Humility: An Essential Value

Humility, a writer’s necessary value—that has a good ring to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s necessary value? Or a surgeon’s? Or a student’s? They all good wonderful. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. In this section, we’re going to discuss about why.

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. It’s a private one, and I’m going to make myself a little prone along the way. I call it:

The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate

When I was coming out of arts school, a long-haired, goateed novice, write was a known quantity to me, design on the web, however, was riddled with complexities to understand and learn, a problem to be solved. Though I had been fully trained in graphic design, font, and design, what fascinated me was how these classic skills may be applied to a budding online landscape. This style would eventually determine the direction of my job.

But I drained HTML and JavaScript novels into the wee hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into print like many of my companions. I needed to understand the main ramifications of what my style choices may ultimately result in when rendered in a website.

The later ‘ 90s and early 2000s were the so-called” Wild West” of web design. Developers at the time were all trying to figure out how to incorporate design and visual conversation into the online landscape. What were the laws? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? At a more micro level, how was my values, inclusive of modesty, admiration, and link, coincide in combination with that? I was eager to learn more.

Even though I’m referring to a different time, those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of style. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main elements are all the same, basically the same as what we previously discussed earlier on the immediate parallels between what fulfills you, independent of the visible or online domains.

First within tables, animated GIFs, Flash, then with Web Standards, divs, and CSS, there was personality, raw unbridled creativity, and unique means of presentment that often defied any semblance of a visible grid. Splash screens and “browser requirement” pages aplenty. Usability and accessibility were typically victims of such a creation, but such paramount facets of any digital design were largely (and, in hindsight, unfairly) disregarded at the expense of experimentation.

For example, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (” the pseudoroom” ) from that era was experimental, if not a bit heavy- handed, in the visual communication of the concept of a living sketchbook. Very skeuomorphic. On this one, I worked with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy, who is now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote, to sketch and then play with various user interactions. Then, I’d break it down and code it into a digital layout.

Along with design folio pieces, the site also offered free downloads for Mac OS customizations: desktop wallpapers that were effectively design experimentation, custom-designed typefaces, and desktop icons.

From around the same time, GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal some graphic designer friends and I conceived, designed, developed, and deployed.

Design news portals were incredibly popular during this period, featuring ( what would now be considered ) Tweet-size, small-format snippets of pertinent news from the categories I previously mentioned. If you took Twitter, curated it to a few categories, and wrapped it in a custom-branded experience, you’d have a design news portal from the late 90s / early 2000s.

We as designers had evolved and created a bandwidth-sensitive, web standards award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. You can see a couple of content panes here, noting general news (tech, design ) and Mac-centric news below. We also provided many of the custom downloads that I previously mentioned on my folio website with a GUI Galaxy theme and name.

The site’s backbone was a homegrown CMS, with the presentation layer consisting of global design + illustration + news author collaboration. And the collaboration effort here, in addition to experimentation on a’ brand’ and content delivery, was hitting my core. We were creating a global audience by creating something bigger than just one of us.

Collaboration and connection transcend media, which have a huge impact on my design career.

Why am I taking you on this journey of design memory lane, now? Two reasons.

First, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for that design era ( the” Wild West” era, as I called it earlier ): the inherent exploration, personality, and creativity that saturated many design portals and personal portfolio sites. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

Today’s web design has been in a period of stagnation. There’s a good chance of seeing a website with a hero image or banner with text overlaying, perhaps with a lovely rotating carousel of images ( laying the snark on heavy there ), a call to action, and three columns of sub-content directly beneath. Perhaps there are selections that vaguely relate to their respective content in an icon library.

Design, as it’s applied to the digital landscape, is in dire need of thoughtful layout, typography, and visual engagement that goes hand-in-hand with all the modern considerations we now know are paramount: usability. Accessibility. Load times and bandwidth- sensitive content delivery. A user-friendly presentation that connects with people wherever they are. We must be mindful of, and respectful toward, those concerns—but not at the expense of creativity of visual communication or via replicating cookie-cutter layouts.

Pixel Problems

Websites built during this time were frequently built and built on Macs whose desktops and OSs looked something like this. This is Mac OS 7.5, but 8 and 9 weren’t that different.

Desktop icons fascinated me: how could any single one, at any given point, stand out to get my attention? In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, say an icon was part of a larger system grouping ( fonts, extensions, control panels ) —how did it also maintain cohesion amongst a group?

