Category: Blog

I am imaginative. Alchemy is what I do. It is a secret. I don’t perform it as much as I let it be done by me.

I have a creative side. Not all aspiring artists approve of this brand. Not everyone see themselves in this manner. Some innovative persons incorporate technology into their work. That is the way they are, and I take that into account. Perhaps I also have a little bit of fear for them. However, my thinking and being are unique.

It distracts one to apologize and qualify in progress. My brain uses that to destroy me. I’ll leave it alone for today. I may regret and be qualified at any time. After I’ve said what I should have. which is difficult enough.

Except when it flows like a beverage valley and is simple.

Sometimes it does. Maybe what I need to make arrives right away. I’ve learned to avoid saying it right away because people think you don’t work hard enough when you know it’s the best idea when you’re on the go and you know it’s the best idea.

Sometimes I just work until the plan strikes me. Maybe it arrives right away, but I don’t remind people for three days. Sometimes I get so excited about an thought that just came along that I blurt it out and didn’t stop myself. like a child who discovered a prize in one of his Cracker Jacks. I occasionally manage to escape this. Yes, that is the best idea, but maybe others disagree. The majority of the time, they don’t, and I regret that joy has faded.

Passion should only be saved for the meet, when it will matter. Certainly the informal get-together that comes before that meeting with two more meetings. Nothing understands why we hold these gatherings. We keep saying we’re going to get rid of them, but we just keep trying to find different ways to get them. They occasionally yet are good. But occasionally they detract from the actual labor. Depending on what you do and where you do it, the ratio between when conferences are valuable and when they are a sad distraction vary. also who you are and what you do. Suddenly, I digress. I am imaginative. That is the style.

Often, a lot of diligent and persistent work ends up with something that is rarely useful. Maybe I have to take that and move on to the next task.

Don’t inquire about the procedure. I am imaginative.

I have a creative side. I have no control over my goals. And I have no control over my best tips.

I can nail ahead, fill in the blanks, or use images or information, which occasionally works. Often going for a walk is what I can do. There is no connection between sizzling fuel and flowing pots, and I may be making dinner. I frequently have a sense of direction when I awaken. The idea that may have saved me disappears almost as frequently as I become aware and part of the world once more in a mindless breeze of oblivion. For inventiveness, in my opinion, originates in that other world. the one that we enter in ambitions and, possibly, before and after suicide. But authors should be asking this, and I am not one of them. I am imaginative. Theologians should circulate large armies throughout their artistic globe, which they claim to be true. But that is yet another diversion. And it’s miserable. Possibly on a much bigger issue than whether or not I am creative. But that’s also a step backwards from what I’m trying to say.

Often the outcome is mitigation. And suffering. You are familiar with the adage” the tortured designer”? Even when the artist is trying to write a soft drink song, a call in a worn-out comedy, or a budget ask, that word is correct.

Some individuals who detest being called artistic perhaps been closeted artists, but that’s between them and their gods. No offence here. Your reality is also true. However, mine is for me.

Artists acknowledge their work.

Negatives are aware of cons, just like queers are aware of queers, just like real rappers are aware of true rappers. People have a lot of regard for artists. We respect, follow, and almost deify the excellent ones. Of course, it is horrible to revere any person. We have been given warning. We are more knowledgeable. We are aware that people are really people. They argue, they are depressed, they regret their most important choices, they are weak and thirsty, they can be cruel, and they can be as terrible as we can because they are clay, just like us. But. But. However, they produce something incredible. They give birth to something that was unable to arise before them or otherwise. They are the inspirations of thought. And I suppose I should add that they are the mother of technology because it’s just lying it. Ba ho bum! Okay, that’s all done. Continue.

Because we compare our personal small accomplishments to those of the great ones, artists denigrate them. Wonderful video I‘m not Miyazaki, though. That is glory right then. That is glory straight out of the Bible. This unsatisfied small thing I created? It essentially fell off the turnip vehicle. And the carrots weren’t actually new.

Artists is aware that they are at best Some. That is what Mozart’s creatives do, also.

I have a creative side. I haven’t worked in advertising in 30 times, but my former artistic managers are the ones who make my nightmares. And they are correct to do so. My mind goes blank when it really counts because I’m too stupid and complacent. No medication is available to treat artistic function.

I have a creative side. Every experience I create has the potential to make Indiana Jones look older while snoring in a balcony seat. The more I pursue creativity, the faster I can finish my work, and the longer I brood and circle and gaze blankly before I can finish that work.

I can move ten times more quickly than those who aren’t creative, those who have just been creative for a short while, and those who have just been creative for a short time in their careers. Only that I spend twice as long as they do putting the job away before I work ten times as quickly as they do. When I put my mind to it, I am so confident in my ability to do a fantastic task. I have an addiction to the delay hurry. I’m still so scared of jumping.

I don’t create anything.

I have a creative side. never a musician. Though as a boy, I had a dream that I would one day become that. Some of us like and criticize our talents because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism, but at least we don’t practice elections.

I have a creative side. Despite my belief in reason and science, my decisions are based on my own senses. and accept both the successes and the calamities that come with them.

I have a creative side. Every word I’ve said these may irritate another artists who see things differently. Ask a question to two artists, and you’ll find three responses. No matter how we perhaps think about it, our debate, our passion for it, and our responsibility to our own truth, at least in my opinion, are the best indications that we are artists.

I have a creative side. I lament my lack of taste in almost all of the areas of human understanding, which I know very little about. And I put my ego before everything else in the areas that are most important to me, or perhaps more precisely, to my passions. Without my passions, I’d probably have to spend the majority of our time looking ourselves in the eye, which is something that almost none of us can do for very long. No actually. Actually, no. Because so much in existence is intolerable if you really look at it.

I have a creative side. I think that when I leave, a small portion of me will stay in someone else’s head, just like a family does.

Working frees me from worrying about my job.

I have a creative side. I fear that my little product will disappear.

I have a creative side. I spend way too much time making the next thing, given that almost nothing I create did achieve the level of brilliance I conceive of.

I have a creative side. I think approach is the most amazing mystery. I think I have to think it so strongly that I actually made the foolish decision to publish an essay I wrote without having to go through or edit. I swear I didn’t accomplish this frequently. But I did it right away because I was even more scared of forgetting what I was saying because I was as scared as I might be of you seeing through my sad gestures toward the gorgeous.

There. I believe I’ve said it.

Humility, a writer’s most important quality, has a great circle to it. What about sincerity, an business manager’s vital value? Or a doctor’s? Or a student’s? They all have fantastic sounds. When humility is our guiding light, the course is usually available for fulfillment, development, relation, and commitment. We’re going to discuss why in this book.

That said, this is a guide for developers, and to that conclusion, I’d like to begin with a story—well, a voyage, actually. Along the way, I’m going to render myself a little vulnerable. I call it:

The Absurd Pate of Justin: A Tale

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. Although I had formal training in typography, layout, and creative design, what most intrigued me was how these traditional skills could be applied to a young modern landscape. This theme may eventually form the rest of my profession.

But I drained HTML and JavaScript publications until the early hours of the morning and self-taught myself how to code during my freshman year rather than student and go into write like many of my friends. I wanted—nay, needed—to better understand the underlying relevance of what my design decisions may think when rendered in a website.

The so-called” Wild West” of website layout existed in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. Manufacturers at the time were all figuring out how to use layout and visual connection to the online environment. What were the guidelines? How may we break them and also engage, entertain, and present information? How could my values, which include value, humility, and connection, go along with that on a more general degree? I was eager to find out.

Even though I’m referring to a different time, those are amazing factors between non-career relationships and the world of layout. What are your main passions, or ideals, that elevate medium? The main themes remain the same, much like the clear parallels between what fulfills you, who is independent of the physical or digital worlds.

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 instance, this iteration of my personal portfolio site (” the pseudoroom” ) from that time was experimental if not a little overt in terms of visualizing how the idea of a living sketchbook was conveyed. Very skeuomorphic. This one involved sketching and then passing a Photoshop file back and forth to experiment with various user interactions with fellow designer and dear friend Marc Clancy, who is now a co-founder of the creative project organizing app Milanote. 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.

