Carl Nelson

2013 is already a promising year. Nicole and I just moved into an amazing apartment which we’re excited to make our own. Especially exciting is creating a workspace where my creative projects can live. I’m booked to teach two dance events this year and the dance troupe is rolling along with our choreography for ILHC. There is a lot I would like to get to this year, and even if I don’t or if my ideas change partway through the year, that’s okay.

Below are some vaguely sweeping themes for 2013. They are followed by some more specific intentions constrained to the first quarter of the year.

Themes of 2013

Making & Craftsmanship

I’m looking forward to creating as a big part of 2013. The first part of that will be fashioning a workspace. From there I’ll hopefully litter the space with sketches, schematics, code, writings, and possibly even some physical projects including arduiono systems. I get so very excited when I have the chance to actually spend time working with my hands and the only way to get better at my craft is to put in the time and work.

Reading & Mental Exploration

One of the greatest ways for me to break out of my own ideas and perspective is to surround myself in the words and thoughts of someone else. I aim to spend more time reading, digesting and exploring the mental spaces of others. Whether that is through finding possibilities in fiction, deepening my understanding of scientific or technical realms, or drifting through visual spaces with art, architecture and design books.

Next 3 Months

Creative Workspace

Create a space where I feel comfortable tinkering, sketching, floating amongst my own ideas. Invest time in designing how that space is going to feel; how it is going encourage me to create; how it will enhance how and why I work. To not feel constrained by its prettiness or acceptability. To feel free in that space to start in on the daunting blank canvas and to leave work out, rough edges and all that will tease at me to finish them.

RWS Downtime

RWS will stand as shorthand for read, write or sketch. In my downtown, rather than spend time on social networks, checking email or watching videos, I’ll spend it either reading, writing, or sketching. In this way I’ll be working within one of my two themes for the year, but also engaging in a different way with my idle time.

Find A Design Mentor

One of the things I learned over the last year working with athletic coaches was that having someone there to observe, give feedback, and push you past your current limits. I want to find and develop a relationship with a designer locally to give me those same kinds of nudges and feedback as a designer. Part of that will be connecting with a lot of more senior designers who are working in spaces I find interesting, the rest will be a work in progress.

2012 was an exceptional year. For oh so many reasons it has turned out to be one of my favorites so far. The short of it is that I feel that I have finally gotten a grasp on what it means to be me in the context of a relatively high functioning adult. I have vaulted into a career that I’m exceptionally happy with. I’m in a preposterously amazing relationship that continues to grow and amaze me with the wonderful Nicole Zuckerman. I have finally stepped up and taken responsibility for adult things, e.g. the dreaded realm of finances. 2012 was a year when things worked out amazingly, when Obama got re-elected, and when I was stupid and broke my middle finger finger-wrestling.

Professional 2012

Salesforce.com

I started at Salesforce as a Senior UI Designer in April 2012. They reached out to me, which felt amazing, and I couldn’t be happier to be with them this year. I’ve learned an exceptional amount as a designer, a communicator, and a person working within a large company alongside exceptionally talented designers and researchers. The work is challenging in both complexity and scope, yet I have the time and support to pursue deepening my knowledge taking classes and going to conferences. My process is richer for the time I have spent here so far and I can’t wait for another year.

Speaking & Teaching

This year I was asked to speak on a panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference down in San Jose. In doing so I had a blast evangelizing design and cracking some carapaces at The Boiling Crab with other designers. Design is going to be a strong field within enterprise as users become more savvy with technology and their expectations increase. I also taught four Skillshare this year. Two on my own on UX Flows and two with Rob Surrency and Jonathan Hung on Guiding UX Principles. I’ve always found teaching to be a way to learn more about a craft and I love sharing the knowledge I have with others.

JavaScript & Coding

I’ve spent more time this year deepening my knowledge of JavaScript and programming in general. In part thanks to the courses available to me through work, but also independently. Rather than relying heavily on frameworks while not understanding what is going on underneath the hood as I have mostly done in the past, I spent many hours writing in pure JavaScript. I finally grasped the concept of closure, that was a good one. And, I have spent time thinking about code on a more abstract scale when working rather than just diving in and writing.

