Mearso

End of day.

Finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable with SASS, but a little annoyed that I feel I have taken too long on basic aspects of the CSS /HTML that i’ve been working on.

At least i’ve slogged through my own optionitis and will try to concentrate on making decisions and seeing them through tomorrow.

Working on CSS with CSS Edit today. Started of a bit of a slog, with me suffereing from my usual lack of confidence.

Realised that the only way to work through it is to keep going and be driven by things that need to be done.

So, I’ve been trying to make the views in the app consistent, along with trying to work out what I need from the 960 framework, and what I need to add that is different.

Can we change the color?

Recently read some documents from work, and despite my own promises to myself to not get worked up about things find I can’t help myself reacting. I find my motivation plummets each time one of these idiotic documents comes out, though I do derive some black humour from the contributions by people clearly unaware of the sitcom “The Office”.

Maybe by venting my spleen in words I can move on and not let the well intentioned, but spurious arguments that prevail stop me enjoying what I do. If all this sounds a little vague it’s because I’d rather not get in trouble by publicly calling people out over the things they say. It’s the right thing to show some self restraint, and I hope that ultimately we all want the same thing - good websites and experiences.

I guess my frustration is that everyone rightly, can have an opinion about how websites can and should work, but not all those opinions should carry equal weight. Unfortunately I’ve been in plenty of situations where exactly that has happened, and even worse. I’m sure I’m not the only designer who’s had to change a color because the wife of a senior manager didn’t like the color on a cursory glance of a website. I’m sure I’m not the only designer who’s had to bite their tongue whilst daft ideas are lauded and applauded because the sponsors are misguided. I understand that design is subjective, and there’s never just one solution. Perhaps I’m being naive in hoping that others would realise that too.

Trying to end on a positive note, I’ll write some things that might help me to channel my energies in more fruitful directions.

I am creative.
I enjoy creating images and designs.
I have experience doing the above.
I’m paid to do the above.
I understand that design is subjective
I can only make myself happy.

Going forward.

The past week or so has felt a little like a belated New Year, now that our contractor has left and other projects are demanding our attention. It feels like an opportunity to take stock, have a little breather and dive in to the new things we need to do.

It’s quite exiting to have some more variety of projects to undertake, but I hope we can continue with the Agile methods we’ve been using so far. The rest of the team seem broadly positive about what we’ve learnt, and I feel that were we to look back over the last 3 months , where we’ve been using Pivotal, then we can be reasonably pleased with what’s been done - ( even with the difficulties of a particular part of the work).

I think our reporting is very comprehensive, which helps us not only do the work, but get some idea of how we can do it better. One of the pressing issues at the moment will require us to state where we’ve come from, and where we see things going. To do this we need to have a thorough look at our work and ourselves to muster up the necessary energy.

Just noticed a twitter tweet from someone at the University linking to and pointing out a silly example of a blog post that has been put up.

I’m refraining from naming or linking to them because i don’t want to distress either. However, it did get me thinking. It seemed a curious thing to do; to link to an example of a colleague doing something daft and then draw public attention to it. If the purpose was to educate them about their behaviour then surely a private communication would have sufficed.

I would have hoped for a better understanding that there is a person at the root of blog posts, and that ridicule, though fun, it probably ceases to be so when in public

Wrestling with GIT again, but thanks to the helpful people on IRC I have a better understanding of what went wrong. All fixed now

This week’s retro went by pretty quickly, I only had one thing to show since I missed half the sprint, and other things continue to be difficult to launch.

Somehow though we managed to do loads more points, which at least bumps up our average.

Learnt some things about myself this week. Remembered that I really enjoy creating images, and consequently shouldn’t be surprised that at the clamouring from content people to have a go too.

I’ve been creating some postcards for print, which I need to finish off tomorrow, and it’s be interesting to rediscover the process of being creative with imagery. As soon as I worked through the harder stage of generating ideas, and something with merits started to emerge then the the creative muscles really start to flex. The ideas about colours, textures, composition, balance, function and practicality amongst others really start to flow.The hardest part is the really compressed timescale I’m working under, and the knowledge that I have to get the job to a releasable state. I’m not naive enough to think it’ll ever be perfect, but I could’ve done with more time.

However, a good step back on the design path.

Blimey, it’s been 13 days since I last posted. Where the time goes is a bit of a mystery. I know that 5 days disappeared under a blanket of snow last week.

This week I’ve been pretty happy that I managed to clear some of my more technical outstanding jobs and got cracking on creating some designs. However, I did find it harder than expected to get the creative juices flowing, not being in the swing of things.

I’ve read a few discussions about just where design fits in an agile method, and I’m finding that it’s quite difficult not to put oneself under pressure to get stuff live as soon as possible. The short sprints are great for things where it either works or doesn’t but as soon as one bring qualitative judgements to bear it becomes problematic.

I’ve been thinking that one way I could work around this issue is to get better at breaking down the design task into smaller chunks that can be reasonably tackled in a sprint. Quite how I will do that is something that I need to work out.

Maybe Cucumber story style statements of intent and functions might be interesting to apply to design. Would certainly demand some clarity.

Business like retrospective today. We rattled pretty quickly through the tickets for the week with only one rejected for further work.

I’m liking our use of pivotal tracker, and it’s great to have all the relevant info in the tickets so we can quickly remind ourselves what each ticket means.

If we carry on like this we might actually get our average points for the week to start going up.

Resolving to get some design tickets on the go this coming sprint. And maybe plan that they don’t have to be done in one sprint.