I’ve read a lot of articles about how homogenous web design has become, but few have compelled me like Morgane Santos’ on Medium. For the first time, I felt as a web designer that I wanted to join this conversation.

This part of the article grabbed my attention:

Perhaps the biggest issue with all this homogeneity is how lonely it can feel when you want to do something different. Two separate friends have told me how they don’t feel like they fit in with the design community. These two friends are guys who more or less fit the Designer Dave stereotype, too. If they feel isolated, how does everyone else feel?

I started to gather my thoughts, but explained to my wife later on that I didn’t feel qualified to share them — which is interesting to me because it proves Ms. Santos’ theory. I, too, am white and in my mid-twenties (although I do not have a beard). Some of my web design work falls prey to certain stereotypes (although I don’t necessarily feel all of it does). In many ways, I relate to Designer Dave. With that being said, I’ve tried to gather my thoughts coherently regardless.

What’s happening in design reminds me of what’s been happening in filmmaking over the past twenty years. Have you noticed that a lot of popular action movies have been bathed in orange and blue?

Once you see it, it’s hard to un-see it. Priceonomics has a really good rundown on what’s going on, and you should read the whole article, but this quote deserves special mention:

One way to figure out what will look good is to figure out what the common denominator is in the majority of your scenes. And it turns out that actors are in most scenes. And actors are usually human. And humans are orange, at least sort of! Most skin tones fall somewhere between pale peach and dark, dark brown, leaving them squarely in the orange segment of any color wheel. Blue and cyan are squarely on the opposite side of the wheel. You may remember from preschool that ​“opposite” color pairs like this are also known as ​“complementary” colors. That means that, side-by-side, they produce greater contrast than either would with any other color. And when we’re talking about color, contrast is generally a desirable thing.

I’d need to do more research, but I’d be willing to wager that a teal and orange colour scheme makes your average film studio more money on opening weekend too. Most big-budgets films are cast in this orange and blue look, while indies feel more free to roam around.

That’s not very different from web design: while market forces are unwilling to invest in unusual design, smaller organizations who need to stand out may be more interested. The same way some directors make one for the studio, and then one for them, it’s financially sensible to do the same thing as a designer. (I’m not saying to compromise your values; I’m telling you to make enough money to support yourself and your families.)

My second thought is this: there are ways to play with established conventions.

Priceonomics included an image from Mad Max: Fury Road in their article. It was my second-favourite movie last year, and a big part of that was because I adored the colours. The story is that director George Miller wanted to show the film in black and white, but Warner Bros. refused (market forces at work). In response, Miller gave them what they wanted: blue and orange, cranked up as high as he could make it go.

That sense of over-saturation practically outdoes Transformers, and in a backhand way, forces you to notice it and be aware. I don’t know a single person who saw it who didn’t mention the colours. It’s subversive. Miller wants the colours to be part of the film’s intensity, yes, but he also wants it to reflect the insanity of everything else going on. It’s absolutely intentional.

I think we can learn something from Miller: If you’re given constraints that you don’t like, be subversive with them. We design for audiences who are smart enough to notice, and while they might not realize you’re being playful, they’ll appreciate your work all the more. You’ll stand out within the confines of homogeneity.

All that being said, at the end of the day, I don’t know the answer to homogeneity in web design, nor do I feel qualified to share my thoughts on the topic. For me, sharing this takes courage.

I learned in school that our brains are wired to notice semiotic patterns. Blue and orange is one such pattern. Boring websites are another. And while neither are going away any time soon, I think there’s a lot we can do to subvert expectations and experiment with new things.

Most digital todo lists suck. I’m sure you’re aware of this. I’m certain you’ve probably spent hours combing through tips on LifeHacker about how to organize the chaos of your life with ​“this one simple app that will blow your mind.” Or maybe you’re like me and you’ve bent over backwards to fit your workflow into somebody else’s expensive dystopian view of getting things done.

I don’t need to tell you that task management apps suck. 

