Mysterious Flame

For a long time, Photoshop used Command-Z as “Undo” and Command-Shift-Z as “Redo.” A few years ago, for reasons unknown to me, they changed Undo/Redo to the same shortcut, which forces you to resort to scroll through the History palette to get your documents back to a future state. It takes too long to mouse over to the history palette (if I don’t have to hunt for it first since it might be collapsed or hiding behind something else) and click, click, click to find the document state I’m trying to get back to. This for me is unacceptable and unintuitive, and interrupts my flow of thinking. Plus, it’s inconsistent with the other design apps I’m accustomed to using.

So for every fresh install of Photoshop I work with, I always change “Step Backward” to Cmd-Z and “Step Forward” to Cmd-Shift-Z. Now Photoshop appears to Undo/Redo in the same fashion as everything else does.

It is essential to ask yourself this sort of question, whether you are doing knowledge work or physical labor. Knowledge workers don’t often immediately create a physical product as a result of manual labor. Rather, their work is more “virtual.” Physical work generally results in something tangible. They both deliver something. It sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Knowing what you are delivering lets you know when you are done.

Some simplified examples of professionals and their deliverables:

• Auto-body Mechanic/Technician - a fixed axle on a car, returned to the customer
• Web Developer - optimized, valid (x)html files, uploaded to the server
• Print Designer - high-res CMYK PDF, sent to printer
• Marketing Coordinator - bulleted list of marketing mix strategy for next year
• Novelist - 300 pages of manuscript

Now, art is a weird hybrid between manual labor and knowledge work. You can end up with a physical object like a sculpture. Or you can create something abstract like a song, experienced in the moment and described even more abstractly with coded marks on paper. Often enough, though, the final result reaches physical form somehow. The end product for poetry is likely to be some sort of bound volume with those poems in print. And music? Well, it can come in the form of a compact disc, a digital download, or a concert with concert-goers clapping their hands enthusiastically.

If you’re still with me, I realize you may be saying, “All right, Captian Obvious, it’s pretty plain that a painter will end up with a painting and a novelist will end up with a novel.” Right. But this kind of thinking will help you focus on your end product and not get sidetracked, as we artists are wont to do.

The bottom line is, this is outcome-based thinking. It helps you know when you’ve reached your goal because you were specific about it. You have created the promised deliverable, whether that promise was to yourself or someone else.

I mentioned earlier that I had been thinking of redesigning the site and moving it from Drupal, which was overkill. Initially I imagined it would be something of a community with a forum and everything, but the forum never really got off the ground. I have to admit, I probably went about it the wrong way, since I didn’t “seed” it with interesting, specific topics. I didn’t really publicize it, either. So I decided to do without it.

Design-wise, the colors have remained the same, but the grid system has changed a bit. The grid was largely inspired by Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction.com and based on the 960 Grid System, so it’s very modular. As a designer I’ve finally come to love the grid and gain a better understanding of it’s potential and how to use it. I’ve also come to a greater appreciation for Helvetica, which is used pretty much everywhere except for the body type.

Just so you know, the Feedburner feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysteriousflame. I actually had to resubscribe to it in Google Reader (it looks like I had been subscribed to the default RSS feed generated by Drupal) so you may have to adjust accordingly.

So MF has had a new look for about 2 weeks now, and it’s finally got all it’s content back. (Hopefully I didn’t clog anyone’s RSS reader with a ton of “new” posts.) As I mentioned in my last post, I resuscitated the old posts from trusty old Google Reader, reformatted the text and images and tweaked a few grammatical points here and there, and viola! Mysterious Flame is back on the road. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten the comments back on the site. I’m honestly not sure how to do that since I’m not a power WordPress user (yet), but frankly, there weren’t that many to begin with, so I’m OK with it. If you want to go back and re-comment, by all means, do!

Hopefully I was able to retain the old Permalinks (I checked, but there are probably a few that I missed.) So if you see anything that looks out of place, a broken link, or something that’s missing, please let me know via the contact form.

Hello to newcomers

I want to welcome newcomers to feel free to poke around the site and explore. Have a look at the About page to see what this site is about, (“sharing ideas for maintaining creative momentum and finding ways to become ‘unstuck’”). Take a look at the Art & GTD Series, which is one of the main intellectual problems that got me to start the whole site to begin with. I’m also pretty proud of the posts I’ve done on Stuckness, Gumption, and Motivation.

Welcome back to old friends

Old friends, I hope you’ll enjoy the new site and find it more usable than it was before. I’m sure some things will be tweaked here and there, but I think this design will prove to be more versatile in the long run. For at least a year anyway. ;-)

Upcoming content

While it has indeed been a while since I’ve written anything new, I’ve got a few things in the pipeline, as well as some cool/useful tools I hope you’ll like.

Anyway, it’s good to be back, and I look forward to getting this ball rolling again. See you around!