Jack Hart on Chunking Up The Writing Process

Break it down into manageable steps. Let’s kick this idea around. OK, now that we’ve kicked it around, what would you say your theme statement is? And that will help refine things. If that’s your assertion about reality, how are you going to demonstrate that? What sort of information do you need to gather that’s relevant to that? And so on, and so forth. If you do those things one at a time in a logical order, it’s much less intimidating.”

Jack Hart


Here’s some more writing tips on this site.

Design, Objectivity & The Punk Spirit

What does human nature, biology, and ancient Greek architecture have to say about how wide my sidebar should be?

I’ve recently been geeking out about how my calculator can help me design more gooder.

I’ve been influenced by people who say there may be objective-ish right answers to design problems… or at least righter answers.

Making it feel right

Up to now everything I’ve designed has been a product of feel: shaping the stuff to look right/good to me. Obviously often within constraints which shape the design as much as my “feel” (the CEO hates blue, the site must be accessible to weird people, the target audience is Australian Latinos, etc).

This is the only way I could have known how to make things. I’m self taught, no lessons, and the fun thing about design has always been caring about the experience and making it right.

But this feel-based approach has been called into question by a few smarty pants people. (more…)

Radiohead on Self Publishing In Rainbows

The great thing about [releasing In Rainbows for donations] was [the music industry] didn’t like it because this wasn’t about the money – it was about the spirit of the thing.

Obviously we hoped to make money out of it, but it’s not about being greedy. It’s getting that whole thing back: what’s exciting about music? It’s the spirit.”

Ed O’Brien of Radiohead

Radiohead on Confidence and Making

One of the big things making the last record was how deeply un-self confident we were […] We didn’t trust in the process. We’ve got to trust more in the ‘it’ll be okay,’ you know, ‘we’re just working through something.’ We’ve got to trust that we’ve done some good stuff in the past and good stuff will still come.”

Ed O’Brien of Radiohead