GUI Galaxy was a design, pixel art, and Mac-centric news portal that my friends and I conceptualized, designed, developed, and deployed around the same time.

Design news portals were incredibly popular at the time, and they now accept tweet-sized, small-format excerpts from relevant news from the categories I previously covered. 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 had evolved into a bandwidth-sensitive, award-winning, much more accessibility-conscious website using web standards. Still ripe with experimentation, yet more mindful of equitable engagement. There are a few content panes here, with both Mac-focused news and general news (tech, design ) to be seen. We also offered many of the custom downloads I cited before as present on my folio site but branded and themed to GUI Galaxy.

The presentation layer consists of international design, illustration, and news author collaboration, and the backbone of the website was a homegrown CMS. 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 medium in their impact, immensely fulfilling me as a designer.

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

First of all, there’s a reason for the nostalgia for the” Wild West” era of design that so many personal portfolio and design portals sprang from the past. Ultra-finely detailed pixel art UI, custom illustration, bespoke vector graphics, all underpinned by a strong design community.

The web design industry has been in a state of stagnation right now. I suspect there’s a strong chance you’ve seen a site whose structure looks something like this: a hero image / banner with text overlaid, 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 is relevant 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 Issues

Websites during this period were often designed and built on Macs whose OS and desktops looked something like this. Although Mac OS 7.5 is available, 8 and 9 are not very different.

How could any single icon, at any given moment, stand out and grab my attention? That is a fascinating question. In this example, the user’s desktop is tidy, but think of a more realistic example with icon pandemonium. Or, let’s say an icon was a part of a larger system group ( fonts, extensions, control panels ): how did it maintain cohesion within the group as well?

These were 32 x 32 pixel creations, utilizing a 256-color palette, designed pixel-by-pixel as mini mosaics. This, in my opinion, was the embodiment of digital visual communication under such absurd constraints. And often, ridiculous restrictions can yield the purification of concept and theme.

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

I wanted to see how I could use that 256-color palette to push the boundaries of a 32×32 pixel grid, expanding upon the idea of exploration. Those ridiculous constraints forced a clarity of concept and presentation that I found incredibly appealing. I was thrust into the digital gauntlet because of it. 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 clunky, built-in Mac OS utility not really made for exactly what we were using it for. Research is at the center of all of this work. Challenge. solving problems. Again, these core connection-based values are agnostic of medium.

There’s one more design portal I want to talk about, which also serves as the second reason for my story to bring this all together.

This is the Kaliber 1000, or K10k, short for. K10k was founded in 1998 by Michael Schmidt and Toke Nygaard, and was the design news portal on the web during this period. It was the place to be, my friend, with its pixel art-fueled presentation, ultra-focused care given to every aspect of every detail, and many of the more influential designers of the time who were invited to be news authors on the site. With respect where respect is due, GUI Galaxy’s concept was inspired by what these folks were doing.

For my part, the combination of my web design work and pixel art exploration began to get me some notoriety in the design scene. K10k eventually figured out that I was one of their very limited group of news writers who could contribute content to the website.

Amongst my personal work and side projects —and now with this inclusion—in the design community, this put me on the map. Additionally, my design work has started to appear on other design news portals, as well as be published in various printed collections, in domestic and international magazines, and in various printed collections. With that degree of success while in my early twenties, something else happened:

I really changed into a colossal asshole in just about a year of school, not less. The press and the praise became what fulfilled me, and they went straight to my head. They inflated my ego. I actually felt somewhat superior to my fellow designers.

The casualties? My design stagnated. My evolution has stagnated, as is its evolution.

I felt so supremely confident in my abilities that I effectively stopped researching and discovering. When I used to lead sketch concepts or iterations as my first instinctive step, I instead leaped right into Photoshop. I drew my inspiration from the smallest of sources ( and with blinders on ). 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, candor was a gift from those same friends. They called me out on my unhealthy behavior.

It was a gift I initially did not accept but which I, on the whole, was able to reflect on in depth. I was soon able to accept, and process, and course correct. Although the re-awakening was necessary, the realization let me down. I let go of the “reward” of adulation and re-centered upon what stoked the fire for me in art school. Most importantly, I regained my fundamental values.

Always Students

Following that temporary regression, I was able to advance in both my personal and professional design. And I could self-reflect as I got older to facilitate further growth and course correction as needed.

Let’s use the Large Hadron Collider as an example. The LHC was designed” to help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, which concern the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity”. Thank you, Wikipedia.

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

Designing the interface for this application was a fascinating process for me, in that I worked with Fermilab physicists to understand what the application was trying to achieve, but also how the physicists themselves would be using it. In order to accomplish this, this role requires,

I cut my teeth on usability testing, working with the Fermilab team to iterate and improve the interface. To me, their language and the topics they discussed seemed to me to be foreign languages. And by making myself humble and working under the mindset that I was but a student, I made myself available to be a part of their world to generate that vital connection.

I also had my first ethnographic observational experience, which involved visiting the Fermilab location and observing how the physicists used the tool in their own environments, on their own terminals. For example, one takeaway was that due to the level of ambient light-driven contrast within the facility, the data columns ended up using white text on a dark gray background instead of black text-on-white. This made it easier for them to pore over a lot of data during the day and lessen their strain on their eyes. And Fermilab and CERN are government entities with rigorous accessibility standards, so my knowledge in that realm also grew. Another crucial form of connection was the barrier-free design.

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

An evergreen willingness to listen, learn, understand, grow, evolve, and connect yields our best work. I want to pay attention to the words “grow” and “evolve” in particular in that statement. If we are always students of our craft, we are also continually making ourselves available to evolve. Yes, we have years of practical design experience behind us. Or the focused lab sessions from a UX bootcamp. Or the monogrammed portfolio of our work. Or, ultimately, decades of a career behind us.

However, with all that being said, “experience” does not equate to “expert.”

As soon as we close our minds via an inner monologue of’ knowing it all’ or branding ourselves a” #thoughtleader” on social media, the designer we are is our final form. The creator who we can be will never be there.

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months.

Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why:

The pitfalls of feature-first development

When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating new features. You might think, “If I can just add one more thing that solves this particular user problem, they’ll love me!” But what happens when you inevitably hit a roadblock because the narcs (your security team!) don’t like it? When a hard-fought feature isn’t as popular as you thought, or it breaks due to unforeseen complexity?

This is where the concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) comes in. Jason Fried’s book Getting Real and his podcast Rework often touch on this idea, even if he doesn’t always call it that. An MVP is a product that provides just enough value to your users to keep them engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or difficult to maintain. It sounds like an easy concept but it requires a razor sharp eye, a ruthless edge and having the courage to stick by your opinion because it is easy to be seduced by “the Columbo Effect”… when there’s always “just one more thing…” that someone wants to add.

The problem with most finance apps, however, is that they often become a reflection of the internal politics of the business rather than an experience solely designed around the customer. This means that the focus is on delivering as many features and functionalities as possible to satisfy the needs and desires of competing internal departments, rather than providing a clear value proposition that is focused on what the people out there in the real world want. As a result, these products can very easily bloat to become a mixed bag of confusing, unrelated and ultimately unlovable customer experiences—a feature salad, you might say.

The importance of bedrock

So what’s a better approach? How can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and—most importantly—stick?

That’s where the concept of “bedrock” comes in. Bedrock is the core element of your product that truly matters to users. It’s the fundamental building block that provides value and stays relevant over time.

In the world of retail banking, which is where I work, the bedrock has got to be in and around the regular servicing journeys. People open their current account once in a blue moon but they look at it every day. They sign up for a credit card every year or two, but they check their balance and pay their bill at least once a month.

Identifying the core tasks that people want to do and then relentlessly striving to make them easy to do, dependable, and trustworthy is where the gravy’s at.

But how do you get to bedrock? By focusing on the “MVP” approach, prioritizing simplicity, and iterating towards a clear value proposition. This means cutting out unnecessary features and focusing on delivering real value to your users.

It also means having some guts, because your colleagues might not always instantly share your vision to start with. And controversially, sometimes it can even mean making it clear to customers that you’re not going to come to their house and make their dinner. The occasional “opinionated user interface design” (i.e. clunky workaround for edge cases) might sometimes be what you need to use to test a concept or buy you space to work on something more important.

