Plain Reminders

Mandy Brown, from her recent newsletter:

[The] repository of the world’s knowledge has ever been too large for most people to know it completely, and it keeps getting bigger. In that context, choosing to surface history that is technically available but obscured by the sheer enormity of human experience is a kind of radical act. Maybe what we need are not writers who can tell us something new, but those who can plainly remind us of everything we failed to remember.

And she's absolutely right. In the last few hundred years, we've amassed an unfathomable amount of knowledge and wisdom. Finding our way through that is a herculean task, and it's not something our education system is prepared to tackle either. Perhaps a new generation of journalism could be? 

I've long had the feeling that the pendulum-like swing of philosophy has also slowed to an almost full stop. From what I can tell, we've tested all the extremes -- Existentialism to materialism, authoritarianism to totalitarianism, romanticism to realism, etc. -- and are now doing our best to be pragmatic with what we've learned. It's still difficult to make sense of it all, though, without Master's degrees or years of sacrificial reading. There's too much to know and it all requires so much context to understand properly. 

I suppose longer-form journalism has always been a kind of continuing education. It would be nice to push this kind of writing into the foreground. If this is what Brown is proposing, I'm all for it. 

Just Keep Writing

Finally got into the flow of writing posts again. Part of it is the app, Writer Pro. It’s exactly the app I had slowly been conceiving of in my mind, and was *this close* to designing and possibly prototyping. Still, might, actually: if I’m going to try my hand (and my brother’s) at designing an app, there’s no better place to start than a text editor.

Writer Pro allows you to take notes and leave them in a notes folder. When you’re ready to actually start expanding that note into something more like *writing*, you move it into the Write folder. And then from Write to Edit, and from Edit to Read (where Read is really Ready To Publish). It’s great to be able to keep that flow within one app. I’ve needed to use so many apps to accomplish this previously. I take notes in either Vesper or Notes. I use Notes for longer writing. And at some vague point, those writing drafts move into my CMS, but once there it’s so hard to decide if they’re ever finished or not.

Let’s poor one out for Editorially. It closed in the Spring, but it was well on it’s way to solving writing for the web. If it had lasted long enough to have produced an iOS app, I likely never would have thought to look for another place to write. It was so good.

I’ll continue to journal using a .txt file in Notes, stored in Dropbox. Some of thoughts I stumble upon in that free-form writing become posts for the blog, likely skipping the entire Notes to Drafts to Final process. And I hope to get to a place again where I could write blog posts on the fly. Regardless of how this writing gets done, it’s always worth doing. This year’s journal is up to 22,000+ words. And that feels too short. 

Development Is Design

I attended Brooklyn Beta last week. While there, I must have introduced myself a hundred times, which of course required me to explain what I do. My stock answer was that I was a designer and developer. Both. And each time it felt weird, as if I was either claiming to be a wunderkind who can do it all, or that I didn’t know the difference between the two enough to pick one.

So when Brad Frost makes the argument that development is design, I nod my head in agreement. I know why we generally think of them as separate, it's just that it is becoming increasingly difficult to define where design ends and development begins. Some front-end work is only translation from comp to code, as in how it looks, but so much more involves how a site works. So much gray area in there.

And so now, when people ask, I’ll just say I’m a designer.