Tagged: process

Creativity happens in two stages: first, unbounded imagination; then — more importantly — ruthless editing.

Loads of great advice in this post from Jason on the part of "ideas" that tends to get less attention: editing.

One of the ones that jumped out to me was his note about the importance of underutilizing people's time:

On top of that, a healthy team is intentionally underutilized. This creates free time for chasing shiny things with low risk. A roadmap with this kind of slack built-in supports exploratory tinkering by defining a clear plan with clear boundaries: I know I need to complete these 5 tasks this week to keep us on track; I finish them by lunchtime Thursday; I now have a day and a half to do whatever I find exciting without hurting the overall strategic goals or slowing things down.

What a healthy (and wise!) counter from the way most organizations tend to operate.a

Jeremy writing about Clearleft's current conclusion around so-called "AI":

There’s no way that we’d use this technology to generate outputs for clients, but we certainly might use it to generate inputs.

I think this sums up the way I've been feeling about it so far (though struggling to phrase it as succinctly).

Like most, I've played with ChatGPT, Midjourney and similar things, purely out of curiosity, and I've paid attention to the example outputs I'm seeing from others. For me, the output continues to fall into that camp of "pretty good for a piece of technology but definitely has a distinct 'smell' about it".

Creating a modal that could do all of this required thoughtful consideration and hard work. Under the hood, the modal component is composed of more than 10 sub-components. But that complexity is not passed on to our client.

A good reminder that I really, really need to get with it and spend a bit more time with web components.