Practical strategies for building financial products that stick

So what are the key strategies I’ve learned from my own experience and research?

1. Start with a clear “why”: What problem are you trying to solve? For whom? Make sure your mission is crystal clear before building anything. Make sure it aligns with your company’s objectives, too.
2. Focus on a single, core feature and obsess on getting that right before moving on to something else: Resist the temptation to add too many features at once. Instead, choose one that delivers real value and iterate from there.
3. Prioritize simplicity over complexity: Less is often more when it comes to financial products. Cut out unnecessary bells and whistles and keep the focus on what matters most.
4. Embrace continuous iteration: Bedrock isn’t a fixed destination—it’s a dynamic process. Continuously gather user feedback, refine your product, and iterate towards that bedrock state.
5. Stop, look and listen: Don’t just test your product as part of your delivery process—test it repeatedly in the field. Use it yourself. Run A/B tests. Gather user feedback. Talk to people who use it, and refine accordingly.

The bedrock paradox

There’s an interesting paradox at play here: building towards bedrock means sacrificing some short-term growth potential in favour of long-term stability. But the payoff is worth it—products built with a focus on bedrock will outlast and outperform their competitors, and deliver sustained value to users over time.

So, how do you start your journey towards bedrock? Take it one step at a time. Start by identifying those core elements that truly matter to your users. Focus on building and refining a single, powerful feature that delivers real value. And above all, test obsessively—for, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Alan Kay, or Peter Drucker (whomever you believe!!), “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Why Inner Excellence Creates Outer Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode: Overview In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Jim Murphy, high-performance coach, speaker, and creator of the Inner Excellence Methodology. Jim has coached world-class athletes, Olympians, and business leaders, helping them master the inner game that leads to breakthrough results. He shares the story behind […]

Why Inner Excellence Creates Outer Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses.

This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question.

The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Designer handles craft. Problem solved, right? Except clean org charts are fantasy. In reality, both roles care deeply about team health, design quality, and shipping great work. 

The magic happens when you embrace the overlap instead of fighting it—when you start thinking of your design org as a design organism.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Design Team

Here’s what I’ve learned from years of being on both sides of this equation: think of your design team as a living organism. The Design Manager tends to the mind (the psychological safety, the career growth, the team dynamics). The Lead Designer tends to the body (the craft skills, the design standards, the hands-on work that ships to users).

But just like mind and body aren’t completely separate systems, so, too, do these roles overlap in important ways. You can’t have a healthy person without both working in harmony. The trick is knowing where those overlaps are and how to navigate them gracefully.

When we look at how healthy teams actually function, three critical systems emerge. Each requires both roles to work together, but with one taking primary responsibility for keeping that system strong.

The Nervous System: People & Psychology

Primary caretaker: Design Manager
Supporting role: Lead Designer

The nervous system is all about signals, feedback, and psychological safety. When this system is healthy, information flows freely, people feel safe to take risks, and the team can adapt quickly to new challenges.

The Design Manager is the primary caretaker here. They’re monitoring the team’s psychological pulse, ensuring feedback loops are healthy, and creating the conditions for people to grow. They’re hosting career conversations, managing workload, and making sure no one burns out.

But the Lead Designer plays a crucial supporting role. They’re providing sensory input about craft development needs, spotting when someone’s design skills are stagnating, and helping identify growth opportunities that the Design Manager might miss.

Design Manager tends to:

• Career conversations and growth planning
• Team psychological safety and dynamics
• Workload management and resource allocation
• Performance reviews and feedback systems
• Creating learning opportunities

Lead Designer supports by:

• Providing craft-specific feedback on team member development
• Identifying design skill gaps and growth opportunities
• Offering design mentorship and guidance
• Signaling when team members are ready for more complex challenges

The Muscular System: Craft & Execution

Primary caretaker: Lead Designer
Supporting role: Design Manager

The muscular system is about strength, coordination, and skill development. When this system is healthy, the team can execute complex design work with precision, maintain consistent quality, and adapt their craft to new challenges.

The Lead Designer is the primary caretaker here. They’re setting design standards, providing craft coaching, and ensuring that shipping work meets the quality bar. They’re the ones who can tell you if a design decision is sound or if we’re solving the right problem.

But the Design Manager plays a crucial supporting role. They’re ensuring the team has the resources and support to do their best craft work, like proper nutrition and recovery time for an athlete.

Lead Designer tends to:

• Definition of design standards and system usage
• Feedback on what design work meets the standard
• Experience direction for the product
• Design decisions and product-wide alignment
• Innovation and craft advancement

Design Manager supports by:

• Ensuring design standards are understood and adopted across the team
• Confirming experience direction is being followed
• Supporting practices and systems that scale without bottlenecking
• Facilitating design alignment across teams
• Providing resources and removing obstacles to great craft work

The Circulatory System: Strategy & Flow

Shared caretakers: Both Design Manager and Lead Designer

The circulatory system is about how information, decisions, and energy flow through the team. When this system is healthy, strategic direction is clear, priorities are aligned, and the team can respond quickly to new opportunities or challenges.

This is where true partnership happens. Both roles are responsible for keeping the circulation strong, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.

Lead Designer contributes:

• User needs are met by the product
• Overall product quality and experience
• Strategic design initiatives
• Research-based user needs for each initiative

Design Manager contributes:

• Communication to team and stakeholders
• Stakeholder management and alignment
• Cross-functional team accountability
• Strategic business initiatives

Both collaborate on:

• Co-creation of strategy with leadership
• Team goals and prioritization approach
• Organizational structure decisions
• Success measures and frameworks

Keeping the Organism Healthy

The key to making this partnership sing is understanding that all three systems need to work together. A team with great craft skills but poor psychological safety will burn out. A team with great culture but weak craft execution will ship mediocre work. A team with both but poor strategic circulation will work hard on the wrong things.

Be Explicit About Which System You’re Tending

When you’re in a meeting about a design problem, it helps to acknowledge which system you’re primarily focused on. “I’m thinking about this from a team capacity perspective” (nervous system) or “I’m looking at this through the lens of user needs” (muscular system) gives everyone context for your input.

This isn’t about staying in your lane. It’s about being transparent as to which lens you’re using, so the other person knows how to best add their perspective.

Create Healthy Feedback Loops

The most successful partnerships I’ve seen establish clear feedback loops between the systems:

Nervous system signals to muscular system: “The team is struggling with confidence in their design skills” → Lead Designer provides more craft coaching and clearer standards.

Muscular system signals to nervous system: “The team’s craft skills are advancing faster than their project complexity” → Design Manager finds more challenging growth opportunities.

Both systems signal to circulatory system: “We’re seeing patterns in team health and craft development that suggest we need to adjust our strategic priorities.”

Handle Handoffs Gracefully

The most critical moments in this partnership are when something moves from one system to another. This might be when a design standard (muscular system) needs to be rolled out across the team (nervous system), or when a strategic initiative (circulatory system) needs specific craft execution (muscular system).

Make these transitions explicit. “I’ve defined the new component standards. Can you help me think through how to get the team up to speed?” or “We’ve agreed on this strategic direction. I’m going to focus on the specific user experience approach from here.”

Stay Curious, Not Territorial

The Design Manager who never thinks about craft, or the Lead Designer who never considers team dynamics, is like a doctor who only looks at one body system. Great design leadership requires both people to care about the whole organism, even when they’re not the primary caretaker.

This means asking questions rather than making assumptions. “What do you think about the team’s craft development in this area?” or “How do you see this impacting team morale and workload?” keeps both perspectives active in every decision.

When the Organism Gets Sick

Even with clear roles, this partnership can go sideways. Here are the most common failure modes I’ve seen:

System Isolation

The Design Manager focuses only on the nervous system and ignores craft development. The Lead Designer focuses only on the muscular system and ignores team dynamics. Both people retreat to their comfort zones and stop collaborating.

The symptoms: Team members get mixed messages, work quality suffers, morale drops.

