Posts Tagged ‘how-to’

A little more than a month into my Grand World Tour, and I’m still utterly thrilled by it. My sense of time is all skewed—it feels as though I’ve been away from my “home” and the people I love so much longer, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve been living in México for a month. I’ve been absorbing, learning, and chan­ging so much, and I don’t think I have, for even a single moment, yet regretted my decision to under­take this grand venture.

It’s pretty intense what I’m doing, and I often find myself overly emotional—not in a neg­ative or pos­itive way really, but I think it’s my way of pro­cessing the gen­eral instability of this way of life. Everything around me is either con­stantly in flux or con­stantly unfa­miliar, and it would be easy to become unbal­anced by it.

One month in, here are my tricks for staying sane. Nine months (and two or three more con­tin­ents) in, I’m checking back with this, to see how much of it stays the same.

1. Realize that some­times a day will be a wash.

Some days, you’ll be sick. Some days, you’ll be tired and jet­lagged. Some days, you’ll be mel­an­choly and home­sick. I struggled with this with my recent trip to México City—I was only there for eight days, and I wanted to absorb as much of the city as I pos­sibly could. It’s fas­cin­ating, chaotic, and a chal­lenge to com­pre­hend, and I cas­tig­ated myself for being asleep or working at ten am. I should have been out exploring! Then I real­ized that run­ning myself down just doesn’t work long-term. I’m not on hol­iday for a week, I’m living my life in a for­eign place. Not every day will be pro­ductive work-wise, and not every day will be rev­el­atory travel-wise. Some days will be neither. That’s okay.

Some days, you get totally lost for hours, because all the streets in Mexico City go in circles and have six dif­ferent names. But then you acci­dent­ally bump into beau­tiful old build­ings covered in graf­fiti, and everything works out.

2. Stay in touch.

My biggest fear is loneli­ness. This is my first time trav­el­ling for more than five weeks by myself, and I know that I’ll miss the social struc­tures, and the people I care about, more than any­thing. Luckily, the internet is a magical thing, and it affords me roughly a thou­sand dif­ferent ways to keep in con­tact with people. So I use Face­book and Twitter more than I would nor­mally. I send texts to my litttle sister via What­sApp. I send emails and make phone calls. I had a Skype date with my room­mate, in which we both drank wine, talked, and made faces at one another for two hours. I send stories written on the back of post­cards. Keeping in touch with the people who made my “stable” life so rewarding (and in fact were pretty much the reason I stayed in Hal­ifax as long as I did between trips) goes a long way to keeping me sane and bridging the old life with the new. When everything around you changes, you change immeas­ur­ably too. Keeping grips on your alternate self helps you realize the things that remain con­stant and true throughout, and help you to be more assured of who you are, even when some­times it feels as though everything’s been torn out from under you.

3. Make new friends.

While it’s important to stay in touch, if I didn’t make new friends, I’d be hor­rific­ally lonely and home­sick. This was the biggest mis­take I made in Argen­tina, when I wasn’t trav­el­ling alone, and it con­trib­uted greatly to the deteri­or­a­tion of my rela­tion­ship with my travel com­panion, as well as my own sense of self.

I didn’t make friends with a baby jaguar, but I really wish I had.

I tend towards being a hermit. I’m a bit of a mis­an­thrope to begin with, and I work by myself all day, so it’s easy to spend a day in which I don’t talk to anyone. So I’ve act­ively been working against that, knowing that while yes, some­times I just need time and space away from humans, but more often it’s healthy for me to meet new people and make new con­nec­tions. I live with a room­mate, I couch­surf a lot again, and I make it a rule to gen­er­ally say “yes” when someone asks if I want to go out. As a result, I’ve met a ton of awe­some, intel­li­gent, varied people, and I’ve learned more about the cul­ture and hidden under­cur­rents of this country than I ever would have if I’d isol­ated myself. Sure, some­times I end up stuck at a party where everyone’s speaking Spanish and I feel lost and uncom­fort­able, but most of the time I find myself having a great time, making new friends, and learning new things. As far as I’m con­cerned, that’s a more valu­able part of travel than seeing pyramids.

4. Focus on the little things.

I find, the more I travel, the less I care for typ­ical touristy things. Sure, lots of these things are famous attrac­tions for a reason, but I no longer beat myself up if I miss one or two (or six­teen, depending on the place). Usu­ally, the guide­book attrac­tions are swarming with people (this becomes espe­cially true in Europe), and, while impressive, can feel like a one-hit-wonder. It’s nice to see, but then it’s over. I’ve seen so many tour­ists storm through an attrac­tion, taking photos every two seconds, not stop­ping to con­sider any­thing or even look at the thing they’re pho­to­graphing so enthu­si­ast­ic­ally. (Watch people in the Vat­ican if you don’t believe me.) It feels empty.

Really gor­geous graf­fiti in Colonia Roma. As much as I like museums and such, I think out­door art install­a­tions (whether “legal” or not) are far more inter­esting. Art should be con­tex­tual and integ­rated into daily life. México City is full of great museums, but I liked the series of coffee cups installed out­side the museum better.

I’m finding more value in taking a six-hour walk through a city, get­ting lost and finding inter­esting signs, build­ings, or things hap­pening. I’ve dis­covered that I love urban parks of all shapes and sizes and beau­tiful, multi-level book­stores (I’ve been to #4 and #6!). I really enjoy finding a per­fect little café to work away my day in. Long-term travel isn’t so much about the awe-inspiring or the impressive as it is about the everyday.

