I did it. I caved and I bought myself one of the new MacBook Pros with the scissors keyboard switches. (Which hopefully mean I can leave the house with my laptop without living in fear.) But that meant I had to migrate all my files and settings to this new machine.

I like setting things up from scratch and starting with a completely new setup, but that’s rarely feasible these days. Between my Linux VMs, my Git repositories, and even all the fonts I have installed, setting up a new machine would be a laborious practice.

So I used Migration Assistant for the first time. I wanted to write some tips and tricks about this process, because Apple’s kbase article isn’t particularly clear. And next time I need to do this, I’ll refer to this post as a starting point.

In the past, I’ve used SuperDuper to handle my migrations. That takes a lot of time and often encounters strange bugs. Rather than go down that route this time, Migration Assistant — which I’ve only ever heard good things about — seemed like a good bet.

But it’s not all smooth, of course. Here are some tips, tricks, and gotchas about this migration.

1. Everything from your user account appears to get migrated over. This even includes anything you may have installed on the command line, which is great. It included all my virtual machines, which is also great. It does not include the cache, which is also probably for the best.
2. It does not appear to matter if one machine is on a different OS from the other. I upgraded from Mojave to Catalina and, for the most part, everything went smoothly. (Related: Catalina is nicer than I thought it would be, although I’m unsure how to approach Zsh.)
3. The fastest way to do this is to boot up your old machine in target disk mode and connect them via a cable. If you just run Migration Assistant on your old machine, the entire process will run over wifi. That’s too slow and unreliable for my liking. Boot into target disk mode and save yourself some trouble.
4. Target disk mode means you can connect your two machines together with a good old Thunderbolt or USB‑C cable. You can use the USB‑C cable that came with your Mac. Generally, that’s a good idea. I bought this Thunderbolt cable to make this process faster, but the transfer was never faster than 90mb/​s. And you don’t need Thunderbolt 3 for that throughput. USB‑C will be just fine. (Because of this, I’ll be returning the cable I bought.)
5. Most of your software does not need to be re-authenticated. 1Password, for example, was automatic. This was very nice.
6. Some software, like Office, needs to be re-activated. Office is the only major culprit I’ve found, but I like to fix this stuff right away, so give each of your major apps a first-run experience. 
7. If you use Git, you’ll need to hop into your directories and run git status to force the connection. (Or, at least, I had to.)
8. I don’t know if this was because of Catalina or because of Migration Assistant, but I had to upgrade my VM software (VirtualBox) to the latest version. The documentation said to uninstall VirtualBox and re-install it. Uninstalling VirtualBox did not work, but reinstalling it did. If you encounter any issues with your local server setup (i.e. Homestead for Laravel or anything like that), your VM software is likely corrupted from the transfer.
9. Similarly, Creative Cloud breaks when you run Migration Assistant. (It refused to let me log in and kept crashing.) I couldn’t uninstall Creative Cloud because that required uninstalling and later re-installing Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, Illustrator, Première, and Audition. Ain’t nobody got time for that. It turns out, if you simply run the Creative Cloud installer again, the CC app will run without issue.
10. None of your wallpapers migrate (boo!), but all your virtual desktops and their settings do (yay!).
11. Finally: if you run Backblaze, read their kbase article before upgrading or you’ll have a rough time.

As a designer, developer, photographer, and writer, almost everything about the new MacBook Pro appeals to me. I’ve been through four laptops with their terribly butterfly keyboard, and I cannot wait to get something more reliable. The developer in me is so glad to get the inverted arrow keys back, and as somebody who writes a lot of words every day, I’m thrilled to have a reliable keyboard again.

All they had to do to make me happy was change the keyboard, but 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage(!!!) is an unexpected perk. I’m also glad to see that the price has not jumped (actually, considering they’ve doubled the base hard drive size, it’s cheaper than it used to be).

This is the laptop I wanted Apple to drop in 2016. That we had to wait this long for them to fix the keyboard is unconscionable, but I’m glad to hear that they’ve finally done it.