The treatment: Reconnect around shared outcomes. What are you both trying to achieve? Usually it’s great design work that ships on time from a healthy team. Figure out how both systems serve that goal.

Poor Circulation

Strategic direction is unclear, priorities keep shifting, and neither role is taking responsibility for keeping information flowing.

The symptoms: Team members are confused about priorities, work gets duplicated or dropped, deadlines are missed.

The treatment: Explicitly assign responsibility for circulation. Who’s communicating what to whom? How often? What’s the feedback loop?

Autoimmune Response

One person feels threatened by the other’s expertise. The Design Manager thinks the Lead Designer is undermining their authority. The Lead Designer thinks the Design Manager doesn’t understand craft.

The symptoms: Defensive behavior, territorial disputes, team members caught in the middle.

The treatment: Remember that you’re both caretakers of the same organism. When one system fails, the whole team suffers. When both systems are healthy, the team thrives.

The Payoff

Yes, this model requires more communication. Yes, it requires both people to be secure enough to share responsibility for team health. But the payoff is worth it: better decisions, stronger teams, and design work that’s both excellent and sustainable.

When both roles are healthy and working well together, you get the best of both worlds: deep craft expertise and strong people leadership. When one person is out sick, on vacation, or overwhelmed, the other can help maintain the team’s health. When a decision requires both the people perspective and the craft perspective, you’ve got both right there in the room.

Most importantly, the framework scales. As your team grows, you can apply the same system thinking to new challenges. Need to launch a design system? Lead Designer tends to the muscular system (standards and implementation), Design Manager tends to the nervous system (team adoption and change management), and both tend to circulation (communication and stakeholder alignment).

The Bottom Line

The relationship between a Design Manager and Lead Designer isn’t about dividing territories. It’s about multiplying impact. When both roles understand they’re tending to different aspects of the same healthy organism, magic happens.

The mind and body work together. The team gets both the strategic thinking and the craft excellence they need. And most importantly, the work that ships to users benefits from both perspectives.

So the next time you’re in that meeting room, wondering why two people are talking about the same problem from different angles, remember: you’re watching shared leadership in action. And if it’s working well, both the mind and body of your design team are getting stronger.

The 1980s seemed to be the era of geeks. Not only did geeks get their own company with Revenge of the Geeks, but they also were mainstays in shows such as The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and even pictures no starring Anthony Michael Hall. So it should come as no surprise that the 1985 monster video Fright Night had […]…

The article Fright Night Predicted the Two Sides of Nerd Culture 40 Years Before appeared primary on Den of Geek.

Episode 6 of Star Trek: Strange New World year 3 is spoiler-free in this article.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds year 3 show 6″ The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the excellent traditional science fiction curls. The feared and almost mythical hunter send the Organization encounters, the one that had been destroying planets and spacecraft with impunity, was in fact a long-lost place objective that was initially launched from Earth.

It&#8217, s not exactly a new twist ( even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond ), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. You might have been wondering if Kirk would have been so unhappy about those 7, 000 deaths if the room hat had opened to reveal a brand-new bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a picture into a exciting time in Star Trek‘s potential story. Lost and destined place operations are a constant in the Star Trek universe in the twenty-first era. In Kirk’s very first trip on display,” Where No Man Has Gone Before”, he encountered the journey record of the SS Valiant, and later the area sensor Wanderer. The staff of Next Generation discovered the bodies of the stricken NASA spacecraft Charybdis and the only survivors left inside a fiber novel reconstruction. Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV ( presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon ), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

Yet among these galaxy-spanning journeys, this hunter ship stands out thanks to what we can see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating functions.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the” Starfleet Delta” ( there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that ) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100”. That ship receives a heritage that is unique to the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself thanks to those numbers.

” All these ships were called Business”

In Star Trek: The Motion Image, those numbers initially appear together on camera ( though they are too small for you to really examine ). An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew ( later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe ). The Enterprise is given a tour of the Enterprise in search of peace and understanding, including the ship’s recreation room ( not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also known as the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the most recent” A Space Adventure Hour” ). Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle ( which in real life was named after the fictional starship ), and the Enterprise we know and love. One more, never-seen-before starship, some of which had never been seen before, was located in the ships that were in between those spaceships.

A tiny, circular spacecraft on the end of a long pole, surrounded by a pair of large circle shapes. The brand Enterprise XCV 330 would have appeared if viewers had been able to look carefully enough. It was a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it aspect, but obviously Trekkies have been obsessing over it for years.

Put a Ring on the Ring

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek‘s story, when Matt Jefferies ( the man who the famous” Jefferies Tubes” are named after ) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. A ship with a large set of rings at the back, sometimes with a saucer at the front, and occasionally with other shapes, would be one of those sketches and yield some interesting outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch” 22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker, a digital artist, has contributed to a wide range of Star Trek projects, including some that were entirely based on that sketch.

” About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called’ Starship’”, Rademaker tells us. That series was never realized. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the’ 22L ‘ version”.

Because this new series wasn’t going to be Star Trek, its interior would have some significant differences, even if those differences might end up being more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s early set designs.

People “would not travel to a planet, but rather” step into” the “metafier” ( the dome on the right side of the command module ) and “project” themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. ” I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter”.

Another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II was unsuccessful, and the resultant movie production was the Star Trek canon.

” When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene]Roddenberry ] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies ‘ painting, to add onto this wall”, says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. The Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology served as the only additional information fans could have for decades. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

The ring-ship Enterprise was referred to as” Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things, according to this chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

Up until 2001, when a new show showcasing the adventures of the Enterprise that were previously untold in the Original Series, the ship remained in canon there for decades.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably” Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Return to the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. Vulcan starships would play a significant role in the show for the first time, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies ‘ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler later stated,” My main goal was to create a new classic Matthew Jeffries concept for Star Trek as a signature ship.” So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship“!

With the episode” First Flight,” Enterprise would go a step further in establishing the ring ship’s place in the canon. This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We were introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out, and we saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

This again raises the question of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek‘s chronology.

” My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed”, suggests Rademaker. I’m assuming the XCV-330 was a human design that was based on some sub-light XCV platform but that was engineered to work with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a somewhat dated cylindrical body with a thin interior, and a long neck, keeping the crew far from the danger areas.

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had ample time to consider this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s” Ships of the Line” calendar.

Rademaker recalls that Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to help us decide which direction to take. ” This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it”.

The work received a lot of attention, including that from the modeling firm QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an” Artisan model”.

” Later, when I sat in the theater, I discovered that QMx used the model to make a prop for Into Darkness“! Rademaker says.

Between Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship” The Phoenix” and the real-life Ares V rocket, the miniature appears on Admiral Marcus ‘ desk. This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. This Enterprise was” Earth&#8217, s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle,” according to the QMx website ( which is unfortunately no longer online ).

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. According to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was hired to work on the ring ship once more until 2023, 100 years prior to the launch of this Enterprise.

” I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great performance”! Rademaker says.

At the Rodenberry Archive, you can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, both inside and out, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies ‘ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film” Memory Wall”. For NASA, Reedmaker has also continued to work on the shape of the ring ship. You see, the workings of Star Trek‘s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His” Alcubierre drive” is thought to be driven by an engine that is most likely, you might say, ring-shaped.

” In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘ Sonny’ White ( Then working at NASA ) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach”, Rademaker shares. We ultimately made the decision to create a completely new ringship that would be more in line with his theory. ( The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise. ) The media decided against the idea of presenting that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, instead acting as a useful motivator for students to enter STEM/STEAM. It was good fun”.

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. With what is now a Hugo award-winning finale, Star Trek: Lower Decks came to a close last year. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design, which included some extra solar panels, added details, and a clever new landing mechanism, was undoubtedly an evolution of the Enterprise XCV-330.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It provides a lot of insight into how the Enterprise ringed up in Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

The XCV-100’s size was a requirement for their mission, and it was not a ship with a warp capability. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason”, Rademaker hypothesizes. Or perhaps they simply altered the shape to fit your needs. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics”.

We can see the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta in the brief glimpse we have of the ship ( many decades before Starfleet could have been created ).

