The race is never over. Your app is never done.

I haven’t been in this business for long, but if there’s one thing I’ve seen proven to be true, it’s that the launch of an app is only step one. Yeah, it’s a big step, and something you should be really proud of, but it only signifies the beginning of a long stretch of finish lines to be crossed.

It’s an endurance race. There are always hurdles to clear, coaches yelling at you to do better, and teammates who are counting on you. Each update or feature addition takes preparation and time; each user comment takes careful consideration.

But every time you cross one of the little finish lines, you remember why you love what you do. That satisfaction is what motivates you to train for the next ribbon you snap. And each time you stretch your arms toward the sky in victory, you’ve made progress toward a better app.

“Dave Navarro wrote recently that worrying about what you’re doing (or not doing) is the surest way to keep you poor and unsuccessful.

It’s a cracking article with a heap of good points, one of them being that the key difference in the way successful people operate is that they see failure as an integral part of the process of achieving success.

That’s true. Unless you plan on spending all your time underneath your duvet, failure is in your destiny. Trying to minimize or avoid failure will not help you be successful.” – Steve Errey, Copyblogger

Of course failing isn’t your goal. But taking it with a grain of salt, and figuring out what you did wrong is, in my opinion, a fantastic way to learn. And look at it this way: unless you fail day after day, without seeing any successes whatsoever, you’re probably not going to lose your job or repel a client. (And at that point maybe you should re-evaluate the line of work you’re in…) We’re human, and humans understand humans.

You have high standards for yourself and that’s great. But the occasional mistake should be included in those standards.

You work, and you play. Why do they have to be separate things?

You love what you do, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t choose to be doing it. So you do your work during the day, and then you go home and recharge by doing things like writing, reading, drawing, cooking, or whatever. You make it a point to keep these things separate, because you think they have to be.

It’s time to combine everything.

By bringing your hobbies to work, you’re making your work richer. Like Wes Anderson. Each piece of work he contributes to has a little piece of something extracurricular in it- and brings a whole new dynamic to the project.

Do what you do to recharge- don’t quit. Just do them at work. Channel that creative energy you use at home, and add a new perspective to that new modal editing menu you’re creating. You’ll be making your day more fun, while at the same time getting better at drawing… and design.

“2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.’ The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers. The most important trait a team can have is empathy. Without it, the implementers will not care, and the designers will not be realistic. When companies complain of specs and code being “tossed over the fence”, a lack of empathy is to blame.”
An excellent article by Aza Raskin. I bet family get-togethers at his house are a real trip.

It only takes a few tools to make homemade candy. A good sturdy bottomed pot, a measuring cup, something to stir with, and a thermometer. If you’re really good, you can even do without a couple of these…

Heated sugar goes through lots of stages. An astute eye can see them, but most of us need to use various methods to discover what stage it’s at. At roughly 230ºF sugar forms thin gossamer stings like a spider web when you drip it into cool water. At just 5º more it will form tight little balls. From here, the balls of sugar when dropped into water will just get harder in increments as you approach 265ºF. At around 270ºF something cool happens. The sugary strands and balls you drip into water will remain plyable, and soft when removed. By the time you hit 300º the sugar when retrieved will be hard like a jawbreaker.

At 320ºF something really magic begins to happen; the sugar begins to caramelize. “Caramelize” being just a pretty word for burn. But like a steak on the grill it’s the little black bits that make the flavor. If you heat the sugar to 338ºF give or take a couple, it breaks down to form complex compounds that create an unbelievably rich mixture of flavors. Above 350º and the sugar isn’t caramel anymore, it’s bitter, black, and disgusting.

Just 12º exist between perfect caramel and sticky ashes. If you’ve ever made anything on a stovetop you know it can be tough to control heat in 50º increments, more/less 12º. You might also know that acceleration of heat matters, -things keep cooking when you are done. It’s a challenge of talent, patience, reaction, and intuition to get it right.

I’m not a candymaker, but this whole thing sounds familiar to me. As a graphic designer I work on projects that go through stages. I struggle to add enough heat in the beginning to get to the next stage. I work sometimes days on end to keep evolving the design through stages of hopefully increasing quality. Midway through, it seems that the changes I make start to affect the overall design more dramatically. Really late in the game, it’s all about knowing when to quit.

Design, like sugar, requires talent, patience, reaction, and intuition. I’ll be honest-I’ve been burning lots of designs I work on lately. I take some consolation in hoping that it might be as easy as backing off the heat just a tiny bit to get it to turn from black to golden yummy brown.

“The percentage of our time we spend on DVD by mail [still Netflix’s biggest revenue source by far] is tiny. We’re entirely focused on streaming.” Most newspaper companies’ organization and usage of staff time is focused on print. That means it is facing today, if not yesterday. Expend as few resources on the current operating model as possible, says Hastings, and run to the future. Put your best minds there — and most of your company. ‘We knew that the DVD business was temporary when we founded the company. That’s why we named it Netflix and not DVD by mail. We wanted to become Netflix.’ Whatever the brand name, aspire to what and who you want to become.”

- Reed Hastings Founder of Netflix

Client communication can be tough. On a large, complex project it’s crucial you bridge the gap between client and designer. A fantastic way to do this, and get everyone involved, is to collaborate over content. Organize content first and you’ll be surprised how smoothly the rest of your project will go. Here are five reasons why you should use a content wireframe on your next project. 

1. Opens lines of communication right away. 

First things first- the content of the site. Great design begins with the words on each page. You have to make sure they’re functional, relevant, and in the voice of the client. Most of the time this requires the client’s involvement- or at least approval!  Keep Reading

Yesterday we wrote about this and this

To wrap up, signups did finally pick up a little later in the day. Still not near normal, and far less than what we would call a good day.

Oh well. We tried. We’ll round up to help a good cause.

Last night I was reading around on the internet and came across the Charity Water campaign that Cameron Moll has been running to celebrate Authentic Jobs’ 5 year anniversary. It’s not the first I’d heard of it, but it was the first time I paid much attention to it.

I was instantly taken by two things:

• What a great cause Charity Water is.
• That despite being backed by some of the biggest names in our industry, the camapign had still only netted just over half of the goal amount of 20k.

I hatched an idea in about 2 minutes to donate our daily earnings to the cause. I threw together a quick temp campaign page, and Brian assembled it. We hacked some code at the top of all our app pages that would display the promo once to each of the site visitors. We also followed up with the usual couple tweets, and a blog post to talk about the idea.

Decent idea?

We’re a small niche app studio. We count good days when we get hundreds of dollars in new subscriptions, not thousands. We knew this wouldn’t make a ton of money for the charity… But how much has it made so far you ask?

zero dollars.

We’re about four hours in, and not only has nobody signed up for a paid account, but our signup rate for free accounts is about a third of normal rate from what we can tell…

So what’s up? Was it a bad idea? Are we ignoring some bit of human psychology? Did the campaign popup scare everyone off?