A couple other quick thoughts:

1. We still don’t have great external monitor options for these laptops (I’ve written about this before).
2. If you have the means (or you work as a colourist for a major film studio), you can look forward to extending this laptop with two — two! — 6K Pro Display XDR screens. (The dream.)

I look forward to picking one of these laptops up when my budget allows. Probably not that 6K display though, Apple. Please just put the LG 5K display in a nice enclosure with a glass front, ok?

Focused, hosted by David Sparks and Micke Schmitz, has quickly become the podcast I wish I made. Over the past few months, Mike and David have explored what it means to be truly productive. I used to be obsessed with this stuff, and I thought I had a lot of it down pat, so I don’t say this lightly: I’ve learned a lot on the topic thanks to these two.

I want to point you to their latest two episodes: Moving the Needle and Intentional Constraints. The two of them are best listened to together, in the order of their release. If you’re looking for a new perspective on Getting Things Done, you could do much worse than spend a couple hours listening to these.

The massive takeaway for me is that not all work is equal in value. If we want to do good work, we have to be laser-focused (there’s the title!) on what will move the needle forward for us. After listening to these episodes, this really clicked for me, and I don’t think I could give this topic the same clarity and justice these two gentlemen have. Go listen to their show! I can’t recommend it enough.

Listen here: Moving the Needle & Intentional Constraints

Sony is plugging some of the last holes in their mirrorless lens lineup today with the announcement of their new 200 – 600mm F5.6 – 6.3 and 600mm F45 lenses. These lenses look quite nice — at the very least, they’re competitive with the offerings from Nikon and Canon.

I’m not the target market for the 600mm lens, but the 200 – 600mm lens looks great. The variable aperture isn’t extreme, which is fantastic. (I’m aware this isn’t the first lens of this kind, but it’s the first for the Sony system, so let me be happy.) 

With that telephoto, you could now buy the trinity from Sony for pro work, and get a large telephoto for wildlife and birding and be good to go. The pricing on that model is fair too. Altogether, a much more sensible lens than the 70 – 300mm Sony’s had for a couple years — so long as it will fit in your camera bag. Plus, if you’re a crazy person who needs a 900mm focal length, the lens is compatible with tele-converters.¹

I thought $13k seemed a little high for the 600mm lens, but it’s in line with Canon’s offering (and I bet it’s just as good). I want to complain about the price, but both these prices are more or less what I’d expect from Sony: pricey, but fair (for the 200 – 600mm) and eye-watering, outrageously expensive (for the 600mm).

Also, don’t miss DP Review’s interview with Sony’s Yasuyuki Nagata about the optical design of these lenses. As usual, the editor’s note after the interview is a well-written analysis of the playing field.

Out of all the obvious focal lengths, this just leaves us without a 35mm f1.8. Sony’s lens design team has been on fire recently, and I’m pretty stoked on what they can pull off.

I’m a Mac fanboy, and the new Mac Pro looks astounding. The Afterburner card, as Apple’s calling it, makes it possible to render three 8K video streams of RAW footage in real time. Mind-blowing.

Of course, the Afterburner is a module that can be installed after purchase, or when you order a Mac Pro. Every Mac Pro can be configured to the user’s needs. So while I don’t need to edit three 8K streams of video without proxy files, I definitely need a ton of RAM and some solid GPU options (seriously, Lightroom turns every machine into a jet at takeoff). I could see a future version of myself relying on a version of the Mac Pro Apple unveiled this week.

The display looks incredible too. The Pro Display XDR (seriously, why didn’t they just call it the Pro Display?) looks amazing. But it’s going to cost nearly $10k in Canada to get the display and the stand — because the stand alone comes in at $999 USD. And that’s without the Mac Pro. That’s just the monitor.

For some professional environments, that cost is minimal. But for me, it’s more than it’s worth.

And I get it: I’m not necessarily the target market. The freelancing creative pro is not the upper echelon Apple is going for. But despite that, I miss the days of the Thunderbolt Display. I’d love to see Apple take the 5K display out of their iMacs and put that in a nice enclosure again, just like the old times. 

