Learning from mistakes

I just read a really good essay on Lifehacker about identifying and learning from mistakes. Honestly, I’m blogging about it so that I can find the link later, but I thought others might benefit from it as well. So often, when navigating our career and life paths, we can abandon a particular path because of a mistake, rather than using that mistake to improve how we walk on that particular road. The key is striking the delicate balance between learning from mistakes and punishing yourself for them. In both programming and design, mistakes are inevitable and learning won’t happen without them.

Always learning

I’ve been taking a PHP refresher class through a friend who edits a PHP magazine, trying to keep my skills current in an often-changing field. I found a couple other good online, “casual” courses that I’d recommend as well. Codecademy does a brief intro course in JavaScript that could be a good refresher or introduction. And Method of Action is putting together a series of courses for teaching programmers how to design. I took their kerning quiz and got 85 out of 100. What can I say – I’m a sucker for quizzes! Both of these online courses are free, as far as I can tell, and they’re actually kind of fun. They’re certainly not going to make you into an expert, but they’re a good way to brush up or delve into something you don’t know.

Tags: Codecademy, design, learning, Method of Action, online courses, PHP, programming

Turning Over a New Leaf

Designing your own website, even when you design lots of sites for others, is really hard.  I think it’s even harder to design your own as a designer because you always know all the possibilities.  You’ve seen it all and then some.  You look at another designer’s portfolio and see elements in their designs that are so interesting you have to incorporate them.  You want to do everything, even though that’s not practical at all. So, even though I should have redesigned this website a year or more ago, I never did.  I had analysis paralysis.  I was never going to get it exactly right, so I never started.  Then, finally, I realized that I had to start.  Even if I changed it every other week, I had to start somewhere. 

So, yeah, that blotch of red up there probably could be interpreted as a blood splotch.  I suppose, if I were inclined to give artistic philosophies to my work, I would say that I chose to demonstrate that doing good design can hurt.  Or I could say it was a comment on having to be on the “bleeding edge” of technology, a phenomenon that I find obnoxious and bothersome.  But, really, the real reason it’s there is because I wanted to add a touch of red, saw that, and really liked it.  Sometimes good design is that simple: you like it.

Tags: design, websites