, we’d play with LEGO and action figures without trying to monetize our creations or our stories. I was in a bunch of bands in high school that went nowhere outside of a basement, but it was a lot of fun to play.

To be creative is to play. To play, you have to abandon all notions of production. Otherwise, it’s a job in disguise.

Creativity and productivity are not intrinsically related.

A lot of folks spend their evenings on their side hustles. I don’t have a lot of free evening time anymore. But even if I did, I don’t know if I could make that arrangement work.

My friend and business coach Shawn Blanc has a saying: ​“Work with your head. Rest with your hands.” His idea is that information workers engage mentally with their work. When their day is done and it’s time to rest, they need to turn off their brains and engage in a rejuvenating hobby (Netflix doesn’t count). His suggestion is to find hobbies that are physically engaging, like car maintenance, woodworking, or exercise.

If I sat at my computer all day and designed things, then spent the evening making music in front of the same computer, at the same desk, in the same room, I’d never get a break from my mental work. I wouldn’t even get a break from my physical studio. As much as I love my studio, that’s not good for my mental health.

A creative practice benefits from existing in a separate physical environment from one’s workplace — even if your work is creative, or you work from home. This is one of the big reasons I like having a laptop I plug in to a huge monitor: when it’s time to do something different, you can unplug the laptop and bring it to a different space, but avoid managing multiple machines.

On the other hand, I think there’s a benefit in buying a desktop computer instead of a laptop. When you stop working for the day, walk away from the screen and find something else to do. For me, shifting from a mental task (designing rectangles and programming websites) to a physical task (like playing guitar or exercising) has huge mental health benefits for my day-to-day life.

A couple weeks ago, I made the difficult decision to slow down my work on a YouTube channel I was working on. I recorded backing track videos for guitarists. Each week, I’d write a track, record all the individual parts (using a mix of real guitars and midi instruments for drum parts and the like), put together the video with all the chord changes and scale sheets, and put it in the YouTube machine.

The process took 8 – 12 hours per week. I spent one business day every week recording the audio and making the video. 

It was too much because it was no longer a hobby for me. It had turned into a side hustle.

Here’s what I think the difference is: a creative hobby is something that you do exclusively for you. It won’t make you money. It doesn’t inherently earn you an audience. It’s for fun. To make this as simple as possible, maybe you play an instrument. Maybe you draw.

On the other hand, a side hustle is something you make for other people. It can bring you the same amount of joy as a hobby, but the primary goal is providing a service or product for other people. My backing tracks became a side hustle. I made them for other people and hoped to grow an audience. If you play an instrument and you start releasing music, the minute that stops being about self-satisfaction and becomes something you do for the pursuit of an audience, it’s a side hustle.

The shift from a creative pursuit to a side hustle is a shift in focus.

Side hustles don’t have to make you money. You can do something creative for the benefit of others without earning an income. But if they do make you money, it becomes harder for that project to creatively nourish you. The pressure of the dollar is real. 

I decided to slow down on the YouTube output, though, because the calculus on my time compared to the potential financial reward (many years from now) didn’t make much sense to me. It made more sense to double down on my design business — a creative outlet people are happy to pay me for — than it did for me to focus on my side hustle.

My guitar playing is currently back to being merely a hobby. I loved making backing tracks, and I’m always making music, and it was hard to say goodbye. But one must say no to one thing to say yes to another.

Recently, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s novels. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a popular fantasy author with a wildly optimistic outlook on people, and a knack for world building and magic systems. 

He’s also extremely prolific.

Since George R.R. Martin published Dance of Dragons in 2011 (the most recently published book in his Song of Ice and Fire series), Brandon Sanderson has published ten novels. (That’s not including his novellas.) Some of those books are lengthy tomes that take dozens of hours to read.

Not that Sanderson and George R.R. Martin are in a competition, but if they were, Sanderson wins the output competition. And, at this point, I think he’d win the quality competition. Sanderson is becoming a better writer all the time, and I think it’s because he writes constantly. (Quantity breeds quality.)

I thought about this in light of my own creative practice, of course, and wondered how somebody like Brandon Sanderson gets all that writing done. That’s a lot of words. It turns out, Sanderson’s website has a whole section about his process. He has a page about his daily word count and time goals that I found interesting:

I write every day, and I give myself wordcount goals. (Usually, it’s 2k min, or a certain page goal if revising). It varies though. 10 pages is often my goal. I usually hit it, and sometimes do much more… Also, some days I write for four or five hours – some days I write fourteen or sixteen… The truth is, I love what I do. So if I have time when I’m not doing something else, I work on books… Most days, usually, formally, I write from about noon until four, and then I’ll hang out with my family and do other stuff until about ten, and I’ll start writing from about ten until midnight. No from about ten until 4AM.