There’s a serious gap in the market where a Retina-resolution, well-designed monitor could exist.

If you wanted a standalone Retina 27”-class monitor, you’d better order the LG UltraFine 5K display. Before it sells out. But it’s also nearly $2000 Canadian, and it frankly isn’t that great of a display. (The screen is lovely, but the enclosure is garbage. I’m currently rocking the old 21.5” 4K display, which is nice, but cramped.)

This all causes a problem: currently, there is no good way to live a single-machine lifestyle. Back in 2012, you could buy a quad-core 15” MacBook Pro and a top-of-the-line display for a few grand. That was a great setup: you got an excellent, fast machine with a great (Retina) display, and a nice way to get work done at a desk, all without the hassle of syncing files across machines.

There isn’t a great way to do that today. The current lineup of MacBook Pros are largely lacking (thanks mostly to the keyboard), and there are no great low-end external monitors. Most professionals who can afford it will likely end up with a desktop in their production environment and a laptop on the go. In between, you’ll be syncing everything between a combination of Dropbox/​iCloud/​OneDrive, Git, and external disks (hello again, Lightroom). It’s not ideal.

We always say things were simpler back in the old days, but 2012 wasn’t that long ago, and frankly, things were simpler then.

Austin Kleon just wrapped up a tour for his latest book. During a stop in Chicago. Eddie Shleyner asked him a great question: ​“Do you ever feel like no matter how much work you do, you can or should be doing more?”

This question immediately resonated with me; it’s an issue I’ve personally struggled with and am currently struggling through.

Thankfully, Eddie recorded his answer and transcribed it on his blog:

“Yeah, always,” he said. ​“If you get into that productivity trap, there’s always going to be more work to do, you know? ​“Like, you can always make more. I think that’s why I’m a time-based worker. I try to go at my work like a banker. I just have hours. I show up to the office and whatever gets done gets done. ​“And I’ve always been a time-based worker. You know, like, ​‘did I sit here for 3 hours and try.’ I don’t have a word count when I sit down to write. It’s all about sitting down and trying to make something happen in that time period — and letting those hours stack up. ​“So that’s sort of how I get over it.”

I love this. I love that the answer is simply to sit down and try and get some work done. If you don’t make it, that’s okay: try again tomorrow.

I think most people — certainly creative people — put a lot of pressure on themselves to deliver every day. We aim for perfection. I think the pursuit of output, rather than the joy of the chase, keeps us from doing our best work. Perhaps even more dangerously, it leaves us worse off as people.

A friend of mine told me that Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men and The Road (among many other popular novels), had to stop hanging out with other writers after he stopped drinking. All of his writer friends drank until inspiration hit, and he thought that was a poisonous attitude.

That idea, of creativity beholden to vices, keeps us from doing our best work. It keeps us from facing the blank page and making something. The fear of perfection will literally drive us to drink.

So what can we do instead?

We can sit down, measure our hours rather than our output, and make something. As Shawn Blanc says (and I love this), we can create without overthinking.

I’m the sort of person who needs a list of goals in order to accomplish something. Early every year, I come up with a theme for the year and a few goals to help me keep my focus. 

This year, my theme is about hunkering down and fostering my creativity. With that in mind, I’ve got a few goals that I think will be useful for anybody who wants to do something creative in 2019. 

1. Grab life by the balls. if you’re going to do something, do it wholeheartedly. Not halfway. Doing something halfway is worse than not doing it at all.
2. Consume less. Create more. For me, this means spending less time on YouTube and my Nintendo Switch, and more time making things. This isn’t a challenge to work more. It’s a challenge to spend more time playing your favourite instrument — even if you play poorly. You don’t, and won’t, always make good things. That’s okay. 
3. Be aware of your needs. Do you need a new camera? Find the right one for you and buy it. Don’t waste hundreds of hours on research or the comments on DPReview. Just figure out your needs, go get the thing, and start making stuff. One day, we’re all going to die. Don’t waste time.
4. Read more books. This is a notable exception to Goal 2 because it encourages slow thinking in a fast-paced world. We need more of that. 
5. Say no to that which limits your creativity. Like bad clients, Netflix binges, and hangovers. This one is hard. You will fail. Get up and try again. 
6. Act in the face of fear. I’m borrowing this from the great Steven Pressfield (The War of Art is amazing and you should make it one of the books you read for Goal 2). Fear is what keeps us from being creative and becoming who we’re meant to be. Stare that fear in the face and make the thing you want to make. Then you can declare victory, but not mastery, over the fear. Remember, the fear can fight again at any time. It wants to crush you. It knows no limits. But, then again, neither do you…

