What is this, why?
Make Out Loud ♪ coding ♪ design
What is this?
I think one of the most uncomfortable and exciting things about making things is that there is actually no playbook. It can be a little daunting how much of creation is instinct. When you come to the page, much of the work has already been done in some way. Honing the machine of you, absorbing influence, practice—these are things that are hard to conjure up if you have not already been working. There’s an element of trust in creation that is difficult to swallow: the trust of your own experience, your taste, your curiosity.
Most of my creative work these days consists of popping out of a hole with Something Large. A full on novel manuscript. A 100k+ word interactive game. As I was exiting the professional design world, I felt like I was spending most of my time exiting out of holes with 100 page decks, too.
One of the things I miss greatly is being more open with mess. I miss ugly and early. I miss seeing other people’s mess, their mistakes, their revelations. I find it can be an uncomfortable thing for many people to observe, and it’s getting worse in the age of Reels. It’s understandable. Either the mess doesn’t really make much sense in the moment, or observers don’t have faith in something they can’t control that also doesn’t seem to know what it is.
I’ve learned to hide the chaos from most prying eyes. Of course I have a few close collaborators (particularly on the writing front), but I have noticed myself become afraid of showing imperfection, of changing my mind.
So I’m trying to ‘make out loud’.
I’m starting this effort to document process in a more meaningful way. I don’t know much yet about how this will go, but I do have a few core beliefs:
- We learn the most from each other when we see how minds work in realtime. When we see the artifice that leads to the magic.
- Content is inextricable from design. In essence, you cannot outline or 3-step your way into something cohesive. You don’t know what you’re making fully until you start to make it.
- Part of the goal of working is to pinpoint the soul of that work. If I could only have one, I would always favor work that ‘knows what it is’ and has emotionality over excellent craft. Heart and spark are the base for excellence, not the other way around.
- As a result, ugly phases are natural and part of doing the work. In fact, it should be a celebrated time of creation that helps draw out unique ideas. Demanding consistent perfection is the easiest way to kill the soul of things.
- This endeavor, by its messy nature, will be of little interest to many people.
- Time is an alchemical element in creativity. While holing up in focused bursts has its place, so does chipping away over a long period of time.
I will catalog a subset of my various projects (which will be extremely wide ranging, as are my interests). It won’t be everything. The thing uniting what’s here will be my philosophy of working. I’m hoping that ironically, working in this public process-focused way will keep me free in the way I feel free with my writing. I’m also hoping that it sparks something in just a few other people. Best case scenario would be to join a more intuitive underground in a world that demands metrics, KPIs, and deadlines.
To be really meta about it, this actual process site will be one of the projects. I will endeavor to make this out loud, including all the weird missteps. Also aiming to work on this progressively, in little bits.
In that spirit, here is a very ugly and unstyled first pass. There’s no organization here, no architecture. I’m mostly focused on this being a sustainable place to stash my progress, with the ability to easily add and upload more over time.