But I need to share this because nobody is saying it, and we’re all pretending like we’re organized, but the truth of the matter is that the people who make these apps must have nothing to do — because their apps don’t work for busy people. So this post is for them. 

I only need one thing from a todo list: to tell me what I should be working on right now. And when I’m done that, what’s the next thing I can do?

That’s it. No gimmicks. It’s that simple.

Yes, all your extra features, like sub-tasks of a sub-project inside a project within an area of responsibility in the context of ​‘Phone Calls’ are all well and good, but if you cannot give me a high-level look at what needs working on today, don’t bother.¹

This isn’t just about what’s due: it’s about what’s important, what’s in progress and what big-picture project I should be working on. If I need to finish a project by Friday and it will take three days, then it should show up in a special Today view as early as Wednesday and not leave the Today view until it’s done, even if it’s overdue by three months and a day. 

My task management app should be about managing what’s important, making changes to the unimportant on the fly, and getting crap done. 

For reference, this is where I’m storing all the crap I need to do now. 

Note: This post was originally called ​‘I Tried Every Todo List App So You Don’t Have To’. I changed it for the sake of brevity, not because it’s untrue. I think I did try almost every todo app on the market for iOS and the web.

Yep. In 2015, I’ve made a blog.

I know this is totally counter-cultural at the moment. Writing a blog on your own self-hosted website is increasingly unpopular. And I know Medium is all the rage right now, along with Tumblr, and I even understand why. But in the age of streaming and on-demand content, I really like having my name on the masthead.

I guess I’m a traditionalist. As far as I’m concerned, places like Medium are nice ways to give somebody else all your best words and let them find a way to monetize it. Let the kids have it.

Of course, I didn’t decide to start writing online again solely to rail against the system.

Why I Started a Blog

Before I became a web designer, I was a writer. I’ve been writing since I could read. I even convinced my parents to buy me a typewriter when I was around eight years old, thinking it would help me become more like Hemingway and Tolkien. (What eight-year-old thinks like that, right?)

I started writing professionally when I was twenty-one. I worked at an ice cream chain, and a gentleman came into the store who ran a television studio. We got talking, and when I told him I wanted to be a screenwriter, he told me his last writer just won an Emmy and to give him a call. He gave me his card.

From there, with no portfolio or CV (amazingly), I was suddenly writing commercials for a small production studio a five minute walk from my apartment. It was the dream gig for a young guy in school. That gig turned into opportunities to write for places like AppStorm, Paste Magazine, Jim Dalrymple’s The Loop Magazine, and more. Most of the time I would write app reviews or articles covering design in the Apple world. That writing led to opportunities doing design work, and I never looked back.

That is, until recently. I don’t have a place to share my thoughts with the world. I want to have somewhere to share my writing that, like my words, belong to me. Most importantly, I miss being forced to think about what I want to say. It’s one thing to have an opinion, but another to hold it up to such scrutiny as to write it down. So here we are.

Make It Feel Like Me

I was living in the apartment my wife and I share before we were married. Our wedding was at the end of the month, so to avoid paying for an extra month of rent at her old place, we got the keys for the new one a month in advance. I started moving the essentials there: we had a mattress, a bean bag chair, and my TV with a Wii U and PlayStation. We stocked the kitchen with just enough bowls and plates for me to get by, and I brought some of the old kitchen stuff from my college days down.

And that somehow felt like enough. It didn’t feel like home yet — that didn’t come until later — but it felt like me. That’s what my vision is for this site. I want it to feel like me. Nothing but some text, some funky colours, and maybe the occasional image or two. I didn’t want any crazy JavaScript or wild animations. I just wanted an online home for my thoughts, where they could live unfettered from the noise and distractions that come with being on the web circa 2015. A place that would be as opinionated as me, maybe even to the point of being unpopular. I don’t care really. This isn’t for you. Selfishly, this whole place is for me. And I think today’s web could use a little more of that selfishness. Maybe it’s the only way to keep everything from looking the same.