These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. Under such absurd constraints, this seemed to me to be the embodiment of digital visual communication. And frequently, ridiculous limitations can lead to the purification of concept and theme.

So I began to research and do my homework. I was a student of this new medium, hungry to dissect, process, discover, and make it my own.

Expanding upon the notion of exploration, I wanted to see how I could push the limits of a 32×32 pixel grid with that 256-color palette. These absurd restrictions imposed a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. I was thrown the digital gauntlet, and that challenge fueled my determination. And so, in my dorm room into the wee hours of the morning, I toiled away, bringing conceptual sketches into mini mosaic fruition.

These are some of my creations that I made using ResEdit, the only program I had at the time, to create icons. ResEdit was a clumsy, built-in Mac OS utility that wasn’t really designed for what we were using it for. At the core of all of this work: Research. Challenge. Problem- solving. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

One more design portal that I want to mention also serves as the second reason for my story to connect this all.

This is K10k, short for Kaliber 1000. Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard founded K10k in 1998, which was the design news website during that time. With its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every facet and detail, and with many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site, well… it was the place to be, my friend. The idea for GUI Galaxy was inspired by what these people were doing, respect where respect is due.

For my part, the combination of my pixel art and web design work started to gain me some notoriety in the design world. K10k eventually added me as one of their very select group of news writers to the website’s content.

Amongst my personal work and side projects —and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. My design work has also begun to appear on other design news portals, as well as in publications abroad and domestically as well as in various printed collections. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I evolved—devolved, really—into a colossal asshole ( and in just about a year out of art school, no less ). The praise and the press were the things that made me happy, and they went straight into my head. My ego was inflated by them. I actually felt a little better than my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. Its evolution—my evolution — stagnated.

I effectively stopped researching and discovering because I felt so incredibly confident in my abilities. When I used to lead myself to iterate through concepts or sketches, I leaped right into Photoshop. I got my inspiration from the tiniest of sources ( while wearing a blindfold ). My peers frequently vehemently disapproved of any criticism of my work. The most tragic loss: I had lost touch with my values.

My ego almost destroyed some of my friendships and blossoming professional relationships. I was toxic in talking about design and in collaboration. But thankfully, those same friends gave me a priceless gift: candor. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.

Although it was something I initially rejected, I eventually had a chance to reflect on it in depth. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. The realization laid me low, but the re-awakening was essential. I let go of the “reward” of admiration and focused instead on what ignited the fire in my art school. Most importantly: I got back to my core values.

Always Students

Following that short-term regression, I was able to push forward in my personal design and career. And as I grew older, I could reflect on my own thoughts to help me develop further and make necessary course corrections.

As an example, let’s talk about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC was created” to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the fundamental laws governing the interactions and forces between the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between general relativity and quantum mechanics.” Thanks, Wikipedia.

In one of my earlier professional roles, I created the interface for the application that produced the LHC’s particle collision diagrams about fifteen years ago. These diagrams are often regarded as works of art unto themselves because they depict what is actually happening inside the Collider during any given particle collision event.

I had a fascinating experience designing the interface for this application because I collaborated with Fermilab physicists to understand both what the application was trying to achieve and how the physicists themselves would be using it. To that end, in this role,

Working with the Fermilab team to make changes and tweak the interface, I gave in to the practice. To me, their language and the topics they discussed seemed to me to be foreign languages. And by making myself humble and operating under the impression that I was just a student, I made myself available to them in order to form that crucial bond.

I also had the opportunity to observe the physicists ‘ use of the tool in their own homes, on their own terminals, during my first ethnographic observation. One takeaway was that the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background rather than black text-on-white because of the facility’s level of ambient light-driven contrast. They were able to focus on their eyes while working during the day while poring over enormous amounts of data. Additionally, since Fermilab and CERN are government entities with stringent accessibility requirements, my knowledge expanded. The barrier-free design was another essential form of connection.

So to those core drivers of my visual problem-solving soul and ultimate fulfillment: discovery, exposure to new media, observation, human connection, and evolution. Before I entered those values, I had to check my ego before entering it, which opened the door to those values.

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. In particular, I want to focus on the words’ grow’ and ‘ evolve’ in that statement. If we are constantly improving our craft, we are also continuously making ourselves available for improvement. Yes, we have years of practical design experience behind us. or the intensive lab training offered at a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

But all that said: experience does not equal “expert”.

The designer we are is our final form as soon as we close our minds through an inner monologue of “knowing it all” or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media. The artist we can be will never be there.