” The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Therefore, it still appears a US-like flag next to the UESPA logo, which is also visible on the Friendship One probe launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. ” However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me think that 2067 will mark the beginning of UESPA’s long-term unification and the formalization of Earth’s unification in terms of space-related issues.

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s” Z2″ spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 serves as a missing link, a direct link between Pike’s spacecraft Enterprise and NASA’s ( however long that may go ) future.

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. We are informed of the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship through” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail.” Even the Gorn call it a monster.

Its needs are bottomless, according to Scott. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The more it demands, the bigger it becomes. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop. &#8221,

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Like the Doomsday Machine from TOS or the Borg, something consumes, destroys, and assimilates everything it encounters.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek‘s perfect future.

It’s a long journey to get from here to there, in the words of another old Enterprise…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The first post on Den of Geek was titled Strange New Worlds &#8217, XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History.

The most interesting tales are often told from viewpoints that we unconsciously ignore. That’s precisely what writer and producer Dan Kay set out to do with What We Hide, an emotionally driven picture that examines the current effects of dependency through the eyes of its youngest testimony and those left to pick up the items ]… ]

The second post McKenna Grace and Jojo Regina Open Up About Sisters, Survival, and What We Hide appeared initially on Den of Geek.

This article contains trailers for Star Trek: Strange New World year 3 season 6.

One of the greatest traditional science fiction curls came to an end in Star Trek: Odd New Worlds year 3 episode 6 of” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail.” The feared and near-mythical hunter send the Organization encounters, the one that had been flying through the cosmos wiping out planets and spaceships with leave, was not a strange new mysterious threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission previously launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist ( there were numerous variations of it in The Twilight Zone and beyond before Planet of the Apes made one ), and in this installment it even crossed the line of being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7, 000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

It also provided a window into a fascinating time in the future of Star Trek. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In” Where No Man Has Gone Before,” Kirk’s first screen encounter, he encountered the space probe Nomad and the flight recorder from the SS Valiant. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis ( as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel ). The Mars mission Ares IV, which is thought to be the base for the Ares III mission Trek canon, and the experiment warp probe Friendship One, are both on board Voyager.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We can now see the letters and numbers “XCV-100” and the well-known emblem that is now known as the” Starfleet Delta” ( there is a whole other article to be written about that ). Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

” Energy was the name of all of these ships.”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen ( although too small for you to actually read ) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A member of the ship’s crew has been taken by an alien entity, which it turns out to be yet another Earth probe that has gone wrong, this time the Voyager VI probe. In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room ( not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent” A Space Adventure Hour“. A sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually use in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle ( which in real life was named after the fictional starship ), and the Enterprise we know and love are all depicted in a wall of pictures. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A pair of large ring shapes surround a small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. Since it was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, Trekkies have undoubtedly been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That image was created when Matt Jefferies ( the man whose famous” Jefferies Tubes” are named after ) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. It has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek‘s story. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. However, the sketch” 22L,” one of those discarded sketches, would continue to serve a much longer, ongoing purpose.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

According to Rademaker, “Sketch 22L was picked up again about ten years later when Gene was creating a new series called” Starship.” ” That series never came to fruition. However, Matt Jefferies did produce some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork for the” 22L” version for that series.

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of being based on a single man in a chair, the bridge was designed with concepts that would still appear on Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s early set designs.

” People would not transport to a planet, but step into the’ metafier’ ( The dome on the right side of the command module ) and ‘ project’ themselves onto a planet”, Rademaker says. I’m assuming that this was another low-cost mechanic, similar to a transporter.

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

Gene Roddenberry requested Rick Sternbach to create a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies painting for the rec room wall when they were building the ship wall, according to Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

That particular detail would continue to be a tantalizing piece of canon for a long time. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. This book, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, was for many years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe. It was published in 1980.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as” Declaration Class”, operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. Additionally, the book claimed that it was the first ship to have a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

The show chose a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the 1701 rec room wall, because it was probably correctly determined that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably” Star Trek” than the historic ring ship.

Back into the Canon

However, the Star Trek: Enterprise based Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, and the show would also require other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first thought was to dive into Matt Jefferies ‘ “wastepaper basket.”

As designer Doug Drexler said later,” My main impetus was to get another classic]Matt ] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So Matt Jeffries ‘ ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s” Starship” is where the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic originated.

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode” First Flight”. In this episode, a flashback to the early days of the warp program was provided. 80 years after Zefram Cochrane won Warp 1, Earth was still attempting to reach Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, which features a picture of the mysterious ring ship, is right up there on the board, and the bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek‘s chronology.

XCV ships were developed somewhere between 2055 and 2110, according to Rademaker. ” I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be the final and perhaps even the most complete version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits”.

Releasing the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. When he met Andrew Probert, who designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s” Ships of the Line,” he first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity.

” Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take”, Rademaker remembers. ” This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, and I improved a lot as a result.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. In order to create an” Artisan model,” they requested a file of the 3D model from Rademaker.

” Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness“! Raemaker asserts.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship” The Phoenix”. This places it before people can travel at lightspeed. According to the QMx website ( which is sadly no longer online ), this Enterprise was” Earth&#8217, s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle”.

Eaglemoss would use Rakemaker’s model as the foundation for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature, which would continue its journeys. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

When Mike Okuda reached out to ask if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive, I was just about to do a refit on this ship. Great gig”! Raemaker asserts.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies ‘ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even made its first real appearance on the ship, which was ultimately depicted in the short film” Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the theories of physicist Miguel Alcubierre are very similar to those of Star Trek‘s warp drive. His theoretical” Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

” Dr. Harold” Sonny” White ( who was then employed by NASA ) requested that I modify the XCV-330 to make a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker says. ” We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. ( The IXS-110, also known as the IXS Enterprise. ) The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was enjoyable.

The Continuing Voyages

For the first time, Star Trek‘s ring ship design is being featured. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The USS Beagle, a ship that travels through an alternate 21st century, parallel universe, and was the subject of the story. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

Finally, we come to the XCV-100 in the episode from last week’s Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. The ship appears much larger than the ship in Rademaker’s models if it has a ring similar to the Enterprise, which is obscured.

” The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. In contrast to the 100, the XCV-330 appears to be a scaled down version with very similar nose/front end parameters, as if that was an optimal shape for some reason,” Rademaker suggests. ” Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Some hulls can be increased from, say, 60 to 120 meters without making significant structural changes. This is not uncommon in shipbuilding.

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta ( many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established ).

” The 100 probably was constructed sometime between 2055 and 2063.” Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067″, Rademaker suggests. That probe does not, however, have any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth &#8217, s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized”.

Even the crew’s spacesuits are visible, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s” Z2″ spacesuit being created for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program ( however much longer that might last ).

However, look closer, and there’s a little bit more to it than that. Through” The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn refer to it as a monster.

As Scott describes it,” Its needs are bottomless. It only consumes and grows bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to eat the next resource, as if it never stops. &#8221,

When he says it, we believe we are describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But it turns out he’s talking about people as they are in the 21st century, as the Star Trek fans can see it.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

On Paramount+, new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episodes will air on Thursdays before the season’s finale on September 11.

The post Strange New Worlds &#8217, XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

This Star Trek: Strange New Worlds review contains spoilers for season 3 episode 7. Part of the joy of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is that it takes risks, both in terms of the stories it tells and the formats it chooses to tell them in. Most of the time, those risks pay off. After all, […]

The post Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3 Episode 7 Review — What Is Starfleet? appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The post Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Ron Howard always wanted to visit the Galápagos. In the director’s mind, it was a “bucket list” destination before there was a movie called The Bucket List. When we catch up with the Oscar-winning filmmaker, he even points out that he dreamed about this well ahead of his frequent collaborator and friend Paul Bettany filming […]

The post A Ron Howard Family Vacation Led to His Darkest Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Strange New World season 3 episode 6.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 episode 6 “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” concluded with one the great classic science fiction twists. The feared and near-mythical scavenger ship the Enterprise encounters, the one that had been flying through the galaxy wiping out planets and spaceships with abandon, was not a mysterious new alien threat, but in fact a long-lost space mission originally launched from Earth.

