What Am I Doing? (Mar 2009)

Freelance

Things are going well with my freelance project. We’re pretty much wrapping up with the foundation of the site, with a few more adjustments and fixes. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to present it here with some process work.

GTD

I finally had some time to revamp my GTD system, and it seems to be working better than before. I basically digitized my projects list and actions so that they’re easier to look through (and therefore, less intimidating for me to review and organize). There are still parts of the system that I need to streamline, but things are definitely more efficient already.

Twitter

I recently started using a public Twitter account. My username is ivanwlam, and you’re welcome to follow me if you want. So far, some of the “famous” people I’ve followed include David Allen (the GTD Guy), Ze Frank, swissmiss, Armin and Bryony at Under Consideration, and TED.

Cut&Paste

Me. Me. Me. The fact that I forgot to mention that I went to watch my friend Sam Sellers talentedly compete at the SF stop of the Cut&Paste Competition Tour is unacceptable. Long story short, Sam did a great job and was robbed of his first prize. I love the piece he did for the first round, which was (and will be again) my Facebook profile photo.

Motivation

Something happened in the past week that retriggered and intensified my motivation to advance my career and my life as soon as possible. I can’t go into the details, but I now have a stronger desire to be independent and self-sufficient and to take control of my own life. So hopefully, in the coming months, I will have more exciting things to report.

Really Simple Designer Web Comic

Within the past month, I ended one blog and started another. Really Simple Designer Web Comic was an experiment to create a daily web comic starring Point, Line, and Plane. Every start of the day, I take about half an hour coming up with a concept and quickly draw a comic for the next day on my Wacom tablet. The idea of this project was to become more comfortable with my tablet, and I definitely am now. I ended it after two months because it was taking too much time of my day and the creative juices just weren’t flowing as fluidly as I’d like.

One Per Day

One Per Day is a much simpler project. Every day, I post about the day before, using only one word or phrase as the title of the post, and only one sentence describing the day. This keeps my post lengths short and to the point. It’s sort of a practice for me to pack as much content and meaning into one word and one sentence as I could, instead of dragging on and on about an incident (which I tend to do quite often… like right now).

The idea for One Per Day originated from a revisit to Ze Frank’s The Show, which indirectly kept a record of Ze’s personal life and experiences behind the scenes during its running. I have tried to keep a record of my life ever since I could write and had self-awareness. I used to write by hand with special notebooks and special pencils, and then switched to LiveJournals for a while, then to design blogs with monthly reviews (like this one).

But all these posts were taking too much time of my life to sustain, as I write really long posts, usually about now-apparently trivial things, and I wouldn’t want to return to them if I wanted to recall events of my life at the time.

One Per Day reaches a compromise between wanting to document every experience of my life and cutting down the number of words that I would have to read later on. One year from now, the individual events that happen every day will mean very little to me. In the end, a day is just a day, even on special occasions. What’s more important is the overall mood.

I just started blogging on One Per Day on WordPress (my new friend, perhaps my fortune cookie best friend?), and I haven’t gotten to redesigning it. But the presentation is going to be more streamlined and intuitive. Subscribe to the feed, and stay tuned.

Quotes I Go By Lately

“A day is a day. Every event, however trivial, will, by definition, influence and change the rest of my life.”

“Keep it simple (and easy), stupid.”

Flush.

About Flush

(Hide/Show omitted text.)

“Number One”/Quick Overview

Flush is a dumping ground for notes, thoughts, and ideas related to design. The point is to get everything worth consideration pondering about out of the head and down onto the literal and metaphorical paper. Put in perspective, these ideas can either marinate and brew to deliciousness or shrivel up and die ironically in the recycling bin. This way, the mind is always fresh and never stale, and creativity can stream out without hesitation. Ivan W. Lam writes this design blog as a way for him to think, explore, and learn about everything design without feeling like he has to constantly be correct and perfect about his design decisions. In other words, this blog prevents Ivan from going crazy ca-ca.