Personal 2012

Love & Friendship

This year I spent so much wonderful time deepening my relationship with Nicole. We’ve danced a lot more together. We’ve planned more together. We support each other through and through while encouraging each other to grow in the ways we want to see ourselves. We continue to love each other more and more. We’re tackling a life together. This photo says it all. Additionally, I’ve tried to make an effort to spend more time connecting with my parents and sister including skype calls and more time in person. I didn’t do as good of a job staying connected with some of my good friends who are elsewhere this year, despite managing the occasional visit or Skype call, and hope to make a better stab at that next year.

Dance

I spent less time dancing overall this year than I have in years past. Part of this was confronting the realization that I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of dancing. I crossed into eleven years of dancing and my goals and priorities have changed considerably over the last couple of years. I’m no longer interested in traveling, teaching and competing all of the time. I enjoy those activities but it wasn’t fruitful for me, I wasn’t as engaged with the dance as I tried those things I had been doing. A lot of the year was spent with some frustration around dance. Even with the great advice from peers whose advice I value, it took me most of the year to start finding delight in the dance again. Part of it comes back to exploring new parts of the dance that I haven’t, such as balboa, and the other part comes back to digging into a part of the dance I haven’t done in a while. Choreography. I started choregraphing a group piece in the fall, and also helped choreograph two other pieces this year.

Money

I’ve never been a big fan of dealing with money, but this year I got a hold of my shit and started making sure of my financial life was in order. I made sure my credit card debt was all gone and paid off large portions of some personal debt. I took over some student loan payments from my parents. I got a 401k plan and started making sure part of my paycheck went into a savings account (it helps that I have a nice job at Salesforce now). I have health insurance and made use of it (particularly for that broken finger). All in all, a good year for my financial responsibilities.

Health & Movement

I joined a gym that I think is awesome this year. It’s a great space where I feel not only comfortable to go and work out in, but also to go and hang out in the cafe. I know the staff well and I appreciate their attitude of a physical culture. I’ve also started worked with two trainers this year. Kirk has improved my skills with kettlebells and reconnected me with pilates. Vincent has helped me with gymnastic training and I’ve had massive progress on the rings, in my floor work and my handstand. I’m very excited that I’ve seen so much progress with not only my strength and mental mindset but also in the development of a physical skillset that I’ve always wanted to work more on.

When it comes to the health side of things, I’ve notably drank less this year than in prior years and am generally trying to make a mental effort to not drink as much alcohol. I’m also trying to imbibe less coffee (and in turn more tea and water) during the day at work, although depending on the day it’s a battle I’m willing to lose once in a while. I haven’t been as vigilant about what I’m eating and I feel that I could use more vegetables in my diet.

Skills

This year I spent time investing in some other various skills I wasn’t anticipating learning more about. I got CPR and Emergency Response certified through a program at work. It’s the second time I’ve been certified and it feels good to know I can help someone in need. I also spent a lot of time learning more about bike repair and maintenance as I purchase a less-than-complete bicycle off of Craigslist and it has become an occasionally tedious but educational experience. Lastly, I purchased a Sony NEX-7. One of the prosumer mirrorless DSLRs and have been taking pictures incessantly with it. In the six or so months I’ve had it, I can see a visible improvement in my ability to see and frame a shot, although I’m still not always getting the shot I want. I even printed one of my photos in large format for my mother for Christmas.

Writing

Lastly, I’ve been shit at writing this year. It just hasn’t been on my priority list and I have felt hampered by not having a good workspace to sit and write when I’m at home. I think writing really helps change the way I look at the world, it changes my perspective when I might write about what I’m doing or seeing. The bit of writing that I’ve been decent at this year was responding to my OhLife emails which come in daily and remind me to journal just a little bit.

One of the things I battle with constantly is the blank page, the emptry screen. That’s why it took me so long to just suck it up and put up this writing space that isn’t perfect; that isn’t how I want it to be yet functions as a minimum viable experience for my writing.

