At last I had made time to step away from my work and relax. Not just for one evening either; I was doing it every day. For a short while I had managed to breath some space into my schedule.

But space is a vacuum.

Currently, my time is packed with chores. I have a speech to prepare. Difficult problems to solve at work. A new project to draw up a proposal for. A diary that has an uncomfortable number of activities in it. Plus the usual pile of paper work to… ignore. To try and fit this all in, and make sure I still create time to relax, is difficult.

But I’ve been doing it.

Today, after doing my set number of hours of work, I pressed play on a new audio book, opened up my sketch pad, and smiled – proud of myself for carving out an evening of casual time.

Time to relax.

But.

By multitasking?

By crafting anatomical drawings in my sketchbook?

By listening to a book on the Six Day War and its impact on the modern-day Middle East?

Somehow it doesn’t quite fit my image of what relaxing should be.

But I’ve tried to fit that image. With a mindless movie or a novelty novel. And I’ve found that bores me. And boredom does not mean the same as relax.

Every so often I feel it is important to take some time to evaluate where I have taken my career so far. Stop, think and make conscious adjustments to make sure it goes where I want it to.

My most recent stop and think has been over the past few hours. I’ve made half the decisions I think I will need to before I’m happy.

My conclusion is that I have become far too generalised. As well as the areas I want to be involved in (design, CSS, JavaScript) I’ve found myself spending far too much time in MySQL and even server administration. I would like to move almost completely away from these areas. I have not the slightest regret about learning them; I just don’t want to learn any more.

PHP is a language I love and would like to continue using. But really, I want to spend less time there and more on the client side areas of CSS and JavaScript. These front end areas are where I want to really specialise. They are where I feel passionate. Databases, in comparison, make my brain eat itself so probably best to avoid.

Generalising, I do feel, is good. It is difficult to completely separate the different layers of a web application and so it is very useful to know enough to interact with areas that connect to my primary domain. In some cases that means communicating with specialists in other areas. In other cases it means setting up proof of concept demo sites that I don’t have to worry about scaling.

So generalising is useful, but two and a half years after starting my journey into web development, I now feel confident that my general skills are good enough. I will invest the time in keeping up, but I want to stop offering some of these skills as a service.

Instead I want to really start focusing on front end development. I want to hone my design skills and my JavaScript knowledge.

I especially want to focus in this area now that it is starting to become more sophisticated. Lots of really interesting things are happening now that browsers are starting to implement new abilities in CSS, JavaScript and even HTML. JavaScript libraries are also having a tremendous impact on the industry. This is creating a lot of activity and I want to be part of this hive.

In a way this isn’t a new decision I’m making. I’ve been trying to focus myself on Drupal user experience work almost from the start. But I’ve not been effective in positioning myself there, because my work has pushed me in a wider arc.

Particularly frustrating is the lack of time this has given me for work on the Drupal 7 User Experience drive. For the past 6 months I have hardly done anything in this areas. I just haven’t had the time or energy to do so. And quite honestly putting time into open source can be both harmful and rewarding. There is just a limit to how much one can offer without financial reward. This has nothing to do with motivation which I have an abundance of, but more about buying time.

Finally, I think as the web tries to do more and more crazy things, specialising is going to be a requirement to avoid mediocrity. I would have been specialising about now anyway, but I think this means that I need to take this a bit further and hyper-specialise. I’m not sure what that will be exactly yet; perhaps the industry will guide me there.

That’s the general plan. Just need to refine and execute it.

If you haven’t already read Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘How David Beats Goliath‘ do so now, or this will make less sense.

I’m still slowly making my way through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals (I am about a third way through). At this stage it is easy to see Lincoln as a David who won the presidency by fighting the complacency of his rivals (the Goliaths). Lincoln was far and away the underdog, but he was very good at doing what those who thought it their destiny to win the presidential nomination would not. Goodwin writes (chapter 8):

Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way. It is hard to imagine Lincoln letting Greeley’s resentment smoulder for years as Seward did. On the contrary, he took pains to reestablish rapport with Judd and Trumbull after they defeated him in his first run for the Senate. His ability to rise above defeat and create friendships with previous opponents was never shared by Chase, who was unable to forgive those who crossed him.

Lincoln also broke the ‘rules’ by purposely remaining unknown as a contender until the last moment so that there would be little time for him to cause ‘offence to others’; which is exactly what Seward, who was favourite for the nomination, had unwittingly done. Instead the little-known Lincoln took his rivals by surprise and seized control of the political conversation at the critical moment, steering support away from his rivals and towards himself. He was able to do so because he had cultivated his army of supporters. And, perhaps just as crucially, by the hard task of also establishing friendships with those who could so easily have become enemies.