Not long ago, after a long and trying day spent in meetings, I made the 90 minute drive back to my home in silence. No podcasts. No music. The stereo in my car was off.

On the highway, I heard barely any noise. Only the low rumbles of my winter tires, and the whooshing of surrounding traffic as we passed each other, driving into the sunset.

In today’s dizzying world, where we often fill the silence with social media and fast news, the silence and the isolation feel increasingly rare. They create an opportunity for slow thinking — for quiet contemplation.

More than ever, I think slow thinking is exactly what we need.

A couple months ago, some folks at Adobe admitted to some major news publications that they were working on Photoshop for iPad. Today, they formally revealed it at Adobe MAX, and The Verge got a hands-on look at the app in action.

I’m a Creative Cloud subscriber because, well, I run a design studio for a living. But Photoshop is perhaps my least important CC app. (InDesign is king, if you’re wondering — nothing else comes close.)

For somebody like me, this app is going to hit the perfect sweet spot. Everything I need to touch up photos on the go, hopefully with the same Export to Web feature that I love on the desktop.

Ironically, if you live in Photoshop (like many designers I know), then it sounds like the iPad version won’t be for you. At least, not right away. Adobe is stripping away a ton of features that will make the app less useful (keyboard shortcuts, for example).

But in the meantime, this is a pretty serious win for creative professionals on the iPad. I’m holding out for InDesign next (but I know I’m going to have to wait for Adobe to do Illustrator, Première, and probably After Effects first). 

Some other news that will change my life in some meaningful ways: 

• Typekit is now Adobe Fonts (and every font is available for unlimited desktop syncing now!). The new website feels slower than Typekit to me, but it’s also a little less quirky, which is nice.
• Adobe XD’s first plug-in integrations are now available, drag gestures and linked symbols (finally) are built in, and the app is getting some great Illustrator and After Effects integrations. I try XD every six months or so to see if it can release Sketch. This update could put it over the edge for me.
• There’s a new properties panel in InDesign that looks amazing. True story: I have multiple custom views in InDesign that I switch between based on the amount of screen real estate I have. I’m hoping this makes that process less cumbersome for me. (Plus, there’s content-aware fill, which looks very neat.)
• PhotoShop CC finally uses the same Undo keyboard shortcuts as literally everything else on my Mac. You can also double-click to edit text instead of switching to the type tool, which also should have happened many, many moons ago.

All in all, these are great updates. Congratulations to the Adobe team for making their suite of products even better, and making my job easier!

About a week ago on Twitter, I asked a poorly phrased question, which I’ll re-phrase here for clarity’s sake:

Why do designers focus on images in their portfolio’s archive, instead of properly describing their work?

This is something I’m just as guilty of as the next designer. Here’s an image of what my portfolio looked like at the time of the tweet. You can find countless other design portfolios that riff on a theme just like this.

My favourite portfolios are really image-heavy, and I suspect that’s true for most people. Those portfolios are so fun to look at and make. But I often find myself wondering if those portfolios are effective.

If you’re a potential client, why would you click on a thumbnail image? Some designers might hope that the thumbnail tells the story of their project, but the thumbnail is inconclusive at best and misleading at its worst. It often shows off what the final result looks like, but it doesn’t share the thinking behind that visual approach.

But that’s what designers should sell. We need to sell the thought process that gets clients results, because that’s what a good designer gets paid for.

