How I make something

You must start pinning, starting listening, start writing, start shooting. Start realizing that to make truly great things it won’t ever be easy. But the privilege we have to help make the world more beautiful, to inspire others toward goodness, to try and put back together the things that have fallen apart is truly a great one - one we must take seriously.

– Blaine Hogan

Design is not veneer

Every element you add to a design must have a purpose. The purpose may be purely emotive. This is fine. We are, after all, emotional, irrational, unpredictable creatures. But it must have purpose. And that purpose must be a valuable one. Remember, every element you add either contributes to your product being more useful and easier to understand or makes it less useful and more confusing. You should no more be adding visual elements willy nilly to your sites than you should be adding code snippets and components without at least understanding their motivations, purpose, and effects.

A terrific article on the design process in development from Aral Balkin.

Things I did in 2012

I like New Year’s. Not necessarily the going out and staying up until midnight and drinking champagne when the clock sounds - although, as holiday traditions go, that’s more my style than others. I’m not religious and I have no extended family, so I really don’t celebrate holidays in general. But I like the idea of celebrating a new year. Sure, it’s an entirely arbitrary designation of time. Who cares? Why not take the opportunity for introspection, reflection, focusing on the future, and, if it’s your style, champagne?

2012 was a good year for me, all the better for coming on the heels of 2011, which sucked in many ways. It’s almost unbelievable how much progress I’ve made in the past year. Which is exactly why I want to enumerate it and wrap my head around it and remind myself I might not be doing too badly after all.

• I spoke at ten tech and design conferences in eight different cities.
• I taught two courses of beginner HTML/CSS for Girl Develop It Columbus as well as organizing more courses and meetups for the program as a whole. In November, I was interviewed about GDIC for a Columbus Dispatch article about women learning to code in central Ohio.
• I worked my first full year at Relevance, where I’ve been constantly challenged and I’ve learned approximately 800% more than I knew before I started there.
• I took my first trip outside of the US, to Scotland. I also did a lot of other traveling, to at least nine other states, took three multi-state road trips and visited San Francisco for the first time.
• I launched a new personal website and have managed to it keep it stocked with writing I like.
• I spent the entire year with various shades of red hair.
• I got three new tattoos.
• I lived my first full year at a new apartment, which is possibly the first physical place I’ve ever really liked to live in.
• I filled 3.3 handwritten journals.

Overall, I met amazing people and had even more amazing conversations, connections and experiences. I’m still kind of flabbergasted I got to spend time with the people that I did and that I got to do everything I did. There aren’t many people who realize this, but it was only seven short years ago when I was a lone single mother on public assistance. In the years since, I’ve gone through financial hardship of all kinds, disastrous relationships and losing my mother to cancer. I’ve pretty much worked my ass off to get where I am now. It’s been a hard, stressful time. It’s nice to be able to take a breath and a look back and realize how far I’ve come.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this year, whether it was talking at a conference or interacting online or teaching me something I didn’t know or learning something new from me or just putting some positive energy into the world I got to pick up on. You’re all gorgeous people and I wish you all sorts of shiny, happy things in the new year.

I already have some big, big things planned for 2013 but I can’t announce them yet. Feel free to speculate wildly in the meantime.