Wow, the second call to designers in just a few days. It seems that someone needs some advice.
You know the famous burnout syndrome, or if you don’t know, you’ve seen it around. People working and working till they drop dead on their mental tracks. Everyone has a different way of expressing it but it’s there – you just can’t go on anymore like this.
What’s your advice for confronting stress-induced routine and burnout, both in your work and personal projects?
How do you face the all-too-familiar feeling of being useless and empty?
Or if you never felt like that – how in God’s name do you do it?
I’m really interested to hear a bit more from my fellow designers – or not.
Photo courtesy of jurvetson
I’m a weird creature.
I can spend hours working with music jamming around, feeling completely concentrated. At times though, any possible sound can make me snappy and turn my mind off work, immediately.
Eventhough I tend to have my days on this issue, I’ve observed that most of the creative work I’ve done was under some (i)tunes. Most of the times, I set my player to shuffle and just listen. If I want something easy and not too distracting, it’s Chicane or Sten. If I want something more party-ish, it’s Hôtel Costes and Ministry of Sound collections. If I want to wake up, Placebo & Unkle. If I want some deep concentration, there’s nothing better than Carbon Based Lifeforms.
So my question is…
What do you listen to while designing or developing websites?
Is there anything particular that makes you zone in (as acidsmile puts it)?
Do you listen to shuffled tunes, a particular playlist or some random radio station?
I learnt something truly delightful last week: a greek paper, Eleftheros Tipos, was among the five best designed newspapers of the world for the past year. I’m glad E.T. design got awarded because I absolutely love its print design and I’ve been following its progress since its redesign first launched.
But when I recited the story to my family, my sister had an absolutely negative approach. She couldn’t believe how such a newspaper got an award, because according to her, E.T. is a very difficult to read and skim newspaper.
That brought back memories – noone cares about your design dude, remember?
Are we sure that what us, designers, consider a cool design, is a cool design for everyone else? No, I don’t think there is a perfect design that can work as a panacea and please all people, but still. A newspaper gets a design award, and a potential reader absolutely hates it. Why?
I don’t take myself off this – when I see something I can’t have a professional opinion on, for example some print ad or poster that’s considered well designed, 90% of the times I’m like, wtf. People like this? The fake Bauhaus effect and diagonal lines? These usually bore me to death. But other people seem to love them! What gives?
Where do we err? What should we do to design things that both our users and fellow designers will love?
Image courtesy of snd.org
