Experience. Think. Write.

On my way from crappy to good.

[thisunnie]

A quiet space

Posting things on Medium makes me nervous. So I didn’t post a thing. Whether to post on Medium vs. secretly post something in a quiet corner of Tumblr like this became a debate I had with myself. Or with my friends. Or with my dates. Yes. There was this guy who really didn’t get the idea why I wanted to just hide my posts on Tumblr instead of formally post on Medium. He didn’t get it. End of the story.

ANYWAYS.

This is a time when everyone wants to be the loudest, want to share an opinion, or a lot of opinions. Or every bit of their daily life. Or be someone that always has something smart or knowledgable to say. But I don’t. I kind of miss the time, maybe like 10 years ago, when I braindumped whatever shit, feelings and thoughts on my blog, and not feeling awkward about it, and my friends actually read every piece of it. You didn’t need to be the quote generating machine on Twitter, decorating your profile with a lineup of your previous job titles and the labels you gave to yourself. You should simply just be you. You should have a treehouse for your soul in the backyard of your exhausting living room.

I’m going to give this a try again. Don‘t die, Tumblr.

[thisunnie]

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Ira Glass

[thisunnie]

A relentless focus on impact at scale, on making things of value not just for a small group of people born into first-world privileges with niche interests like photography, but for the vast majority of the world

https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/why-i-design-at-facebook-bc978af3b0c1

My personal drive as a designer.

[thisunnie]

Well... drawing/painting is actually really hard. I'll get better. A room with window. Unfinished. With Joep Beving's <Solipsism>.

[thisunnie]

Recent thoughts

I felt pretty defeated recently because I found myself lack clarity of mind. I don’t know what the hell I’m thinking sometimes. I can’t really articulate my thoughts in a clear way when presenting my design, which is bad.

I got nervous while people were grilling me with questions and my face was burning like a fireball and I just wanted to find a place to hide forever. I just go so meltdown realizing the fact that my biggest fear now is don’t know how to think in a good way, to articulate my thinking, lack of strong rationale. This fear keeps paralyzing my actions until this day that I can’t bear it anymore and gotta find a way to face it and solve it.

But I’m little bit happy now that as I age, I can still recover quickly, after some sobbing nights and miserable dinners alone.

Things that I tell myself: 1. Before I can get to any solutions of my problems, I got to calm down the shivering soul first. Just cry if you feel fucking miserable and you’ll be ok.  2. You don’t need to handle things you don’t want to handle now, get to that later. Don’t be too harsh on yourself. Can’t make everyone happy. How do you make others happy when you’re not happy? 3. Wrap your mind around the causes and think about how you can get better. It’s just about time and training. 4. Stay focus. Get rid of the things that distract you so that you can get to where you want to go eventually. Let go those things that out of your control, accept the fact that you can’t do anything about it. You just need to fucking accept it - for example, all of your ex-boyfriends are being with their new girlfriends now and don’t give a fuck about you and you gotta accept the fact that you’re single now, in your personal history. It takes some time to get used to it and you just need to live with the thought about “is anyone still gonna love me - this insane woman?” and “man, seriously, I’m really just BY MYSELF now”. 5. Accept the fact that you are just not good enough as a designer yet. There’s still a long way to go. But as long as you learn and work on it, you’ll get there. Also, sometimes things just don’t have shortcuts. Like no fucking shortcuts at all. It took all the sweat and tears, unbearable nights, self-esteem breakdown, doing things you don’t love, to get to your destination. You gotta take on all the shame, all the disappointment, etc, to get there. You gotta be a good marathon runner in life in general. No matter you are a marathon runner, or designer, a guitar singer, or a ceramic craft maker(which I always dream to be but I haven’t taken one single class yet, who knows if I’ll give up after making my first shitty muddy cup or something), you always need to block out the noise and put in time that others can’t imagine. It’s the spirit, the dedication, the constant thinking, that makes you an outstanding person in any field no matter what you do. 6. Anyways, two pieces of recent quotes that pull me out of the dark - one is from J.K.Rowling on failure, “hitting the rock-bottom is not the end but the foundation”; one is from an Uber driver who’s a mentor for kids herself, “you just always need to do the things you’re passionate about. What are you passionate about and what you love to do? You know, it doesn’t matter where you are at now, it only matters where you are going.” 7. Last but not least, keep reading, keep thinking, keep making things. Like Julie Zhuo said, go for the volume. And I believe that one day quality will catch up. You’ll be okay.