Design pricing is in a race to the bottom. Or maybe it’s already bottomed out. But I think a lot of that is because we’re showing off visuals, instead of explaining our process or discussing our results.

So I’ve made some changes to my portfolio. Now, when you visit the home page, you’ll see a list of every project I was proud to be a part of. Instead of images, each project gets a description. Some of those descriptions link to case studies, and some don’t — but the work is all present and explained.

I had a lot of fun making this. My portfolio isn’t as flashy as it was before, but I hope my portfolio will now be more effective.

I’m really behind on this, because my new portfolio has been live for a couple months now, but: I have a new portfolio.

The website is new from top to bottom: new and re-written case studies, new designs, new type, new photography, new About page, a more detailed contact page, and more. (Not much more. I mean, I almost described the whole site. But the home page is new too.)

If you’re curious about my work, I’ve now got seven case studies up, with three more (!!!) in the works. I’d be honoured if you checked the website out. 

One other note: my business runs on referrals. If you know anybody who has an interesting web or branding project and needs some help, I’d appreciate it if you connected us.

Over the past couple years, I’ve tried to transform my work into a spiritual practice — not unlike Jiro. As often as I can, I spend a few minutes each morning in meditation with God. On the days I can do that, I find I’m much more at peace with my work. Inviting God into my work changes why I’m working.

I’m reminded of Colossians 3:24:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

Our spiritual relationship and development is tied up in our work. Recognizing that has removed a lot of stress from me. 

On the other hand, no matter how dedicated you are to your craft, rest is important: 

“Better to have one handful with quietness than two handfuls with hard work and chasing the wind.” 

• Ecclesiastes 4:6 NLT

On his deathbed, will Jiro wish he spent more time perfecting sushi? Or will he wish he spent more time with his sons?

The other night, my wife and I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The film is a study of Jiro Ono, the man widely considered the finest sushi chef in the world. 

Jiro is a shokunin. A shokunin is a sort of artisan, a person dedicated to the improvement of their craft for the betterment of the public. As Jiro explains it in the documentary:

I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is. Even at my age, after decades of work, I don’t think I have achieved perfection. But I feel ecstatic all day… I love making sushi. That’s the spirit of the shokunin.

Of course, a shokunin doesn’t have to be a chef. A shokunin is a person wholly dedicated to his or her craft. Director and cinematographer Daniel Olivares made a short film about the shokunin at Varis Japan — craftsmen who make aerodynamic parts for high-speed vehicles.

The shokunin are fascinating because they are perfectly content with something I think many of us struggle with in the west. They dream of doing the same thing, every day, for decades. They don’t appear to have a problem with repetition. They are relentlessly hard on themselves in pursuit of the perfection of their craft.

In our culture, we struggle with the Groundhog Day of our lives: the mundanity of a day-to-day life where much of it feels the same. On the other hand, a shokunin looks for repetition. It is an opportunity to improve. Repetition is a chance to get better.

Jiro just wants the best fish to practice his craft on. He is content with that. He and many other shokunin have transformed their work into a spiritual practice.

This is a noble pursuit.

For those of us outside Silicon Valley, the push towards the ​“new” can be set aside. We can agree to work on perfecting what we do, and let that lead us where it will.

Holy smokes, this looks amazing. I don’t do a lot of design work from my iPad, and I think I might be too reliant on Typekit to make this work, but Serif has put an incredible amount of polish into this app.

If you want to get a good overview of what this desktop-grade design tool is capable of, check out the tutorials. It’s insane.

Absolutely thrilled to be featured on The Sweet Setup this week. I’ve been meaning to submit my gear to the website for over a year now, and just never found the time. The Sweet Setup is one of my favourite sites, and I’m thrilled to finally see my rig on there.

One thing I wish I remembered to mention: I would love a sit/​stand desk. When Hildegard and I can afford the luxury of a new desk, a Jarvis bamboo desk exists with my name on it. Edit: It turns out I did mention it. Oops. Ah well. I’d really like a standing desk, so it probably bears repeating.