First, Sanderson writes a lot more than many other authors who have documented their process. Stephen King writes for four hours a day (his process also includes an afternoon nap, which sounds awesome).

Second, Sanderon’s word count is impressive. Two thousand words a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but two thousand words a day about stories and people you’ve conjured out of thin air is no picnic. Two thousand words is double what Stephen King writes in a day. (Again, this isn’t a competition, but it’s interesting to compare two prolific writers. King has written eighteen books since Dance of Dragons. His books are shorter, in case that’s not obvious. Later was an excellent read, in case you wonder if he’s still got it after all these years.)

Put all this aside, though, for just a minute: how do writers like Sanderson and King write this much, all the time? How do you show up every day?

Of course, Brandon Sanderson has something to say about that:

Writer’s block for me is where I’m a few chapters in and the story’s not flowing ​‚or I’m in the middle of the book somewhere and a chapter is just not working… I deal with it by writing the next part anyway, and it often doesn’t work, but I can set it aside and try it again the next day. I find that just writing it anyway, writing it poorly, and setting aside what I wrote and trying again fixes the problem almost every single time. 

Sanderson writes the hard part anyway, then moves on even though it stinks.

I know it sounds a lot like I’m saying ​“just do the work to be creative and you’ll get it done,” and that’s not helpful. But stay with me here: there are at least two takeaways from what Sanderson is saying that I think are immensely helpful.

1. Set aside a time in your day when you get to do your creative work. Stephen King writes the same four hours every day. On ​“most days,” Sanderson writes from noon to 4, then 10pm to midnight. Make an appointment on your calendar and keep it.
2. In that time period, don’t worry about perfection. Your first ​“draft” might stink. That’s why pencils have erasers, Adobe Illustrator has so many ​“Dupe” shortcuts, programmers have the Delete key, and writers have editors.

The hardest thing is point number one. Let’s say you have a 9 – 5, but you take photos in the evening. That sucks. The best light is gone when the sun is down. You have to come up with some creative ways to make a daily practice out of that, but this is a creative process — coming up with creative solutions to hard problems is the work.

Even if your day job is doing creative work — maybe you’re a freelancer like me — it’s still hard to find a consistent time. Trust me, people love meetings, and many clients are more interested in meeting with you than they are in your completion of their work.

But if you can find the time to show up every day, and keep that appointment with yourself, the second problem solves itself. Your first drafts get better. You get blocked less often. The mere act of showing up triggers your brain’s neurological pathways into doing the work.

The hard part is making the time to do your creative work. To do the stuff that matters. Don’t try to find the time. You won’t. You must make it for yourself.

Last week, my wife and I streamed Girl, Interrupted, which I hadn’t seen in about twenty years. There’s a moment where a psychologist explains the protagonist’s central problem: she is unnecessarily choosing to embrace her pain and live in a psychiatric institution: 

Quis hic locus?, quae regio?, quae mundi plaga? What world is this?… What kingdom?… What shores of what worlds? It’s a very big question you’re faced with, Susanna. The choice of your life. How much will you indulge in your flaws? What are your flaws? Are they flaws?… If you embrace them, will you commit yourself to hospital?… for life?

I immediately rewrote this quote in my mind to be less negative: The choice of your life is this: What are your flaws? Are they flaws? Will you embrace them and embrace yourself?

Naturally, this whole thing reminded me of the creative process, which to me is about embracing ourselves and our imperfections. If we can’t accept our flaws, we’ll never make anything worthwhile. I think we can create from a good place or a bad place, but each unique creation of ours bears the signature flaws that make us unique. So if we want to commit ourselves to doing good creative work for all our lives, we have to embrace our flaws. 

Of course, the central question is, are they flaws?

Like many things in life, non-western cultures are much better at this. The Japanese allow imperfection and accept it in all things, including art. They even have a word for it: wabi-sabi. For them, something isn’t beautiful unless it is imperfect, or impermanent, or incomplete. I’m struck that we as humans are all imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. We want to find things that remind us of ourselves.

Traditional Hebrew rabbis encourage the admittance of imperfection. As Rabbi Ari Lev writes, ​“And amidst our imperfections may we have the courage and compassion to to say to ourselves, Hinein — Here I am, I am not perfect, but I am very good.” (Modern western Christianity barely has a basic understanding of this concept and has made ignoring it a cottage industry of theirs.)