That’s a pretty obvious lesson that is technically easy for us all to use and benefit from. But how many of us are prepared to? Not only is it hard work to always make friends, but resentment feels a little too natural to fight.

I had a blog post in mind, half wrote it and then realised I’d be a bit of a hypocrite if I did. Which, as I said previously is not something to worry about, but certainly not something to aim for either. I have a better way of conveying my thought, I think, and shall attempt to tomorrow when sleep is not such a pressing matter.

Today began with sunshine, but not enough to distract me from work. I got a lot done and finished early. I exercised. Then completed dinner before settling down in front of the television for the latest episode of Lost. It was a great episode. I followed this with about three hours of drawing study. My day ended with another chapter from the book about Honest Abe.

Nothing exceptional happened, but for most days that’s perfectly fine. For an ordinary day this was a very good one. I will try to make more like it. Mostly I think it is under my power to do so.

Over the years I have learnt to be careful in my selection of bedtime reading. I know I must avoid anything too stimulating or my brain will gradually warm up and sleep become impossible.

Something similar happens when I’ve been drawing just prior to closing my eyes for the night. As soon as the world goes dark, it lights up again with beautiful three dimensional drawings of whatever I’ve been sketching. Much to my chagrin these are many times better than I can actually draw.

Perhaps it is that annoyance that stops me from sleeping. You would think that the vividness of the images would be so much like a dream that I’d get to sleep all the more quick-sharp. However, I suspect the similarity to dreaming could actually be tricking my brain into thinking that I’m already asleep; hence it doesn’t bother to initiate the actual sleep sequence.

Whatever theory proves correct, the images are beautiful enough (again far beyond my actual capabilities) that this is a kind of insomnia I can live with.

Except tonight I’m worried.

Because I have been spending the evening drawing skulls. And I’m worried about what this might inspire when I close my eyes.

I can only pray that I’ll be lucky and get a band of friendly pirates.

It’s late again.

It’s the pictures, you see.

I’ve been working hard on developing the habit of drawing everyday, and now I can’t stop. The more my pencil flows the more time seems to flow with it and before I know what is going on it is late into the wee hours of the morning.

My sketchbook needs more pictures. It commands me to create them.

The trouble is: drawing doesn’t inspire writing. I need to read books in the evening to inspire blog wisdom. Unfortunately, anatomy books for the artist just don’t cut it. And so you get this kind of thing.

Blogging everyday hard.

I’m cheating today and just posting that it is too late to blog. I’ve run out of time. It is 3:30am. I got caught up in other stuff. And now I must go to bed before it gets light again.

I promised myself that I would post every day for 30 days. I never said it had to be good content. So this will do.

This. Will. Do.

For a while I’ve been trying to spend all my free evenings at my drawing desk, trying to improve my draftsmanship. Like most people who love drawing but are not doing it professionally or studying art full time, I have found the habit of drawing everyday to be a difficult one to foster.

But recently I seem to have managed to do just that. It is now what I automatically do after I have my dinner instead of surfing randomly online, watching TV, or washing the dishes.

Even though my primary objective is to enjoy the process of learning and ultimately use it to relax, I’m the kind of guy that gets most satisfaction out of taking things quite seriously. So when I’m drawing, I’m working hard on my weaknesses. Right now, I’m spending most my time studying human anatomy.

Professionally, I make websites and my primary interest is in the user interface. At one end of the scale, this is quite a formal – almost scientific – pursuit. But at the other end it is about making things look nice. So add design to my interest in drawing.

What I wanted to do with Finding Form was split my professional interest in user-interface design into two categories – usability and aesthetics – and study aesthetics separately. The ultimate dream is to create beautiful computer interfaces that are extremely usable, but Finding Form has a tighter goal. Although I believe you always interact with an image in some way, and although I believe most images contain some kind of meaning, the focus here is on the aesthetics of the image. What makes imagery appeal to the senses?

As much as possible then, I want to stick to talking about subjects such as light, contrast, line, colour, balance, texture, shape and how these are used to create something that is beautiful or emotionally captivating in some way.

I would like mentions of creating websites to be seldom. As I focus in on the Finding Form project, the plan is to keep it as some kind of cross between design and fine art. However, if you are interested in my wider goal Jason Santa Maria’s presentation on web design demonstrates a similar goal to mine (see below).

A website for Finding Form will follow, but for now I am starting with a Twitter account.

Here is that video…

SVA Dot Dot Dot Lectures: Jason Santa Maria from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

I keep finding things on YouTube that would be really cool if they were real. Then it turns out they are real and I’ve underestimated the human race again.

Then I think of something cooler, and the human race seems suitably rubbish again.

For example, real thing:

What I’d like: Ability to water jet over land and make everyone really wet (especially those wearing suits).

Real thing:

What I’d like: Indoor skydiving in a really big hollow skyscraper.