Search with Design

Every designer has heard the story about the lady in the park asking Pablo Picasso to sketch her. She loves his drawing and asks how much, he says 50,000 pesos or dollars or pre-euros or whatever. She gasps why, it only took you five minutes. He says I’ve worked my whole to be able to do this. Boom.

Lessons

1. Work your whole life.

2. Sit in parks with bohemian women waiting for them to recognize you.

3. Inflate your prices and hope some finally pays up.

I’ve always tried hard as a designer to understand why other designers love this story.

I try and think logically, but quickly fall into self loathing and despair. Does this mean I’m not a designer because I don’t get it?  Should I work hard or smarter? Or am I too stupid to work smarter so I might as well toil my days over? Or should I pretend I understand it? “Yeah, it’s art, so you wouldn’t get it.” Or can you just call it like you see it, regardless if its an urban legend or not.

Pablo understand one thing very well, to be an artist you needed to sell your work. To do that professional for a living you needed an audience. So he found one in several different ways. He had initial talent, which got him some attention. Then he branched off and created something new among his close peers. This made him stand out, which gave him more attention. But he, like many artists before him, realized that just being and thinking differently wasn’t enough, you needed something more than stories and ancedotes, rumors and headlines to be a professional artist, you still needed works. Which means you needed to work.

Many artists had talents understudies that would learn under the masters and help finish up certain painters or even copy a work completely and then have the original artist sell those copies using their name. But some works take more than just hours, they take weeks or even months. So what did Picasso do, create an artistic painting in the least possible brush strokes. He didn’t create minimalism. He created worktheleastism. More paintings in front of more people at the same time, during his lifetime afforded him the maximum exposure that would allow him to remain a professional artist, doing whatever he pleased with his time, money and women.

Pablo Picasso was a brilliant marketer, acting on the timing of his previous success to push him in front of a larger and larger audience. He didn’t spend his lifetime perfecting his fine brush strokes. As he aged, his hand and eye both became thick and lazy. He mastered the business of art. He captured attention, produced quantity and charged heavily.

June, 2007 marks the date I officially switched tribes and joined the Ubuntu crowd.

As far as I can tell, Ubuntu is an African word with no direct translation, but which embodies the concept of “being completely inscrutable, yet self-congratulating and better than Windows”.  The truth is that it is a distribution of Linux, favored by many due to its easy install, and similarities to the Windows environment.
But why go all the way to Linux from my previously favored WinXP?  Glad you asked…

To be honest, I saw the release of Windows Vista approaching and realized that I was getting sick of playing a (small) part in the empire-building of Microsoft.  As much as I had hated the switch from my trust Win98 to WinXP, I had learned to live with it after a lot of slipstreaming CDs, backups and tweaks.  But Vista’s DRM-pushing, close-to-spyware using, sanitized like a mental hospital hanging from a cliff feeling just wasn’t going to cut it for me.  So what if it’s pretty?  Nothing runs on it and it will mark every file I create as illegal.

So why not go with a Mac?  After all, they’re powerful, chic, nerdy and they look like a hip young rock star.  Here’s where things get complicated.

I have a serious dislike for laptops.  I’ve never been able to find a laptop which fit the bill for a computer I could actually work on.  I need lightweight, power, small screen, excellent keyboard, durability, battery-life…the list goes on and on.  I’m a laptop snob.  There is only one line of laptops on earth that I will buy and use, and that is the IBM Thinkpad.

I love my little Thinkpad.  The keyboard is great, the battery and weight are good.  Also high on the list is the thumbstick, which is tough to master at first, but once mastered, makes a touchpad feel like drawing in the sand with a stick.

I need my desktop and laptop to sync fairly effortlessly, and because IBM doesn’t make a LeopardPad, I had to shoot the middle.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have my trusty copy of XP dual-booted (although I haven’t seen the familiar green ‘Start’ button in weeks).  I keep it around for one reason, and one reason only: Battlefield 2.

The switch to Ubuntu wasn’t bad, the three biggest sticking points being syncing my iPod (done with Amarok and patience), enabling the ‘Back’ button on my MS Intellimouse (done with some extra drivers), and disabling my on-board sound in favor of the SoundBlaster 5.1 card (accomplished through some text file editing and a reboot).

All in all, the switch has gone great, and it’s only getting better as I play with Compiz/XGL effects and customizing my computer through clever use of Launchers and Terminal.
I think Windows Vista could be greatest thing that ever happened to the Linux community.  More users = more options.

Why not come over for a stay with the tribe?