The flaw in my work, or maybe the flaw within myself, is a fear of impermanence. I have struggled with the impermanence of my work for years. I design websites and web apps for a living. They have a life cycle of somewhere around seven minutes before some executive gets the brilliant idea that a redesign will fix all their problems, which is disheartening when you spend months or even years of your life working with clients on large projects.

But wabi-sabi: embrace your flaws, and embrace the flaws in your work.

To counter this, I make music. I record it. I share it. I have a little Youtube channel, and a Patreon, and a Bandcamp page, all that junk. In my mind, it’s evergreen: a piece of music lasts a lot longer than most websites. The music I make and put on Youtube will be as valuable in 2033 as it is in 2023. 

Every week, I spend at least one day a week just making music. It keeps me sane when I make something as impermanent as a website the next day.

What are your flaws? Are they flaws? Will you embrace them and embrace yourself?

When in your life did you feel like you were the most creative?

I don’t mean productive. Creativity and productivity are different.

I mean creative. When in your life did you feel like your output matched your input?¹

The concept of achieving a flow state has become so popular that it has a detailed Wikipedia page. What if one could achieve flow for longer than a few hours at a time? What if one were able to pursue flow, relentlessly, without ceasing, for months or even years at a time?

I don’t really think of that as a flow state any more. I call it ​“relentless creativity.” And I think I achieved it once for a period of a few months, or a year.

This period of relentless creativity began in March of 2020. This was the beginning of the COVID lockdowns, of course, but I’m not sure it was just the one event that created these circumstances. And I’m also not sure how long it lasted. For all I know, I was in this state for two years. Thanks to the way COVID compressed the feeling of time², I couldn’t say how long the state of relentless creativity lasted with any certainty³.

I would like to experience that flow state again. And I’d like to stay there.

With that in mind, I plan on writing a lot more about achieving this state in the coming months. I thought it would make sense to start by thinking through what allowed me to become relentless creative in 2020:

• Certainly, COVID was part of it. COVID meant there was nothing to do but keep up with the news (and lose your soul), or get to work. I chose the latter.
• I was fortunate, though, to have a great workspace in my home. At the time, I was working on an iMac Pro in a den in the condo. There was a designated space to get to work. I couldn’t just pick up a laptop and go lie on the couch. My desk was on wheels, but I couldn’t move it too far. Our condo wasn’t that big!
• The condo might have played a role in it too: when a third of your living space is designated to be your working space, it’s pretty easy to make your way to the studio each morning and get to work.
• And another thing that might have helped were the clients I had at the time: thanks to COVID, my work exploded, and I had more work than ever before. I was at the magical point in my career where people wanted to work with me specifically, and had started to seek me out. Suddenly, my thoughts carried real weight, and my opinionated designs were welcomed and encouraged. (I’ve been blessed to have a great roster of clients ever since.)

All of this to say that my environment was extremely conducive to creative work at the time (James Clear says your environment will dictate your behavioural defaults.

None of that accounts for the other half of this equation: the inputs.

• In 2020, my wife and I watched 166 movies. (That remains our record.)
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons had just come out for the Switch. I was playing it every morning. I would hop on before work for fifteen minutes and check turnip prices (IYKYK). Something about that small (and extremely cheerful) dopamine hit would trigger something in my brain and I’d happily get to work after.
• In the evenings, if we weren’t watching movies, I was often playing hard video games. According to my notes, during COVID, I 100% completed Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Dark Souls III, and 2018’s God of War on the highest difficulty. It was in this time period that I fell in love with these high-skill-level games. For me, it was a way to cope with depression. (It’s still a way I cope with my depression.)

Between video games and movies, I was absorbing a lot of visual media every day, and I was often engaging with the material at an intellectual level. I was allowing my work to be influenced, in some subconscious way, by all the media I was working with.

I don’t mean to state that the best way to become more creative is to mindlessly binge Netflix for hours. But we all need to become inspired somehow. Curating what we engage with, and picking the thing that most inspires us to do our best work, is going to go a long way to making us more creative.

The point is: creativity isn’t exclusively a measure of our output. It’s also an indication of our input.

