Eight Days

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been eight days since I last published anything – in the open – here. That isn’t to say I haven’t been working, I have, I just haven’t felt the need to share anything. On top of this I’ve been fighting, internally, with a feeling that I need to move beyond well-crafted markup and begin embarking upon the perilous journey towards ‘design’ (a feeling I’ve found nothing short of crippling). [1]

I’ve been thinking a great deal. I’ve also been working a lot, behind the scenes, on exploring process and methodology.

I’m looking at the ways in which I work, specifically at how I reflect on tasks in hand and maintain a record of my process, an archive of thoughts and working methods, that I can return to, in time, and learn from, long after a project is completed.

To this end, I've been reading a great deal on various working methods – both digital approaches (John Carmack's .plan files have been particularly interesting to explore), and analogue approaches (Leonardo da Vinci's note books have been equally inspiring to investigate) – in a quest to shape a working method that places equal emphasis on process as well as product.

On the surface, here, with a mere five posts, this might not be apparently obvious. The fruits of this labour will, however, follow shortly.

Footnotes

1. With every post I’ve felt an overwhelming pressure to start working on ‘design’ and I’ve found that pressure debilitating. I feel a tremendous pressure of expectation, a sense that my design will be ‘judged’, the moment it’s in the open, and that I – and my ability – will be found wanting.

   It’s ludicrous, really, and I know that this is all in my mind; yet it’s a very real and inescapable fear.

   A part of me feels that the content is what’s critical here, but a part of me feels that I’m living on borrowed time and, before much longer, I’ll need to make the leap and start to clothe this content with form. That, I’ll be honest, fills me with fear. ↩