None of this is to say this place won’t get cluttered as time goes on. This is a brand new home with only a couple pieces of furniture. Give it a couple years to start looking crowded. By the time my wife and I moved into the apartment officially, there was enough stuff in it to fill Noah’s ark. And I’m excited for that to happen to this website, too. Not everything should be a masterpiece of Zen minimalism, least of all the online homes that represent our real selves. We’re messy and complicated people, right? So I figure the website will get messy and complicated too in time.

I’ve kept a couple things from my old blogs on here — just my most important thoughts from the past year. I didn’t want to clutter this place up with junk right out of the gate. I just wanted to make something new, and to learn a few things on the way. Expect me to do more of that around here. Sound good?

Some great news from the Adobe front: they’ve finally realized they need a solution more unique than Photoshop for today’s digital designers. They call it Adobe Comet. I think it looks super exciting. 

The video on the landing page doesn’t do a whole lot for me — it’s clearly some promotional fluff to last them until launch — but it looks like a great tool. I like that they’re clearing thinking through competitive features and UX designer’s needs, so it’s not going to be just a ​“me too” product. 

What surprises me is that it doesn’t look like they’re promoting it as a part of Creative Cloud; at least, not yet anyway. My understanding (although I could be wrong) is that the beta will be open to the public.

A part of me wonders if it will have an extended beta like Brackets, Adobe’s open-source text editor. That would be unfortunate. Brackets is nice, but it always feels a little behind compared to competitors like Atom (the text editor we’re using here). 

And that’s a sort of summary for Adobe’s current position in the digital design app marketplace: behind the eight ball. I don’t know if Comet will be more of the same or a sign of real change, but I’m excited for its debut in 2016.

Incredibly sad news. Frutiger is responsible for a great many beautiful typefaces, but Univers is one of my favourites. For lack of better terms, a gentleman’s Helvetica. Rest in peace.

Every time I start mocking up a new project, I have a habit of beginning the work in Photoshop. After all, it seems that many other designers — some who I greatly respect — swear by the software. So there’s this part of me that figures, it must just work.

Of course, we all know that’s not necessarily the case. But when Adobe used this year’s Creative Cloud update to release Design Space Preview, I spent yet another week trying to make Photoshop work for me.

It still doesn’t work.

I can certainly appreciate the vision Adobe has for the product, but it’s so far behind. Artboards and a simplified skin won’t save Photoshop. Here’s what it would take to get me out of Sketch and back into Adobe’s playground:

• proper support for vectors and much stronger zooming capabilities
• better font rendering, as well as displaying typefaces as vector properties. Really, if anybody should be able to pull this off, it would be Adobe. If I can do it in CSS, I want to be able to do it in Photoshop.
• a native, speedy, buttery-smooth app for OS X. Sketch is so much less prone to crash on me that using it is a total no-brainer.
• an interface that doesn’t make me feel like I’m wandering through a pit of darkness and despair

Am I asking for too much?¹

Last week, Apple made a big splash with its latest iPad offering, the iPad Pro. Featuring a massive screen with insanely high, pixel-perfect resolution, a nearly-perfect don’t-call-it-a-stylus digital pencil, and an incredible amount of computational power than surpasses the overwhelming majority of laptops in the wild, the new iPad should be a no-brainer for a creative professional like myself. I want one so badly. But I still can’t use it for work. 

With that explosive, perhaps controversial lede out of the way, I should clarify: I think a growing number of people can use the iPad for work, particularly with the split-screen features of iOS 9. If you tend to work a lot in the Office suite and send a lot of email, I think the iPad could easily replace your laptop. 

But for the creative pro that Apple is pitching this to, I think it’s a dud. 

To begin with, there’s a dearth of applications in the creative industry for the iPad. Adobe has made a couple, but they’re designed for mobile and meant to get us started with our ideas. If we want to finish them, Adobe is pretty clear that we need to do so in a desktop application. You still can’t run Xcode on an iPad. You still can’t make a proper mockup on an iPad. 