My thoughts on becoming relentlessly creative right now are fairly simple:

1. Create an environment where creativity is your default. To repeat my own example: if you work with computers, there is a lot of value in getting a nice desktop and a good monitor. (I’d love a Mac Studio.) The whole point is to create a dedicated environment to do your work in. You will not be more creative if you lug your tools to all sorts of different rooms. You’re just rearranging the furniture in an effort to procrastinate.
2. Consume as many good inputs as possible. This might not mean reading a book or watching a movie; it might mean engaging with another hobby. Maybe you play the piano to engage different mental muscles (playing an instrument has similar effects to learning another language), or perhaps you like woodworking on the weekends.
3. I didn’t mention this above, but showing up every day to make your art is going to have a big impact on your work. ​“Quality is a probabilistic function of quantity.”
4. And again, I didn’t mention this above, but exercise as often as possible. Some research suggests that creativity and physical health are linked. The connection is probably not direct, but even an indirect connection with positive effects is worth exploring in our own lives.

Go make something beautiful.

Today, I get to eat a little crow: contrary to my publicly stated intentions, I did not return my iPad Pro. The short version is that my old iPad Pro more or less died on me. 

In my previous post, I wrote that I could do everything I needed on an iPad with pen and paper. The thing is, I didn’t inventory my work on iPadOS until after I wrote that post. (This was stupid of me.) That was when I thought to myself: ​“Shoot, I do a lot of iPad-only stuff when I’m working on wireframes.” I’ll frequently grab screenshots of apps and websites and place them alongside my sketches. I tend to iterate on ideas from left to right, duplicating old ideas, erasing what didn’t work, and sketching more (as though I were duplicating art boards in Figma). 

On top of that, a lot of my clients are long-term clients, and the work that I do months or years prior might (and has) become useful again, even if it were disregarded prior. I do not want to keep stacks of draft paper filed away for months or years at a time.

At that point, I made a decision: I still don’t need this new iPad, but I do need my old one.

So I booted up my 2017 10.5” iPad Pro, which I had previously formatted for trade-in, and set it up again. I had a bit of work to do, so once Freeform was ready, I got to it.

That was when I noticed the smell.

The iPad had this faint smell of burning plastic, but only when I held my face near it (which I tend do while drawing; please do not judge me and my weird habits). I’m no engineer, but I know that anything resembling the smell of fire in a battery-powered product was bad, so I shut the iPad down, and made a new plan.

Clearly, my 2017 iPad Pro was kicking the bucket.

So, in an effort to get the best bang for my buck and make the new one last, I would keep the 2024 iPad Pro, and trade in the 2017 iPad Pro.

A day or two later, I brought the 2017 iPad Pro to the Apple Store to trade it in. I explained what I just wrote, but the Apple Genius seemed nonplussed. ​“Does the device power on?” he asked. I said yes. ​“Does the screen work?” he asked. I said yes again. Finally, he asked if Touch ID worked and there were any large dents or scratches. I said yes and no, respectively, but I added that the battery only lasts an hour and may or may not be swelling. He again, said this wasn’t an issue and they would check all that during their diagnosis.

So he used whatever fancy tool Apple has for this, signed off on everything, and gave me a refund of $100 towards the 2024 iPad Pro (which felt pretty generous, all things considered).

Then he got me to wipe the 2017 iPad Pro, and something happened.

The iPad froze after I entered my password to disable Find My on the iPad. ​“Oh yeah, this happens all the time,” the Genius said. ​“On every product, not just iPads. iPhones and Macs all freeze here too. Don’t worry.” 

Then the iPad unceremoniously shut down. 

I asked if we should have seen an Apple logo with a loading indicator below it (we should have), and the Genius said yes. But then he added nonchalantly, ​“Who knows though? I’ll be back.”

He spent a few minutes helping other customers before he returned. My iPad still hadn’t rebooted.

“You said the battery doesn’t last, right?”

I said yes.

He took about thirty seconds to find a Lighting charger buried somewhere in the deep recesses of the store and plugged the iPad Pro in. It still didn’t turn on. 

The Genius’ brow furrowed. ​“I think your iPad is dead.” Seeing my immediate look of concern, he added, ​“but we already gave you the money for the trade in, so it’s our problem now.”

I spent another several minutes with him while he tried every troubleshooting method I knew of and a couple I didn’t. Eventually, the iPad rebooted long enough just long enough for us to see the iOS welcome screen. ​“There. Your data’s been wiped,” he confirmed. 

Then the screen turned off again as the iPad shut down, while plugged directly into an outlet.

And that, dear reader, is how my old iPad Pro died the moment after Apple gave me my trade-in value for it. As my father-in-law pointed out to me, it is rare in life for a system like that to work in your favour, so cherish it while it lasts.

I did, however, return the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, which only served to help me procrastinate on the iPad before returning to my Mac. I replaced it with the Smart Folio cover, which is totally fine.