[thisunnie]

UI Prototyping Tools

As a product designer, being able to rapidly prototype flows and UI animation is one of the key skills. In order to be better at this skill, I’ve been exploring different UI prototyping tools to find out what are their pros and cons. With limited time and energy to master all of them, I think it’s best to try out the basic, be good at some of them that best fit your skillsets and being able to achieve most of your design tasks efficiently.

Here’re my learnings so far:

1. InVision

Superpower: team collaboration

Pro: - Best for day-to-day cross-functional collaboration: sharing links, comments, organizing team projects, etc. - Love the Inspect feature, pair with Craft, that can easily sync Sketch file to InVision and seamlessly turn design into redline for engineer, which makes design<>engineering workflow much more efficient - Good for both web/mobile prototype with page flow, be able to handle simple page flow, hover tooltip, transition - Be able to view prototype with phone

Cons: - Not the best tool for micro-interaction/motion prototyping

2. Marvel

Superpower: embed into website

Pro: - Best for creating a click-through prototype for mobile app - Best for embedding the prototype, with the device, into your personal website - Easy to sync with Sketch (there’s a Marvel plug-in for Sketch) - Be able to view prototype with phone Cons: - Also not the best tool for micro-interaction prototyping - If not embedding into website, InVision can pretty much achieve what it does

3. FramerJS

Superpower: Script + Complex Interaction

Pro: - Pretty much capable of achieving any interactive prototype that you want, especially with different plug-ins, real data, to achieve complex ones - Good for sharing the prototype to the team

Cons: - Learning curve.....

4. Principle

Superpower: No script but be able to demonstrate lots of interactions Pro: - Easy to pick up, in between keynote animation and After Effect - Best for prototyping micro-interaction/motion ideas - Set your own canvas, not limited to web/mobile - Can record and export GIF

Cons: - Need some time to explore the auto transition and the Animation/Driver panel, sometimes the transition get messy - The layering sometimes get confusing, if a prototype is complex, it’s hard to get a clue - Can’t use real input or have real button states (hover/active/release, etc.)

5. Xcode + Swift

Superpower: prototyping a real app!

Pro: - Real code, real app, yo. Can parse real data, using real input field, also using default iOS layout and keyboard, pretty legit. - Pretty intuitive design, easy to pick up; especially like you can drag the UI element and connect to the script, good for designers - Good to understand how a real iOS app is built and to speak the language of engineer

Cons: - Learning curves - Debug, debug, debug.... - Not meant for collaboration and sharing, just a tool

6. After Effect

Superpower: motion graphic and fancy Dribbble shots

Pro: - No code, purely keyframe animation - Best for creating sophisticated motion graphics and making nice Dribbble shots with perspective, or adding additional background - Best for exporting video to GIFs

Cons: - Learning curves of motion graphics and also placing the prototype into something else - No meant for collaboration and sharing, just a tool

- - -

Btw, to make product demo video, I’ve been using Camtasia to edit and export. It’s fairly easy to pick up, compares to After Effect. Editing, adding video transitions, adding zoom in/zoom out effect are all pretty straightforward. I was able to edit a product demo video within 2 days, with basic knowledge of some other video editing softwares I knew (Premier, After Effect).

[thisunnie]

Sketch Prototyping for VR

Michie, Karen and I started our first VR Study session this afternoon. I tried out this demo sample: https://github.com/auxdesigner/Sketch-to-VR Which is using a Sketch plugin (and a local server) that turns a Sketch file into a VR scene that you can view in a web browser. 

Here’s how the final demo looks when you drag it around in the browser: 

The original Sketch file:

In the original Sketch file, basically there are two artboards: the background layer which is a panorama photo (or any 360 scene that you can drag around), and another artboard contains the content that layer on top of the background photo. The background color of this artboard has to be transparent. After you get ready for the two layers, use the Sketch VR plugin to export the file and run it in the web browser using a local server.