Part of the problem is the App Store. My preferred mockup app on the Mac, Sketch, won’t be coming to the iPad any time soon. Emanual Sa explains:

But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. We cannot port Sketch to the iPad if we have no reasonable expectation of earning back on our investment. Maintaining an application on two different platforms and provide one of them for a 10^th of it’s [sic] value won’t work, and iPad volumes are low enough to disqualify the ​“make it up in volume” argument.

Yikes. I don’t believe that app trials would fix everything, but I think it’s time Apple threw developers a bone. Unsustainable software businesses won’t entice great software developers to invest in your ecosystem. 

The other problem is that iOS is still a sandboxed environment. You can have a great app like Coda running on iOS, but it’s pretty limited: no external servers, limited language compilers, etc. I spend a lot of my day coding in text editors. When I can’t do half my work on a device because there’s no possibility of an app in that product category being available for it, that’s very constraining.

With all that being said, even when there is an app available for iPad that I could use in my workflow, I’m not sure I want to use it. 

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the beta of an app called Protosketch. It’s similar enough to Sketch that I can get some work done with it. But doing some of this work without the precision of a mouse is cumbersome, particularly on my first-gen iPad Air (whose single gigabyte of RAM is really beleaguered while running the app). The larger iPad Pro might make it better, but it’s not worth spending $1,000 to find out. 

If you want my hot take on when iPads will kill off desktops, it’s pretty simple: desktop computers lose their usefulness when the software available on the iPad becomes more valuable than its hardware. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I hope the iPad Pro helps spur us along. Like I said, I want one.

I never used to be interested in making New Year’s resolutions, and I still don’t like calling them ​“resolutions”. Resolutions imply that you need, in the immortal words of Dave Grohl, ​“a little bit of resolve” to see them through. And it makes me feel like they need to take a whole year to complete, when in reality some goals may only take two weeks to implement.¹

A lot of people I respect and admire have written out in detail what their resolutions are. I have a list, but I think most of them are boring. They mostly revolve around changes in my personal life, which I don’t mind sharing:

• In June, I’m marrying the love of my life (insert mandatory cuteness here). I’m thinking a lot about how to win the 2015 Award World’s Best Husband after the wedding day, and about the goals my fiancée and I have set for ourselves in our life together.
• After the wedding, we’ll be living in Toronto — the ​“hub of the universe”, in case you’re not from Canada and aren’t familiar. I live about an hour from there now, but irregardless, it still implies a large shift in clientele and my current business relationships. I want to keep my business above water during this change. Apart from gaining deeper knowledge of my finances (which I have hired a bookkeeper for), I have no further business goals than that.²
• My friends and I are launching the Wildfire Community this year, probably in the next month or so (I hope). I want to have a positive impact on my hometown of Guelph, even if that means I have to be involved in making it a better place from my future home in Toronto.

Most of my goals revolve around these circumstances, and as a result, all my goals involve being mindful as a spouse and as a leader. They involve looking after myself, so I can take better care of the people who are important to me. And they involve equipping the few people I lead to become better leaders than me, so they can make the world a better place than I alone could.

I know I don’t necessarily believe in ​“New Year’s resolutions”, but I do believe in mindfulness and in self-improvement. Setting manageable goals and coming up with an action plan to achieve them is important. And sharing what you’re attempting to do is important too, because it keeps you accountable.

So I’m sharing my goals here for prosperity. I hope that a year from now, when I look back on them, I’m able to recognize where I grew and where I re-aligned my priorities as the year progressed.

A few weeks ago, I wrapped up the first year of writing my music blog, Unsung Sundays. Technically speaking, I’ve been writing it for a year and a half, but I took time away from it at a couple points last year (usually holiday seasons), and it took a couple months longer than expected for me write 52 posts. Unsung Sundays is an experimental blog for me. I listen to a lot of music while I work, and I wanted an easy way to share my new favourites with my friends. Instead of just telling people what was new whenever we chatted about it in person, a blog seemed like a faster and more frequent way to communicate. I share about five records every Sunday — some old, some new, hopefully all worth listening to. I summarized how much time I’ve spent on Unsung in another blog post, but here’s a quote:

• 52 weeks (obviously)
• 84 posts
• 223 recommended records
• 2,809 recommended songs (!!)
• 2 special playlists (1 for Stanley Cup 2013 and 1 for Kanye West songs)
• 1 guest post
• 61 followers on Tumblr
• 63 likes on Facebook
• 15 followers on Twitter
• 116 tweets
• Countless hours listening to music and creating content.

