In which I ramble to myself about things I’m doing and going to do.

The Incoherent List of Things

536 words about creative — 00:18 · 25th Jan 2013

Be warned. This is more a list to myself than anything else. I need to summarize my thoughts somewhere in a simple to-do list type schematic so I won’t have to keep everything in mind all the time. Should you for some reason still feel like reading it, be my guest. I warned you. This is probably as incoherent train-of-thought writing as it’s ever going to get.

Write remaining sections of branding guideline for Carlos Eriksson. Clean up the “dirty” parts — you know what I mean — and reword everything to be consistent. The guideline itself needs to follow the guidelines set out by the guidelines. Convoluted perhaps, but more precisely… like it should be to be consistent. Spell- and grammar check everything three times too many. Then do it again just to be sure. Then build one page website where everything set out in the guideline gets used. Partly to illustrate and partly because that’s how the guideline itself should be. An evolving entity.

Implement WordPress CMS, which is probably easier but less “fun” or write own CMS. URL rewrite needs to be fixed anyway. Review old blog posts and add labels to all of them, to be later “changed” into tags or whatever. Make cross-references for everything. Standardize paragraph lengths for introductory texts to prevent truncation. 140 characters might be good but it’s pretty arbitrary anyway, should pick something that makes sense in the context it will be used. Don’t follow Twitter. Ignore double entendre of previous sentence.

A card from Magic the Gathering titled Train of Thought.

Don’t do run-ins on first paragraphs. I’d like to but they make you look a bit like a douche and also spacing between paragraphs work better with your writing style. Embrace what you can not and will not change. No run-ins.

All graphics where possible should be with optimized svg’s. Worry about optimization even though some it is over-thinking it. Remember to shrink png’s and gzip all your shit. Don’t do mistakes you preach against.

Don’t settle for designing mobile-first. Design content-out. Image a platform agnostic website capable of scaling itself according to the users wishes. The device is only a tool. The user/visitor is who matters, everything else is just masturbation. Build it like it was a multi-billion dollar website but don’t expect anyone to pad you on the shoulder for doing it. Just know that it works as it should. Be immaculate.

Write a short “article” about every showcase item. Give everything a context and reason for existing, otherwise remove it. Exceptions are few but possible. Make comments in this post that overwrite any old information. Always refer to latest way of thinking when deciding.

Root folder Apple specific icons are sufficient. Don’t reference them inside HTML document.

Hide Konami code — with easter eggs — somewhere, somehow. Pretend you didn’t just tell everybody about it.

Figure out a reasonable way to organise everything you do. It’s going to be too much with the current layout. Or will it? Find fusion.

Never lose sight of what matters, even when those things aren’t design.

Now. Be done so you can watch Supernatural with your wife.

You’ve just read The Incoherent List of Things.

In which, 11 years ago, I wrote 536 words about creative and I covered topics, such as: web design , and behind the scenes .