Independent designer and Conjunctured co-founder unabashedly sharing digital novelties.
I’ve had these pictures stuck in my head for the last few weeks. The left is a sketch Jack Dorsey made of his concept for Twitter back in 2006, and the right (if you don’t remember) is what Facebook looked like in 2005 when it was essentially a sloppy version of Friendster for students of a particular Ivy League college. When something hits such immense scale, it can be difficult to remember that it once existed as such a fleetingly simple, unmitigated idea. Some of the sharpest people the industry could muster (along with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars) have been bought to bear to cultivate these technologies into their present forms. But those are effects, not causes.
Think about that the next time you sketch something on the back of an envelope.
Great point—I’ve been reminding myself lately to sketch as much as possible on the back of proverbial envelopes for the very reason you describe. I see the value in getting ideas out and not judging them, but as a designer (read: perfectionist) I get caught up in trying to make things look production-ready all the time. Iteration is key.
PS: I have the Stat.us picture favorited from Jack’s Flickr stream.