It’s not exactly a new twist (even before Planet of the Apes did a variant on it, numerous versions of it had appeared in The Twilight Zone and beyond), and in this installment it even bordered on being a little problematic. The episode did leave you wondering if Kirk would have been quite so upset about those 7,000 deaths if the space helmet had opened to reveal a new kind of bumpy forehead.

But it also gave us a glimpse into a fascinating period in Star Trek’s future history. The 21st century of the Star Trek universe is littered with lost and doomed space missions. In Kirk’s very first adventure on screen, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he encountered the flight recorder of the SS Valiant, and later the space probe Nomad. The Next Generation’s crew came across the wreckage of the doomed NASA spacecraft Charybdis (as well as the corpse of its sole surviving crewmember trapped in a reconstruction of an old pulp novel). Even Voyager ran into the long-lost Mars mission Ares IV (presumably making The Martian movie’s Ares III mission Trek canon), and the experiment warp probe Friendship One.

But even among these jaunts into the galaxy, this scavenger ship stands out thanks to what we see when the viewscreen zooms in on the remaining Earth-originating features of the ship.

We see a familiar emblem now known as the “Starfleet Delta” (there’s a whole other article to be written about the history of that) and the letters and numbers “XCV-100.” Those numbers give that ship a lineage that leads to none other than the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 herself.

“All these ships were called Enterprise”

The first time those numbers appear together on screen (although too small for you to actually read) are in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. An alien entity has possessed a member of the ship’s crew (later it would turn out this entity was yet another Earth probe that had gone astray, this time the Voyager VI probe). In search of peace and understanding, the entity is given a tour of the Enterprise, including the ship’s recreation room (not to be confused with the holodeck, which was also called the recreation room in Star Trek: The Animated Series and the recent “A Space Adventure Hour.” Here the entity is shown a wall of pictures, including a sailing ship, the real-world aircraft carrier the crew would eventually break into in Star Trek IV, the prototype NASA space shuttle (which in real life was named after the fictional starship), and the Enterprise we know and love. Between those spaceships was another, never-seen-before spaceship, some previously unseen part of the Enterprise lineage.

A small, cylindrical capsule on the end of a long rod, surrounded by a pair of large ring shapes. If viewers had been able to look closely enough, they would have seen the name Enterprise XCV 330. It was a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail, so naturally Trekkies have been obsessing over it for decades.

Put a Ring on It

That picture has its origins right at the very beginning of Star Trek’s story, when Matt Jefferies (the man who the famous “Jefferies Tubes” are named after) was sketching out potential outlines for what would eventually become the Enterprise. You could go through those sketches and find cool outlines for a dozen new sci-fi shows, but one shape that kept recurring was the idea of a ship with a large set of rings at the back – sometimes with a saucer at the front, sometimes with other shapes. But one of those discarded sketches, sketch “22L” would go on to have a far longer continuing mission.

Mark Rademaker is a digital artist who has worked on a wide range of Star Trek projects, including several based around that very sketch.

“About 10 years later sketch 22L got picked up again when Gene was developing a new series called ‘Starship’,” Rademaker tells us. “That series never came to fruition. But for that series Matt Jefferies did make some more detailed interior and exterior blueprints and artwork of the ‘22L’ version.”

This new show was not going to be Star Trek, which meant its interior would have some extensive differences, even if ultimately those differences might turn out to be more cosmetic.

Instead of a bridge based around one man in a chair, it was based around people sitting in a circle around a computer console – a design with ideas that would still find their way into Star Trek: The Next Generation’s early set designs.

“People would not transport to a planet, but step into the ‘metafier’ (The dome on the right side of the command module) and ‘project’ themselves onto a planet,” Rademaker says. “I assume this was another cost saving mechanic, just like a transporter.”

When Starship failed to materialize, another attempt to relaunch Star Trek with the spinoff Phase II turned into a movie production and that design finally found its way into Star Trek canon.

“When they were building the ship wall in the rec room, Gene [Roddenberry] asked Rick Sternbach to do a high contrast ink version of a Matt Jefferies’ painting, to add onto this wall,” says Rademaker.

The Space Cruise Liner

For a long time that detail would remain a tantalizing tidbit of canon. For decades the only further information fans would have on the ship was the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology. Published in 1980, written and edited by Stan Goldstein and Fred Goldstein, and illustrated by Rick Sternbach, this book was for years the “official” history of the Star Trek universe.

This chronology, which ran from the earliest days of spaceflight to the Enterprise as depicted in the Star Trek movies, described the ring-ship Enterprise as “Declaration Class,” operating from 2123 to 2165 as an interstellar cruise liner, with three theaters, three nightclubs, and a zero-gravity gymnasium, among other things. The book also claimed it was the first kind of ship to be equipped with a subspace radio.

That was where the ship remained in canon for decades, until 2001, with the launch of a new show chronicling the adventures of the Enterprise that came before the one in the Original Series.

Probably correctly deciding that the show’s hero ship would need to be more recognizably “Star Trek” than the historic ring ship, the show opted for a different design, one that for some reason never made it to the rec room wall of the 1701.

Back into the Canon

But while the Enterprise that would appear in Star Trek: Enterprise was reassuringly saucer-and-warp-nacelle based, the show would also need other ship designs. For the first time, Vulcan starships would play a major role in the show, and such iconic aliens needed an iconic starship design.

Like many designers before and since, their first idea was to dive into Matt Jefferies’ wastepaper basket.

As designer Doug Drexler said later, “My main impetus was to get another classic [Matt] Jeffries concept on Star Trek as a signature ship. So the Enterprise Vulcan spaceship design ethic came from Matt Jeffries ring ship for Gene Roddenberry’s Starship!”

Enterprise would go a step further in cementing the ring ship’s place in the canon with the episode “First Flight.” This episode provided a flashback to the early days of the warp program, where 80 years after Zefram Cochrane achieved Warp 1, Earth was still trying to get to Warp 2. We saw young Jonathan Archer competing to be the first person to command an actual starship, and are introduced to Club 602, the San Francisco bar where all the Starfleet flyboys hang out. The bar is decorated with various photos and insignias celebrating the history of flight and spaceflight, and in another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance, the Enterprise XCV-330 mission patch, with a picture of the enigmatic ring ship, is right up there on the board.

Which raises the question, once again, of how the XCV-330 fits into Star Trek’s chronology.

“My personal theory: Somewhere between 2055 and 2110, XCV ships were developed,” suggests Rademaker. “I assume the XCV-330 was a human design based on some sub-light XCV platform but engineered to combine it with a Vulcan low warp ring template. It might be a later and perhaps even the final version of this line of ships. This would explain the rings, a rather dated cylindrical and thin internal layout, and a long neck so the crew is far away from the danger bits.”

Relaunching the XCV-330

Rademaker has had plenty of time to think about this. He first came into contact with the ship in a professional capacity when he met Andrew Probert, who among other things designed the Enterprise for The Motion Picture and The Next Generation, as well as the XCV-330 for Star Trek’s “Ships of the Line” calendar.

“Andrew and I mailed back and forth about the general shapes and a lot about the details, with Andrew sketching over my renders to illustrate what direction to take,” Rademaker remembers. “This collab with Andrew really opened my eyes, I improved a lot because of it.”

The work caught a few eyes, including that of modeling company QMx. They asked Rademaker for a file of the 3D model so that they could use it to create an “Artisan model”.

“Later, when I sat in the cinema, I found out that QMx used the model to do a prop for Into Darkness!” Rademaker says.

The miniature appears on Admiral Marcus’s desk, between the real-life Ares V rocket and Zefram Cochrane’s experimental warp ship “The Phoenix.” This places it before humans achieve lightspeed. According to the QMx website (which is sadly no longer online), this Enterprise was “Earth’s first sublight, interplanetary, and interstellar space vehicle.”

Rakemaker’s model would continue its voyages, with Eaglemoss using it as the basis for their own Enterprise XCV-330 miniature. Most recently, in 2023, 100 years before the launch of this Enterprise according to the Spaceflight Chronology, Rademaker was recruited to work on the ring ship once again.

“I was just about to do a refit on this ship to make it compatible with my current render software when Mike Okuda reached out and asked me if I could model the bridge for the Roddenberry Archive. Great gig!” Rademaker says.