It’s easy to get sucked into learning a new tool, trying out a different setup, or avoiding the page all together than just putting fingers to the keys and writing. It’s hard enough to keep all of the distractions of the world away when we need to work, no less the internal distractions that draw us away from work with promises of a better pencil. Your fucking Conderoga is going to do just fine.

I’ve been listened to Mule Radio’s show “Let’s Make Mistakes” with Mike Monteiro and Leah Reich a lot lately. Granted that’s partly because it has been pouring in San Francisco pretty much everyday for the past week and my bicycle has been in some state of disassembly, but also because it’s a great show. In “Digging Yourself Out Of A Hole” and “What Happens When You Make A Mistake” they pull out some of the hard realities of creative work that we get stuck in.

Digging yourself out of a hole… getting stuck and what to do.

I found myself this week in a hole. I was coming back to the designs for a project at work that has been a long time going. And just to put it into context, this project isn’t a sexy project; it’s the sweaty, roll up your sleeves and get it done kind of project. So, I’m coming back to this project for which I had already built out a functional prototype during our last dev release cycle and some additional robustness that I’d been arguing for got scoped in, yet I’m stuck in the under-scoped unreleased prototype design and just can’t get it moving again.

This is what Mike loosely explained as the “it’s 3pm and the designer is still only on version 3 of the mockup” problem. I was waiting for that idea to be The Idea, and so when I went back, that idea was what I latched onto and it wasn’t getting me anywhere. I expected it to be the solution and it wasn’t. Cue my exceptional design director to come into our 1 on 1 get me to question the fundamentals I had assumed for the problem. In the last hour of the day I was back on track dumping some of my assumptions and moving the work forward.

My design director gave me a moment to break my head above the trees and see the forest. There won’t always be someone there to give me a boost above the trees but I can learn to remember to make sure to step up and take a look myself from time to time.

Design as communication.

If you’ve read Design is a Job you’ll know that a large part of design work is about selling your work, essentially a communication tool. If you haven’t read it, go… buy it, read it now.

Going back to the work I was doing for this project, I was stuck on it, but what I was stuck on it because I already had this communication tool that I thought was sufficient with a few tweaks, however it wasn’t sufficient because my audience had changed. I had been using the prototype to test with users, to check usefulness and discover problems with usability; but now I had to communicate internally, about what we were exactly building, how it was going to work, and why we were doing it a certain way.

In essence, I had ended up in a different forest and I hadn’t even noticed because the trees looked the same.

I needed to communicate with different deliverables because I was no longer talking to users, I was talking to product management and lead developers. Shifting from working within small startups where there is no product management structure and what you’re designing is getting built the same week to a large organization where a large part of the design process is creating documentation of your work is still a challenge for me. Those documents help you sell you ideas when you aren’t there, they also make sure your ideas are clearly documented when the building happens, or when questions arise as to how things will be built.

The urge to build first can get in the way of communicating your ideas to larger audiences outside of your immediate team, so don’t shy away from deliverables that are communication tools first.

It’s been a long time since I had a consistent blog and I miss it often. Not for the having my voice out there but because by having a place to write I see the world differently. I take note of things I wouldn’t necessarily have and I spend more time thinking about things. I want to get back to that place.

I recall reading an article somewhere about why people should blog and it was for that exact reason. Because it asks the writer to take note of things that they may not otherwise if they were not thinking of writing.

So, I’m rekindling my blog and for now putting my portfolio and other work offline while I think about how to reenvision them. I have some ideas, but they’re going to take some serious work to make happen.

Lastly, I’ve been a huge proponent of Wordpress in the past. I think it’s a great platform for so many people but it’s just gotten so bloated and obnoxious to write in that I couldn’t be bothered anymore. It’s a full-on-publishing CMS, not a writing tool. I want to get back to writing. So, after wobbling around with a half-stab at Nesta, I came upon Octopress. Octopress is a lightweight, built for programmers, and gets me back into the command line and markdown. I also get to write SASS instead of CSS for styling and layout which I’m excited about getting deeper into.

Working in Sublime Text 2 to write and publishing by pushing a markdown file brings me back to the days where I wrote .php files and uploaded them to a folder and a php script continually displayed the latest in the list while appending that file to an archive list.