Let’s Party

From young I’ve loved shows / movies with such format:

  1. Hero has a mission
  2. Hero meets other Heroes
  3. Each Hero has their unique story and ability
  4. A Party is formed
  5. The Party goes and accomplish the mission and does it with style
  6. EPIC WIN!

It could be Oceans Eleven, Lord of the Rings, Heroes and even articles like High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace from Wired that gives me a strange kind of high.

I’m in love with the “Party” concept. Its some what like a “Team” but it has a very different feel to it. A “Team” is like… Goal / ROI driven, but for a “Party”, its all about that EPIC WIN!

A party is usually made up of a mix bag of individuals. People with different background, different skills, different life goals, different characteristics, different charisma and more. But however, when they come together, there is a common goal and all these differences compliments one another and the party as a whole is a lot more powerful and can achieve more.

The Party at the work place

In real life, we don’t recruit elves and dwarfs, we don’t wield swords, put on armour and go raid dragon lairs. In real life we also don’t rob banks. In real life, we work as teams on projects and bring back gold coins upon completing quests issued by our beloved clients.

I feel understanding the concept of a Party and how it works, is one step towards the success of the project. The next step would then be to find a party and a party that suits you.

Of cause just putting a bunch of people together will not work. It takes time for the right group of people to gather and to make things more difficult, none of them are actually looking for one another.

So what makes a good party?

Ok let me fast forward into the future that I would like to have. I envision having worked with many different people already and after many years I finally decided to work with a select group of individuals. These individuals together with me love to work with one another because there is a similar frequency, some kind of unspoken affinity. We end up not just being colleagues, not just associates, not just team members, but a close knitted group which not only do amazing work together, but also share life together.

I mean come on, we spend at least 8 hours on weekdays together, that is a huge chunk of our life. Why hang around difficult colleagues or even people you don’t like. Why not integrate work, life & friends, etc. I know its idealistic, but this is really the future I would like to have. So the following is what I think are the key points of a good Party.

  1. Complementing skills – We should know who is good at what so that when work is distributed every one can go do their stuff in excellence and as a group, we can achieve more.
  2. Work style rapport – Everyone is comfortable with different work styles. Some like to plan lots up front, some like things to be agile, some like to talk face to face, some like to just email and IM. Some like clear briefs up front, some like briefs to exclude the solution, some like to solution together. So long as everyone likes a similar style, I think it makes it smooth sailing.
  3. Trust – Once individuals have trust with one another, everyone knows what everyone will do and get done on time. There will be some kind of telepathy. There will be less to worry when there is trust.
  4. Mutual motivation – There will be times when it gets stressful and challenges are difficult or when timelines are tight. Team members will be cheering each other on, helping each other out, buying each other dinner and coffee. Maybe even looking after each other’s kids while daddy or mommy is busy finishing up the last 20% of the work.

So I say, start analysing the people around and keep the suitable ones around.

Does this make us slutty friends?

Just the thought that we like to hang out and work with people who have certain capabilities does on the surface make us kinda shallow. But you can’t help it. Why would you want in the majority of your waking hours be spending time with people who are negative contributions?

There are people who drain the life out of the team with their pessimistic views and offensive language. There are people who always do the wrong thing or sometimes not even around to do anything. There are the people who are plain useless and bottlenecks. Then there are those who spend more time creating drama in the project then focusing on completing the project.

GGG!

Go check out The Future of Work and you will know how I feel about the future.

Its time we go form our Party to achieve blissful productivity so that we can have our constant EPIC WINS!

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Experts to Heroes

Rodney Mullen. Amazing Skateborder, an Expert. I’m always fascinated in his style, innovation and technicality. There is such an excellent spirit and dedication when I see him skate all the time.

This series of videos about him thought me 2 things.

  1. Progress can be due to weird reasons like being tormented by ideas.
  2. When doing something complex, focus on just the key things.

Go check out more of his videos on Youtube.

He will always be my Hero.

CSS Normalisation

If you don’t plan, you plan to fail.

Developers all know the importance of Data Normalisation and its a key planning activity to ensure data integrity, optimal data warehousing by reducing data redundancy, ease of extending database structure, etc. I really feel web designers need to understand the spirit behind normalisation when planning their designs as well.

A website have many elements, from headers to footers, navigation to utility bars, from page wrappers to content containers. And from within the content container itself there are loads of normal HTML elements such as headings, paragraphs, tabular content, lists, forms, quotes, indents and the list goes on.

So just understanding and using CSS is not enough as a large site needs alot more planning. I feel that having a planning session to determine what ID and CLASS to assign to elements is extremely important. Also keeping in mind that using Content Management Systems mean webmasters (your clients) are most likely going to use something like CKEditor or TinyMCE as their WYSIWYG editor which by default uses the basic HTML tags.

So planing for CSS Styles is actually a CSS Normalisation process in my view. Data Normalisation is about “data relationships” and for CSS its about “cascading styles“. Styles are related by inheritance and these inheritance are the relationship.

Data Normalisation Objectives according to databasedev.co.uk:

  1. Arranging data into logical groups such that each group describes a small part of the whole
  2. Minimizing the amount of duplicated data stored in a database
  3. Building a database in which you can access and manipulate the data quickly and efficiently without compromising the integrity of the data storage
  4. Organising the data such that, when you modify it, you make the changes in only one place

So let me try to translate these objectives into CSS Normalisation objectives.

CSS Normalisation Objectives

  1. Arranging CSS Styles into logical groups such that each group describes a small part of the whole
  2. Minimizing the amount of duplicated CSS Styles stored in the CSS file(s)
  3. Building the CSS file(s) in which you can access and edit the CSS Styles quickly and efficiently without compromising the integrity of the whole website
  4. Organising the CSS Styles such that, when you modify it, you make the changes in only one place

Agree? Disagree? Do share your views.

ps: If only someone can do up a simple diagram like Natalie Josy’s Standards in a nutshell to visually explain this CSS Normalisation concept, i’ll definitely stick it to this post.

Appreciation of the material we work with

Today I’ve heard the best perception on how to go to the next level in craft we all call web designing and this is from a collegue of mine at work.

In the past, famous artists experimented with the materials they were using. Arylic paints, oil paints, wood, stone, clay, glass, metals etc. and in the morden world, plastics, carbon fiber, foam, etc.

I remember how Karim Rashid shared that understanding the intricacies of the manufacturing process would enable the designer the know how on how to go about designing a new product. Also the importance of knowing how to design in an efficient way so as not to compromise on the affordability of the end product.

For the web however everything is digital and there isn’t really a physical “material” that web designers work with. However we work with HTML, CSS, Javascript and the likes. These are what makes up the web. These are the “materials” that we who call ourselves web designers work with.

So in order improve ones understanding and to go to the next level of web design, take a break from photoshop and start your text editors. Start reading up on CSS and experimenting with AJax, start understanding grids, start understanding how some content management systems work, start understanding web infrastructure, start putting yourself in the shoes of webmasters who need to update the website you build daily.

This colleague who shared this with me is not a designer, he is not even design trained, but instead he is an excellent developer, a great observer. Thanks, you know who you are.