You can visit Rademaker’s reconstruction of this Enterprise, inside and out, at the Rodenberry Archive, including an explorable 3D reconstruction of its bridge and “metafier” room, based on Jefferies’ blueprints from the defunct Starship show.

The model even gave the ship its first actual appearance, depicting its eventual demise in the short film “Memory Wall.” Rademaker has also continued working with the ring ship shape for NASA. You see, the workings of Star Trek’s warp drive are very close to the ideas of physicist Miguel Alcubierre. His theoretical “Alcubierre drive” would be driven by an engine that is most likely, you guessed it, ring shaped.

“In 2011 Dr. Harold ‘Sonny’ White (Then working at NASA) asked me to modify the XCV-330 to create a ship for STEM outreach,” Rademaker shares. “We eventually decided to do a whole new ringship that would conform better to his theory. (The IXS-110 aka IXS Enterprise.)  The idea was never to present that ship as an actual new NASA Starship, more like a good motivator for students to get into STEM/STEAM, but the media decided otherwise. It was good fun.”

The Continuing Voyages

The ring ship design is finding its way into Star Trek shows for the first time as well. As Star Trek: Lower Decks drew to a close last year, with what is now a Hugo award-winning finale. The story featured an alternate 21st century, parallel universe traversing ship called the USS Beagle. Its design was clearly a variation of the Enterprise XCV-330, with some extra solar panels and added details, and a nifty new landing mechanism.

And finally, we come to the XCV-100 in last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds. It gives us a lot of clues about how the ring ship Enterprise fits into Star Trek history. If this ship has a ring like the Enterprise, that is obscured, and the ship appears much bigger than the ship in Rademaker’s models.

“The XCV-100 was not a warp capable ship, and the larger size was a requirement for their mission. The XCV-330 compared to the 100 seems to be a scaled down version but with very similar parameters of the nose/front end, like that was an optimized shape for some reason,” Rademaker hypothesizes. “Or maybe they just made this shape in a couple of sizes. Not unheard of in shipbuilding, some hulls in terms of hydrodynamics can be scaled up from for example 60 to 120 meters, without significant changes in characteristics.”

In the brief glimpse we get of the ship, we notice the ID number, the American flag, and the iconic Starfleet delta (many decades before Starfleet could have actually been established).

“The 100 probably was constructed somewhere between 2055 and 2063. Hence it still shows a US like flag alongside an UESPA logo that we also see on the Friendship One probe that was launched in 2067,” Rademaker suggests. “However, that probe does not carry any nation flags on the outside. That makes me assume that 2067 is when UESPA is well established and Earth’s unification in terms of space related things has been formalized.”

We even see the crew’s spacesuits, which are clearly based on the prototype of NASA’s “Z2” spacesuit being developed for a potential Mars mission. In that way, the XCV-100 is a missing link, a very concrete connection between Pike’s starship Enterprise, and our own time’s NASA space program (however much longer that might last).

Look closer though, and there’s a bit more to it than that. Through “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail” we are told the legends and rumors about this scavenger ship. Even the Gorn call it a monster.

As Scott describes it, “Its needs are bottomless. All it does is consume and make itself bigger. The bigger it gets, the more it requires. Then it moves on to devour the next resource, like it will never stop.”

When he says it, we think he’s describing an alien monster. Something consumes, destroys and assimilates everything it encounters, like the Doomsday Machine from TOS, or the Borg.

But of course, it turns out he’s describing us – humans as they exist in the 21st century, viewed by the inhabitants of Star Trek’s perfect future.

To a paraphrase another old Enterprise, it’s a long road getting from here to there…

New episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiere Thursdays on Paramount+, culminating with a finale on Sept. 11.

The post Strange New Worlds’ XCV-100 Is a Missing Link in Star Trek History appeared first on Den of Geek.

” Any reply”? is perhaps one of the worst ways to ask for suggestions. It’s obscure and unfocused, and it doesn’t give a clear picture of what we’re looking for. Getting good opinions starts sooner than we might hope: it starts with the demand.

Starting the process of receiving feedback with a question may seem counterintuitive, but it makes sense if we consider that receiving input can be considered a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t perform any studies without the correct questions to get the insight that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to build strong issues.

Design criticism is never a one-time procedure. Sure, any great comments process continues until the project is finished, but this is especially true for layout because architecture work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each stage requires its unique set of questions.

And suddenly, as with any great research, we need to review what we got up, get to the base of its perspectives, and take activity. Problem, generation, and analysis. This look at each of those.

The query

Being available to input is important, but we need to be specific about what we’re looking for. Any comments,” What do you think,” or” I’d love to hear your mind” at the conclusion of a presentation are likely to garner a lot of different ideas, or worse, to make everyone follow the lead of the first speaker. And next… we get frustrated because vague issues like those can change a high-level moves review into folks rather commenting on the borders of buttons. Which theme may be significant, so it might be difficult to get the team to choose the one you wanted to concentrate on.

But how do we get into this scenario? It’s a combination of various components. One is that we don’t often consider asking as a part of the input approach. Another is how healthy it is to keep the issue open and assume that everyone else will agree. Another is that in nonprofessional conversations, there’s usually no need to be that exact. In summary, we tend to undervalue the value of the issues, and we don’t work to improve them.

The work of asking good questions guidelines and focuses the criticism. It also serves as a form of acceptance, outlining your willingness to make remarks and the types of comments you want to receive. It puts people in the right emotional position, especially in situations when they weren’t expecting to give opinions.

There isn’t a second best method to request suggestions. It simply needs to be certain, and sensitivity can take several shapes. The period than depth model for design critique has been a particularly helpful tool for my coaching.

” Stage” refers to each of the steps of the process—in our event, the design process. The kind of feedback changes as the consumer research moves forward to the final design. But within a single stage, one might also examine whether some assumptions are correct and whether there’s been a suitable language of the amassed input into updated designs as the task has evolved. The layers of user experience could serve as a starting point for future inquiries. What do you want to know: Project objectives? user requirements? Functionality? Content? Interaction design? a system of information architecture UI design? design of navigation Visual design? Branding?

Here’re a few example questions that are precise and to the point that refer to different layers:

• Functionality: Is it desirable to automate account creation?
• Interaction design: Take a look through the updated flow and let me know whether you see any steps or error states that I might’ve missed.
• Information architecture: This page contains two competing pieces of information. Is the structure effective in communicating them both?
• User interface design: What do you think about the top-of-the-page error counter, which makes sure you can see the next error even when the error is outside the viewport?
• Navigation design: From research, we identified these second-level navigation items, but once you’re on the page, the list feels too long and hard to navigate. Are there any ways to deal with this?
• Visual design: Are the sticky notifications in the bottom-right corner visible enough?

The other axis of specificity is determined by how far you would like to go with the presentation. For example, we might have introduced a new end-to-end flow, but there was a specific view that you found particularly challenging and you’d like a detailed review of that. This can be especially helpful from one iteration to the next when it’s crucial to highlight the areas that have changed.

There are other things that we can consider when we want to achieve more specific—and more effective—questions.

A quick fix is to get rid of the generic qualifiers from questions like “good,” “well,” “nice,” “bad,” “okay,” and” cool.” For example, asking,” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is this interaction good”? is it possible to look specific, but you can identify the “good” qualifier and make the question” When the block opens and the buttons appear, is it clear what the next action is” look like?

Sometimes we actually do want broad feedback. Although that is uncommon, it is possible. In that sense, you might still make it explicit that you’re looking for a wide range of opinions, whether at a high level or with details. Or perhaps you should just say,” At first glance, what do you think”? so that it’s clear that what you’re asking is open ended but focused on someone’s impression after their first five seconds of looking at it.

Sometimes the project is particularly broad, and some areas may have already been thoroughly explored. In these situations, it might be useful to explicitly say that some parts are already locked in and aren’t open to feedback. Although it’s not something I’d recommend in general, I’ve found it helpful in avoiding getting back into rabbit holes like those that could lead to even more refinement if what’s important right now isn’t.

