Thank you, Brooklyn Roasting Company

On October 21, Brooklyn Roasting Company announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closing all if its brick-and-mortar locations in New York City. During the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is too common as business are struggling to stay open.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest but Brooklyn was the place I found a sense of home. Brooklyn Roasting Company (BRC) was my third place that I would stop in before starting the work day. At the time I was running my own company and it often was the workplace for me. I’d spend hours there filling up on the Maple Shay Almond Latte or Cortados as I worked on client projects.

It’s impossible to get someone from Manhattan to come over to Brooklyn. Since the coffee shop I went to in DUMBO was right along the F stop, the occasional miracle would happen where someone from Manhattan would come over to meet me since it was the first stop into Brooklyn. Anyone who lives in Oakland can understand how this feels with their friends in San Francisco.

BRC was the gathering place for old and new friends. Many people I’d sit next to were freelancers and I have made life-long relationships from being present there.

BRC was a metaphorical Brooklyn Bridge. I hope we can pull off one more miracle and that BRC opens up for business again. Regardless of the outcome, thank you so much for the memories, forged friendships, and a third place to call home.

One year at Webflow

A year ago today I started my journey as a team member at Webflow. Before I joined, I took a small sabbatical to really spend time finding something I wanted to do meaningful for a very long time. I recently left One Medical, a place where I stayed for four years—the longest place I’ve worked aside from my own company. One Medical taught me that as a leader it takes long-term commitment to build something great, and I was looking for something that would be that. My gut was telling me to start a company again. I have many interest in industries (health tech, fashion tech, consumer apps, travel, SaaS, etc.) but the one that is unrivaled is design and developer tools. Many years ago I interviewed with the Xcode team at Apple and always felt I missed my opportunity on tools that enable people to create and build. My noodling and doodling led me to think about taking a crack at a startup to enable people to build apps without code. During my break, I met with my good friend Alissa who mentioned Webflow to me, and the rest was history.

Domm Holland, CEO at Fast tweeted about what you can learn from scaling a startup. After experiencing that at One Medical and having so many fond memories, I simply couldn’t resist doing it again. I’m so grateful to join Bryant, Sergie, and Vlad to work with them in the journey they took several years before as co-founders to make Webflow become real.

In many ways, it’s the perfect product and space. For years I’ve obsessed over the infusion of design and engineering. I also love building tools for people to create, build, and dream big.

Most importantly, the people. From the first hour I started I felt so welcome by this remote team and it’s a pleasure to serve them on a daily basis.

2020 has not been the year anyone expected. Despite all the challenges we are facing in the world, my purpose at work is something that remained constantly optimistic. There is so much more we need to do, and I feel like my journey is only beginning—feel grateful to simply be a part of it.

Striving for imperfection

Is there any better way to dunk on Virgos than writing about subverting perfectionism in September? (Narrator: There is not.) I’m kidding, Virgos. My cat, who just celebrated his 18th birthday, is also a Virgo.

The refusal to accept any standard short of perfection has its benefits and major challenges is a common theme among Virgos and other humans. The benefit is it can motivate you to do top quality work. However, this can be counter-productive, inducing a lot of anxiety, fears, and insecurities.

Perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting high-performance standards, accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations. This can create analysis paralysis and you may never put your idea in motion. Psychologist David Burns once said, “Reaching for the stars, perfectionists may end up clutching at air.” People often don’t launch their ideas because of what they might face as it transitions from idea to reality as a result of this fear. Sometimes you’re trying to refine something so much in your head that you later learn that someone else went and did your idea.

Sharing ideas is extremely hard. It puts you in a vulnerable space. When you keep ideas to yourself, there is no risk of critique or reaction. It’s perfect in your mind. When you create something and put it out to the world, you face critique. It’s tough to launch that app idea, only to find out it’s something nobody wanted and failed. It’s also hard to put yourself out there in a world where things are portrayed in the most idealistic. Open Instagram and within seconds you’ll often encounter perfectly staged narratives. How would you ever reach that standard?

Becoming the imperfectionist

In 2006, the world was introduced to blonde hair and blue-eyed James Bond in Daniel Craig. For those who are familiar with the Ian Fleming character, James Bond has always been portrayed as hyper-masculine, smooth, and suave. Aside from the ocean-blue eyes and blonde hair, Daniel Craig’s portrayal of Bond was different. It was brutal, rugged, and inelegant.

(Spoiler alert: there’s a scene where Bond orders a drink)

Bond: Vodka martini
Bartender: Shaken or stirred?
Bond: Do I look like I give a damn?

This is a rough cut of Bond. He doesn’t care about being smooth; that the job is done (In no ways am I saying Daniel Craig is imperfect). I’ve always looked at the Daniel Craig James Bond as a metaphor for being more real and unrefined in order to achieve results. Though I care about doing high-quality work, I am far from a perfectionist. My style of getting there is very rugged and often by brute force. As the saying goes, “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” This is what Proof of Concept is about; encouraging you to get those ideas out to exist in the world so you can refine it.

The other end of the spectrum of a perfectionist is often defined as an Optimalist. This comes from the Latin word Optimus, which means both “best” and the fearless leader of the Autobots in the Transformers series.

Filling the white space

In art school, I was trained to get rid of all the white space on the canvas. In my oil painting classes, I’d apply the techniques of the artists of old like Titian to complete an underpainting, a very low fidelity pass of the entire canvas to shape up the composition. Once you mess it up, you can then refine it. This helps me cope with any sense of perfectionism that might creep in.

There is more hesitance to make a mark on a blank white piece of paper because each stroke can feel like a mistake. When it’s filled, you have less to lose.