This is how the original demo looks like:

My experiment: 1. Took a 360 degree photo using my Insta360 Nano camera: It’s a very lightweight camera to capture 360 photo/video, and you can download the spheral photo/video to your phone.

2. Replace the image from the demo with my 360 photo and made some thought bubbles in another artboard. 

The tricky part was that - it’s very hard to control the perspective using a 2D tool and translate it into 3D space. The proportion and position of the bubbles were very off the center if you place the bubbles at the center of the artboard. It doesn’t align the way that you’ve expected.

So I made a grid layer on top of the background image for orientation.

Although I still didn’t figure out why the bubbles need to be placed on the left side. But I learn that you’ll need to fix the size and position of the bubbles using the size of the grid. It tooks me more than 10+ trials to get it right.

3. Export it and run it with the local server. 

Takeaways:

1. This is a very simple and basic way to prototype a static VR scene. Just keep in mind that using this method is only faking things on a globe surface, it’s still 2D, not real 3D. 

2. There’s no proper translation from 2D to 3D world, so it’s hard to figure out the proportion of things when mocking up in a 2D grid to project it to 3D world. It would be nice to know how the code works to orient components. Also it would be nice to have a grid system to map 2D world to 3D.

- - -

Btw, Facebook Design has this useful template resource of prototyping VR with Sketch / Photoshop / Unity. “If you’re at the early stages of design or concept development, these templates will help you quickly visualize your design in VR without spending a lot of time creating individual components and scripts.” Interesting to see this ergonomic diagram - it specify different range of interactivity that people’s comfortable with.

However, it doesn’t specify how to view your prototype using your phone. It only introduces how to view it via Oculus Rift. In my next project, I will explore how to view my Unity prototype using my iPhone.

[thisunnie]

Most people building software are actually building and designing systems already – they just may not necessarily realize it. Systems are these broad networks of things that are related and connected. Uber is a simple example. Uber is certainly not a software company and certainly not an app company. Uber is this ecosystem of drivers, passengers, inventory, all sorts of things. Over time as that system emerged and evolved, Uber added things like surge pricing. Other parts of the system like price and availability and even where people drive – the whole thing changes. You change one piece of the system, and other the pieces of the system change.

Paul Adams https://blog.intercom.com/talking-trends-in-product-with-intercoms-paul-adams-and-emmet-connolly/#systems 

[thisunnie]

A company that is design-centric prioritizes the user experience and celebrates new ideas. This company isn't okay with leaving well enough alone, but always seeks improvement. They proactively cultivate creative thinking and they know that behind every number is a person. They're constantly looking for ways to make that end-to-end experience (across every touchpoint) better for their customers.

Katie Dill - Airbnb / Head of Experience Design

[thisunnie]

We use the word reframing to describe taking in new information and synthesizing it to create a unique perspective of the challenge, thus opening up a novel set of possible solutions. It is a principal undertaking of a designer. She must take account of the larger complexity of a problem space — one that includes human emotions and motivations, and the time, space, and people surrounding the issue at hand. Then she must use both logic and — more importantly — reason, to distill a vision from the complexity. In other words, the primary task of a designer — and, in fact, of people in an increasing number of professions — is to discover the meaningful question. Exploring the question is much messier than generating answers. Exploring questions requires floating in an ambiguous space for uncomfortable spans of time, with strong purpose, but lacking specific targets. It requires considering the larger complexity of the situation, working to produce a clear vision out of the complexity, but resisting the inclination to simply cut down the scale of the problem to an analytical exercise. Exploring the question, not answers, is at the heart of creativity, and cannot be done in a deductive, analytical manner. One must play with the ambiguous, explore the irrational, and develop conviction without proof.

What we need to teach our students: The ability to reason

[abramovicinstitute]

Which performance do you feel is the closest one to your heart?

The one I didn’t make yet.

[thisunnie]

No longer are we designing a thing — website, app, service, button—designers are taking on complex and systemic challenges, imagining systems that have the capacity to enhance and transform everyday life.