5. Remain flexible.

This is, above all, my most important rule when trav­el­ling, living, or nav­ig­ating rela­tion­ships. Things will always fail in unex­pected ways, espe­cially when you’re in con­stant motion. You need to be super-flexible in order to make it work. Every time I embark on another long strange trip, I change the rules up, adjusting the for­mula until I hit on some­thing that works.

If you want sta­bility, stay home. If you want adven­ture, learn to adapt.

This doesn’t prop­erly cap­ture the chaos of Mexico City, but ima­gine that there are a few mil­lion people jammed into tiny streets over­flowing with street vendors and old build­ings. I’ve left the orderly world I lived in behind; there’s no room for rigidity here!

Giving good feed­back is integral to good design. While I’m sure all designers—myself included–would love to just whip up a gor­geous design without asking anyone else for their opinion, good design can be made better by working within lim­it­a­tions and incor­por­ating the feed­back of others. And of course, we gen­er­ally want to make our cli­ents happy and give them what they want. Accord­ingly, any designer worth his salt will make sure that the design pro­cess includes his client: we make mockups, ask for feed­back, then refine, ask for more feed­back, refine, ask for more, refine—and so on a so forth, until everyone’s happy (in theory).

Some­times everyone really is happy, and the end result is beau­tiful and usable and made of design-love. Other times, though, one of us is going to end up miser­able, and the design can end up so off-target, messy, awk­ward, or down­right ugly, that your designer won’t put it in his port­folio. That’s a bad scene. In order to make the feed­back pro­cess as effi­cient as pos­sible, I’ve rounded up a few tips from years of going through this pro­cess with a rather sub­stan­tial number of clients—of both the dream and the night­mare variety.

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Bad cli­ents are notorious among designers. We com­plain about them con­stantly, we’ve devoted a hilarious-yet-heartbreaking web­site to them, and we swap horror stories like badges of honour, rolling our eyes in empathy and disgust.

We spend so much time com­plaining about the bad cli­ents that it’s some­times easy to over­look the good cli­ents. Lately, I’ve been working with a few really great cli­ents, and I’ve been so happy because of it. Where a bad client can make you feel as though you’re losing your soul, a good client reminds you of why you fell in love with design in the first place and makes you feel as though you’re doing a good job. It’s the sort of warm-fuzzy feeling I asso­ciate with boys who bring me flowers and strangers com­pli­menting me on my shoes.

Win­ning your designer’s love, regard­less of any other factors, will mean that you will receive a level of ser­vice and quality that sur­passes that most Trouble­some Cli­ents receive. When I love a client and feel that my client respects me as a pro­fes­sional, I invest more of my mental ener­gies into their pro­ject. A good client makes you want to do an amazing job, where a bad client exper­i­ence will often just make you want to finish as fast as pos­sible and get the heck out.

So, how do you go about making sure you’re the greatest client ever, and ensuring your designer feels as pas­sionate about your pro­ject as you do? Here, a few tips culled dir­ectly from my Dream Clients:

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Lately, I’ve found myself giving a sub­stan­tial amount of design feed­back to non-designers. While I always main­tain that you ought to leave design to pro­fes­sionals, some­times this just isn’t feas­ible for one reason or another. So, in the interests of public ser­vice (pret­ti­ness making the world a better place, and whatnot), I’d like to offer up some sug­ges­tions that should improve your design across the board.

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I don’t believe in showing up early for a party (after all, it’s important to make an entrance). In a busi­ness con­text, this prob­ably isn’t the best thing in the world, and in an internet con­text, it’s even less so. For instance, I just recently started making use of Twitter. I hon­estly didn’t get what the big idea was. Then I started using it.

It’s amazing. News stories break on Twitter before the news­pa­pers even have an idea what’s going on. You can see real-time photos of Stephen Fry stuck in an elev­ator. If you com­plain about a product, its man­u­fac­turers will help you out. But most fas­cin­ating are the con­ver­sa­tions: it’s like what I ima­gine The Crysalids was like. Someone makes a com­ment about the colour of the sky, and people respond; threads of con­ver­sa­tion begin spidering off in dif­ferent tan­gents. Anyone can jump in at any point and drop out just as easily, and nobody dom­in­ates because every response is lim­ited to 140 char­ac­ters. It’s the digital rep­res­ent­a­tion of the col­lective uncon­scious­ness. And it’s searchable!

Social media, I’m sure you’ve heard, is chan­ging our world. If you’re late to the party, like me, it’s time to get involved! Rather than give you a bunch of inform­a­tion that may or may not be true, I’m going to point the way to some resources from more cred­ible experts than I.

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I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

So, let’s say you’re having a problem with your email, or if you’ve found a bug in your web­site. Your first instinct, nat­ur­ally, is to fire off an email to your trusty web-person. But wait! Before you hit send, make sure you’ve included as much detail as possible—what you were trying to do when the error happened, what sort of error mes­sage (if any) you got, what soft­ware you were using at the time, etc. This will help your trusty web-person track down the problem far, far more quickly.

An excel­lent way of sup­ple­menting this inform­a­tion is by sending along a screen­shot. I’ll often request this of cli­ents when I can’t rep­licate a reported bug—if you’ve sent one to begin with, I can be that much more effective.

Here’s how you do it.
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Con­fused by CMYK, RGB, and the like? Got a plethora of logo formats and no idea which to use? Read on for some quick tips about how to get the most out of your colour. (more…)

A quick intro­duc­tion to the two major types of file formats you’re likely to run across, and what to use when. (more…)