Origin of Concept

While it was not the spark that motivated the birth of this blog, The original idea of unloading the mind of static data was conceived arrived a year before the birth of Flush this blog, in Fall 2006. Ivan had probably heard or read something from some well-known designer’s lecture online, that ideas are not good staying in the head, because 1) ideas in the head only are useless without execution, and 2) they may be perceived as the “greatest” or “perfect” “the most awesome” solution, when in fact, they may be are darn right straight up crappy, usually realized when those ideas they materialize into actions the world of real people where that follows laws of practicality are followed. This concept quickly became the subtitle of Ivan’s previous design blog, IWIL Blog on Design: Get Those Crappy Ideas Out of Your Head (with “IWIL” being Ivan’s full name initials).

Fast forward to Summer of 2007, when Ivan had heard a SXSW 2007 podcast (more about this in a later entry) where a panelist mentioned the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. In a desperate need for life organization at the time, Ivan actually spent money on a book, a medium where their which the appearance extremely fascinated him while the content usually did not. However, this book was the opposite. A concept that Allen mentioned in the book was very similar to the advice Ivan had heard the previous fall. Allen further explained that the mind can only hold so many thoughts at once, and we’re bound to forget something sooner or later, leaving us that “Something's missing” feeling. So in an attempt to capture all worthwhile thoughts, Ivan has begun to implement the “GTD” method and applied it to this blog Flush.

The Motivation

Then, in early October 2007, Ivan had come across an entry on the design blog SpeakUp by Armin Vit (More about this entry in a later post). As this incident will be extrapolated in a later post, Ivan had become inspired by Armin’s story anecdote about his current place in his life and his career right before his announcement of starting a design service through his now-company UnderConsideration LLC. Seeing it as a sign, Ivan felt that he needed to carpe diem and do something to start his career, in hopes that he could at least be as accomplished as Armin someday. Besides completing the portfolio on which he was three months late on completing, he decides that he needs to get out there and be heard. What more appropriate way to express for personality and stability project demonstrate determination on an ongoing project than a blog?

A Little Warning

As mentioned above, Flush is basically stuff (both good and crappy) that comes out of Ivan’s head. So most of what he says on here are opinions. Do not eat them up as facts, because 1) they’re opinions, and 2) he doesn’t know everything and he may be wrong. In which case, corrections to any of the few factual statements, as well as all grammar, typos, and punctuation mistakes, put on here this blog are always encouraged.

Shortage of Fiber

While Ivan may not be swamped by a sh*tload endless amount of design work or have a family to support, he may take a while to crap pump out these posts. Even though he had already admitted it was already mentioned that this blog will have a lot of opinions, and crap, and opinionated crap, Ivan is still striving to put together well-composed, thoughtful entries that may be of use for the readers. And for a non-professional writer, that takes time. As you can probably tell, he’s not that good at writing, but he’s trying to improve that, by constantly practicing, because he also believes that designers still need to know how to writeverbally communicate well. And to make something good will require more editing than the typical writer. So please excuse him if he doesn’t get out posts as quickly as other design blogs. The best way to know when he has a new post is to subscribe to this blog.

Why “Flush”?

• Flush it down.
• Flush it out.
• Flush left.
• Flushed.
• Because it's sanitary.

Pick your favorite reason(s).

About Ivan

A newbie graphic designer (if you let him call himself that a graphic designer), Ivan W. Lam had studied graphic design at UC Davis in California. He is/will be a graduate of UCD and is considering a grad program in graphic design or design with a business curriculum in a few years. Currently in his early twenties, he has been an AIGA member, SF Chapter since June 2006 and currently lives in the Bay Area, and enjoys naps. His favorite design blogs at the moment (October 2007) are swissmiss and Balla Dóra Typo-Graphika, followed by the classics SpeakUp and Design Observer.

Last edited 31 October 2007.

Flush.