I’m not kidding about Unsung being my experimental blog. I think it’s been a learning exercise in more ways than one. It’s on Tumblr, and I’ve learned that long posts aren’t exactly the best way to communicate there. I’ve had no fewer than three major formats on Unsung:

• a long post with full-length album reviews of three to five records a week
• a short post with one full-length album review for one record every Sunday
• five short posts throughout the day on every Sunday with tiny snippets explaining why I’m recommending the album. (This is the current format.) In the future, I’m going to be changing this again because I haven’t found the sweet spot. For some people, this comes naturally, but for me, I’m still experimenting with the best way to get messages to people. The people that read Unsung really seem to love it, but there just aren’t a lot of people that do that. And while the audience count isn’t everything, it’s good encouragement to continue writing. The point is this: it’s been a year, but keep following the blog (or start following it). It’s been fun, and it’ll be interesting to see if any changes in the future cause a significant change in my readership. (And as you can see from the numbers above, I’m pretty honest about my readers.)

This week, Robin Williams sadly passed away. I think every member of my generation — really, everybody under 25 — can relate to the loss we feel. Robin Williams was with us throughout much of our childhood. For some of my friends, his role in Mrs. Doubtfire alone was enough to make them want Mr. Williams as a surrogate father in their own lives, when they were living in similarly fractured homes. He was a brilliant actor, a wonderful comedian, and an inspiration for so many of us. For me, his performance in Good Will Hunting taught me more about what real love looked like than any traditional romance film.

What shocked me the most about his death wasn’t just the manner of it. What shocked me was how alone he was. In the days since his death, we’ve learned his wife slept in another bedroom the night before he died. I don’t know if she did this every night, or if it’s even true, but its implication astounds me: we all crave intimacy.

I struggled with depression a lot in my youth. In university, I had a serious drinking problem. In hindsight, I can admit these things, but when I was going through them, it was easier to pretend the issues didn’t exist. I had neither intimacy nor a real sense of community in my life. Both are necessary to fluorish.

When I found community and started building real and loving friendships, my entire life began to change. My outlook is wildly more positive, my faith is a real priority, and I have a healthy romantic relationship for the first time in my life. Community changes everything.

There’s this sad myth that creative people do their best work when they’re alone. People believe that depression and isolation breed creativity. The myth exists because we believe Hemingway wrote alone. It exists because we think Steve Jobs was a rebel who did his best work when he rejected every societal standards and treated other people poorly. This myth exists because we think Tolkien was a hermit, or that Picasso’s art existed because of his fractured relationships with his mistresses. It’s simply not true.

Hemingway and Picasso hung out in the same cafés and went to the same parties. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were close friends, confidantes, and creative allies. Steve Jobs did his best work when he was surrounded by a team who made him better. The best art anybody has ever made was made in community.

And the best life anybody ever lived was in community.

You need to know three things if you want to do good creative work. First of all, you can do it. Seond of all, you are worth it. Thirdly, you have value. When I was depressed, I didn’t know these things. I drank because I didn’t know these things. The only way to learn them is by surrounding yourself with a community of people who want to tell you.

If you’re struggling, know that you’re not alone. Get help. Trust me, it’s not a sign of weakness. Talk to me if you think it will help. I don’t even have to reply if you don’t want me to, but I’ll keep you in my thoughts and prayers. The only way to get somebody to pull you up is to reach out.

We need more people like Robin Williams. We need them to make us laugh. To show us things about ourselves that we’re too blind to see. To inspire us when things are bad, and to remind us that a child-like sense of creativity is always a beautiful thing. But most of all, we need these people to know their worth. Because the stigma surrounding creativity and mental illness is worthless.

You have value. You are worth it. You can do anything. Now go make the world better.