Asking specific questions can completely change the quality of the feedback that you receive. People with less refined criticism will now be able to provide more actionable feedback, and even expert designers will appreciate the clarity and effectiveness gained from concentrating solely on what’s needed. It can save a lot of time and frustration.

The iteration

Design iterations are probably the most visible part of the design work, and they provide a natural checkpoint for feedback. Many design tools have inline commenting, but many of those methods typically display changes as a single fluid stream in the same file. These methods cause conversations to vanish once they’re resolved, update shared UI components automatically, and require designs to always display the most recent version unless these would-be useful features were manually turned off. The implied goal that these design tools seem to have is to arrive at just one final copy with all discussions closed, probably because they inherited patterns from how written documents are collaboratively edited. That’s probably not the most effective way to go about designing critiques, but even if I don’t want to be too prescriptive, it might work for some teams.

The asynchronous design-critique approach that I find most effective is to create explicit checkpoints for discussion. For this, I’m going to use the term iteration post. It refers to a write-up or presentation of the design iteration followed by a discussion thread of some kind. This can be used on any platform that can accommodate this structure. By the way, when I refer to a “write-up or presentation“, I’m including video recordings or other media too: as long as it’s asynchronous, it works.

Using iteration posts has a number of benefits:

• It creates a rhythm in the design work so that the designer can review feedback from each iteration and prepare for the next.
• It makes decisions accessible for upcoming review, and conversed conversations are also always available.
• It creates a record of how the design changed over time.
• It might also make it simpler to collect and act on feedback depending on the tool.

These posts of course don’t mean that no other feedback approach should be used, just that iteration posts could be the primary rhythm for a remote design team to use. From there, there can be additional feedback techniques ( such as live critique, pair designing, or inline comments ).

I don’t think there’s a standard format for iteration posts. However, there are a few high-level components that make sense as a baseline:

1. The goal
2. The layout
3. The list of changes
4. The querys

Each project is likely to have a goal, and hopefully it’s something that’s already been summarized in a single sentence somewhere else, such as the client brief, the product manager’s outline, or the project owner’s request. In other words, I would copy and paste this into every iteration post to make it work. The idea is to provide context and to repeat what’s essential to make each iteration post complete so that there’s no need to find information spread across multiple posts. The most recent iteration post will have everything I need if I want to know about the most recent design.

This copy-and-paste part introduces another relevant concept: alignment comes from repetition. Therefore, repeating information in posts is actually very effective at ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

The design is then the actual series of information-architecture outlines, diagrams, flows, maps, wireframes, screens, visuals, and any other kind of design work that’s been done. In essence, it’s any design work. For the final stages of work, I prefer the term blueprint to emphasize that I’ll be showing full flows instead of individual screens to make it easier to understand the bigger picture.

Because it makes it easier to refer to the objects, it might also be helpful to have clear names on them. Write the post in a way that helps people understand the work. It’s not very different from creating a strong live presentation.

For an efficient discussion, you should also include a bullet list of the changes from the previous iteration to let people focus on what’s new, which can be especially useful for larger pieces of work where keeping track, iteration after iteration, could become a challenge.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, it’s crucial that you include a list of the questions to help you guide the design critique in the desired direction. Doing this as a numbered list can also help make it easier to refer to each question by its number.

Not every iteration is the same. Earlier iterations don’t need to be as tightly focused—they can be more exploratory and experimental, maybe even breaking some of the design-language guidelines to see what’s possible. Then, later, the iterations begin coming to a decision and improving it until the design process is complete and the feature is ready.

I want to highlight that even if these iteration posts are written and conceived as checkpoints, by no means do they need to be exhaustive. A post might be a draft, just a concept to start a discussion, or it might be a cumulative list of every feature that was added over the course of each iteration until the full picture is achieved.

Over time, I also started using specific labels for incremental iterations: i1, i2, i3, and so on. Although this may seem like a minor labeling tip, it can be useful in many ways:

• Unique—It’s a clear unique marker. Everyone knows where to go to review things, and it’s simple to say” This was discussed in i4″ with each project.
• Unassuming—It works like versions ( such as v1, v2, and v3 ) but in contrast, versions create the impression of something that’s big, exhaustive, and complete. Attempts must be exploratory, incomplete, or partial.
• Future proof—It resolves the “final” naming problem that you can run into with versions. No more files with the title “final final complete no-really-its-done” Within each project, the largest number always represents the latest iteration.

The wording release candidate (RC ) could be used to indicate when a design is finished enough to be worked on, even if there are some bits that still need work and, in turn, need more iterations:” with i8 we reached RC” or “i12 is an RC” to illustrate this.

The review

A back-and-forth between two people that can be very productive typically occurs during a design critique. This approach is particularly effective during live, synchronous feedback. However, when we work asynchronously, it is more effective to adopt a different strategy: we can adopt a user-research mindset. Written feedback from teammates, stakeholders, or others can be treated as if it were the result of user interviews and surveys, and we can analyze it accordingly.

Asynchronous feedback is particularly effective because of this shift, especially around these friction points:

1. It removes the pressure to reply to everyone.
2. It lessens the annoyance of snoop-by comments.
3. It lessens our personal stake.

The first friction point is having to press yourself to respond to each and every comment. Sometimes we write the iteration post, and we get replies from our team. It’s simple, straightforward, and doesn’t cause any issues. But other times, some solutions might require more in-depth discussions, and the amount of replies can quickly increase, which can create a tension between trying to be a good team player by replying to everyone and doing the next design iteration. If the respondent is a stakeholder or a person directly involved in the project, this might be especially true. We need to accept that this pressure is absolutely normal, and it’s human nature to try to accommodate people who we care about. When we treat a design critique more like user research, we realize that we don’t need to respond to every comment, and there are alternatives: In asynchronous spaces, responding to all comments can be effective.

One is to let the next iteration speak for itself. When the design changes and we publish a follow-up iteration, that’s the response. You might tag all the people who were involved in the previous discussion, but even that’s a choice, not a requirement.
• Another option is to respond politely to acknowledge each comment, such as” Understood. Thank you”,” Good points— I’ll review”, or” Thanks. These will be included in the upcoming iteration. In some cases, this could also be just a single top-level comment along the lines of” Thanks for all the feedback everyone—the next iteration is coming soon”!
• Another option is to provide a quick summary of the comments before moving on. Depending on your workflow, this can be particularly useful as it can provide a simplified checklist that you can then use for the next iteration.

The swoop-by comment, which is the kind of feedback that comes from a member of a team or non-project who might not be aware of the context, restrictions, decisions, or requirements, or of the discussions from earlier iterations, is the second friction point. On their side, there’s something that one can hope that they might learn: they could start to acknowledge that they’re doing this and they could be more conscious in outlining where they’re coming from. Swoop-by comments frequently prompt the simple thought,” We’ve already discussed this,” and it can be frustrating to have to keep coming back and forth.

Let’s begin by acknowledging again that there’s no need to reply to every comment. However, if responding to a previously litigated point might be helpful, a brief response with a link to the previous discussion for additional information is typically sufficient. Remember, alignment comes from repetition, so it’s okay to repeat things sometimes!

Swoop-by commenting can still be useful for two reasons: first, they might point out something that isn’t clear, and second, they might have the power to represent a user’s first impression of the design. Sure, you’ll still be frustrated, but that might at least help in dealing with it.

The personal stake we might have in relation to the design could be the third friction point, which might cause us to feel defensive if the review turned out to be more of a discussion. Treating feedback as user research helps us create a healthy distance between the people giving us feedback and our ego ( because yes, even if we don’t want to admit it, it’s there ). In the end, presenting everything in aggregated form helps us to prioritize our work more.

Always remember that while you need to listen to stakeholders, project owners, and specific advice, you don’t have to accept every piece of feedback. You must examine it and come up with a rationale for your choice, but sometimes “no” is the best choice.

As the designer leading the project, you’re in charge of that decision. In the end, everyone has their area of expertise, and as a designer, you are the one with the most background and knowledge to make the right choice. And by listening to the feedback that you’ve received, you’re making sure that it’s also the best and most balanced decision.

Thanks to Mike Shelton and Brie Anne Demkiw for their contributions to the initial draft of this article.