Why Designers Practice Social Innovation https://npr.design/why-designers-practice-social-innovation-63db0ab095fc#.ht88qsmm1

[thisunnie]

Recent Interests + Readings - 01

Documentary storytelling Especially narrative journalism, documentary photography and journalism podcast. I think the combination of anthropology, sociology, creative writing, history and journalism is interesting. It observes human life from a micro perspective (and sometimes reflect the macro world) and records/reproduce the story with humanity. It’s more about angles, individual, scenes and seeing the unseen. The storytellers’ own take on the objective world make the stories feels more intimate and empathetic than the grandstanding mass media. 

I’ve been reading/listening-

Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer’s Guide Very well-structured collection of essays written by the most prominent journalists and nonfiction authors at Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Essays covered a variety of topics from the how-to of narrative storytelling to launching a career as a narrative journalist. South of Market  by Janet Delancy A photographic portrait of a San Francisco neighborhood in the throes of urban renewal. I’m interested in the San Francisco in the pre-tech era. What’s the city like before it grew too crazy into the tech world? What life were people living in the past? What changed and what remain unchanged? 

Nowhere to Hide by Glen Greenwald (can’t wait to start reading!) Curious about how this impactful reporter, columnist writes about his first-person witness of the Snowden story, the NSA facts he revealed and the opinions in his mind.

The American Life A documentary/journalism radio shows that organized based on themes. The show is interesting because, as they describe themselves:

Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun.

A recent episode I listened was a collection of stories/interviews of people after the US 2016 Election. It used a micro lens to dive into the life and emotion of ordinary people with different races, from different backgrounds and in different jobs. I really liked the stories like, two good friends still like each other when they hold totally different political views, the immigration lawyer who didn’t know how to response to their client’s concerned call, the phone call between the black mother and son about the harassment the mother faced and their discussion about getting citizenship and “where else can we go?” These group portraits feel far more related and interesting to me than the breaking news in social media.

[thisunnie]

...Photography as a medium concerned with understanding the world we live in - a medium whose business is not constructing fantasies pleasing to the eye or imagination but describing the world in the toughest and deepest way.

Why Photography Matters, by Jerry Thompson

[bobulate]

The not yet principle

We were a healthy family. My mom would bring home groceries in paper bags loaded with newly purchased food, mostly plants. But also, more exotically: Oreos, Pretzels, Diet Rite, Golden Grahams, Little Debbie Swiss Rolls, Fritos — a weekly goldmine of snacks into the otherwise snack-less househould. And when one of the four kids rushed to tear open a package, we heard the same sound. “Not yet.”

The not yet sound effect happened not only with groceries, but with anything new. New clothes still with tags hung in every closet. Letters sat unopened. Paitence truly was a virtue, delayed gratification embodied. New snacks, and all new things, were for the future, not now.

This wasn’t the experience I saw around me. Most memorably, at 16, my best friend received a new red convertible because she passed her drivers’ test. Later, after perhaps borrowing my parents’ stationwagons one too many times, I received a trusty (old) hatchback with four speeds and an AM/FM radio. If I had received a new car at that age, my parents reasoned, what would I have to look forward to? They wanted me to feel what it was like to do it myself. The time for a new car was not yet.

They were right (of course). Some years later, as is the case with many childhood things, I got it. Practicing waiting is a lifelong practice since, as it turns out, impatience has a particular gravitational pull. But after all that waiting, finding or opening or having that once-future thing feels very much present.

And that is worth waiting for.

[thisunnie]

I asked Tomas Alex Tizon, who used to work with me at the Seattle Times, why human beings need stories, and he replied: Thank God for stories - for those who have them, for those who tell them, for those who devour them as the souls sustenance that they are. Stories give shape to experience and allow us to go through life unblind. Without them, everything that happens would float around, undifferentiated. None of it would mean anything. Once you have a version of what happened, all the other good stuff about being human comes into play. You can laugh, fell awe, commit a passionate act, get pissed, want to change things. My friend and fellow write Katherine Lanpher, who wrote for the Pioneer Press and is now with Air America, told me this about stories: Stories are the connective tissue of the human race, whether you are dissecting a school levy or South Korean politics. At the heart of every issue is a human element that leads to the three most beautiful words in the English language: What happened next? If you answer that question, you are a storyteller.

“Stories Matter” by Jacque Banaszynski, from “Telling True Stories”

[thisunnie]

-From "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future" by Ashlee Vance