The key is you do not have to attain perfection in one iteration.

Iterate the momentum

As Dr. Julie Gurner recently said on Twitter, “What most won’t tell you? It’s not knowing what to do that it is hard…it’s actually doing it, and not allowing yourself to get in the way.”

Building momentum is the most challenging part of doing anything. One of my favorite quotes is from Pixar’s 22 secrets to storytelling: “Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.”

Similar to my painting style, I approach writing the same way; creating mind maps of ideas and unstructured writing to help me get started. The blank canvas often the biggest blocker.

Especially now during COVID-19 where we seem to be perpetually on screens, I take my sketchbook as a way to plan my action. Whether it’s a book idea or a quick note, I scribble on paper to hash the ideas out a bit before focusing on any digital computation. I’ve also found putting thoughts on paper has put my mind at ease and makings me less anxious about any work I do. Since I spend seconds doing quick thumbnails, there is such low risk for me to re-do the work in a better way.

Sharing your drafts to the public

I’ve been so inspired by people on the web who have been sharing concepts out in the open, and I’d like to share two who come to mind. Paige Doherty is a software engineer who is working on a children’s book about venture capital and has been sharing her pen and paper pages of the book. She used Loom as a way to create an intro video to solicit feedback. I cannot wait to see where this book goes! Jordan Singer, a product designer at Square Cash with a background in computer science, has been building his ideas for many years. He created an app called Airport which lets people browse different TestFlight builds of iOS apps that people are building.

These are two of many examples of people putting work out there to get feedback and providing early access. People don’t create things out of thin air like magic. We often feel like it is so because often we don’t see the drafts and iterations. The reason someone has achieved more success is often likely they’ve failed more than you.

Non Finito can be therapeutic

The word “Non Finito” means “not finished” in Italian. I find a lot of benefits doing a “brain dump” of all my thoughts. This type of journaling has helped provide some mental relief by making it tangible and a source to start new ideas.

You don’t even have to show your imperfections to the world if you’re not ready for it, or if you ever are. Putting these thoughts down can help you look at things head-on and be accepting of the imperfections.

“What if I mess up and break something?”

Who cares.

Kintsugi, the art of repairing with gold is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

It is in our imperfections and fragments where we can find a long-lasting beauty we can appreciate in an authentic and sustainable manner. Take a moment, put that idea out there. You might inspire someone to do the same. Together we can iterate more and share it with the universe.

As the artist, Salvador Dali once said, “have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.”

P.S. In the spirit of idea generation on early drafts, I’d love your feedback on what you’d like for me to write about. Simply reply to this email with your idea. I appreciate any suggestions!

Originally posted on Proof of Concept

A farewell love letter to Quartz Composer

Dear Quartz Composer,

It became official during this virtual WWDC, you were officially deprecated. I never thought my heart would ache for the deprecation software. However, to be honest, I owe so much to you in my life, and it’s no exaggeration. Is this a love letter, or a farewell letter? Like many great loves that aren’t meant to last forever, it’s a bit of both.

We met many times, but you weren’t my first love. To say you were my first love would be a lie. Before we met, there was HyperCard and Dreamweaver. With visual programming tools like this in my life, I could do something I never thought I could…build what I imagine.

We had encounters at times in college, where I remembered you as primarily a graphics app that my music friends loved using. It was a way to create trippy visualizations along with electronic music they produced. You weren’t the first visual programming language (VPL) tool I was introduced to, but were there for the most formative times of my life and career.

I met you again later in my career. It was 2013 and HTC just announced their new phone, the HTC First, AKA the Facebook phone. People were talking about the chat heads interaction that appeared in the device. Julie Zhuo wrote about how the design team prototyped the interactions in QC.

This was at the cusp of my iOS design career. I remember having coffee with my friend Robert Eickmann at Caffe Vita in Capitol Hill. He showed me a video of a designer recreating the chat heads using QC. When I finally joined Black Pixel, one of my dream companies, I was responsible for doing a lot of prototyping work for client projects. I really relied on you to tell stories through inspiring interactions.

A while after, Facebook released Origami, a plugin built on your software. Like many designers, I was obsessed with building every interaction out using it. You once inspired me to give a talk at the Seattle Prototypers meetup, where I met Stephen Crowley, one of my good friends to-this-day.

Photo of David speaking at the Seattle Prototypers group.

You helped me ship the most impactful projects in my career and helped me build rapports with some of the engineers I worked with. You gave me the language, the rhetoric, and the conversation. You enabled me to become a curious explorer and prototyper. I have to be honest, you were the reason I felt I needed two Thunderbolt Displays to see my work. From prototyping a camera app for a social networking app people use daily to creating our first experience of video appointments at One Medical, you were there for all the big moments.

There were others similar to you that came, such as Form (what a great tool and Google did nothing with it) and Noodl. You will always remain the original to me, and the one that sent me on a path of curious prototyping, which really changed my career; the one that invoked endless possibilities.

Thank you, Quartz Composer. I owe so much to you, and as we embark on the next evolution of visual programming, you will not be forgotten and your place in history will forever be remembered.

David (forever known as “That designer who is obsessed with QC”)

Offering up my time to review portfolios

In the midst of the pandemic of COVID-19, many lives have been impacted in so many ways. Unfortunately many people have felt the impact of layoffs throughout the industry, including design. I’m offering up some of my personal time to review portfolios and resumes for those who find it helpful.

Disclaimer: Please note this offer is me as a person and not that of my role as Director of Design at Webflow. This means if you’ve applied to a role at Webflow I am not reviewing your application as a part of this rather free coaching/feedback.