Keeping your place

Written byCameron Adams. 5 comments

Cameron Adams

Cameron Adams, interface designer at Google Wave, melds a background in Computer Science with over nine years experience in graphic design to create a unique approach to interface design. Using the latest technologies, he likes to play in the intersection between design and code to produce innovative but usable sites and applications.

What happened to your passion for the web? It can be hard to stay excited when you get bogged down in the minutiae of RFPs and invoicing clients. It's time to get your mojo back.

…it was held that in a uni­lat­eral con­tract i.e. one where the act of accep­tance is also con­sid­er­a­tion of the promise offered; that there is no gen­eral propo­si­tion that once the offeree com­mences per­for­mance of the act of accep­tance, the offeror is not at lib­erty to revoke the offer. There may, how­ever, be an ancil­lary con­tract not to revoke, or an estop­pel against depri­va­tion of the chance of com­plet­ing accep­tance…
— Some lec­turer in Cameron’s law course

When I fell asleep lis­ten­ing to this lec­ture I con­vinced myself I wasn’t cut out for law.

Still, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do oth­er­wise. But who really does when they’re at uni­ver­sity? Luck­ily, I’d some­how man­aged to get the local stu­dent pub­li­ca­tion to become reliant on my Pho­to­shop skills, devel­oped late at night in my secret dojo/​bedroom. That tiny morsel of expe­ri­ence gave my resume enough grav­i­tas to dis­tract some­one who was look­ing for a desk­top pub­lisher from the fact that I wasn’t actu­ally in desk­top pub­lish­ing (does that even exist now, or is it just called pub­lish­ing?) And from there, it was just a hop, step and a jump into web design.

What I’m try­ing to high­light here is pas­sion. Pretty much every­one I know who makes stuff for the web has a sim­i­lar story. Army recruits who became front-​​end coders, zool­o­gists who are now search engine opti­mis­ers, dive instruc­tors who design. We’ve all cho­sen to be here because it excites us. Some­times it excites us so much that we go home from our jobs and do exactly what we’ve been doing all day at work. We are where we are because we’ve found our (pro­fes­sional) pas­sion – the thing that makes us happiest.

But even after you’ve found a job you love to do, it’s still a lot of hard work to keep it that way. Before you realise it you can be neck deep in account­ing or mired in man­age­ment and you’re back at square one – a job you hate. You know that excite­ment you had when you first dis­cov­ered web stan­dards? When you had no idea about floats, but you read that arti­cle about how to make two columns with­out a table and sud­denly it just clicked? Well, now that’s turned into a poten­tial client, a 23 page pro­posal to win their project, which you did, but they took four months to actu­ally decide that you did, and they didn’t bother to change their six month dead­line, so now you’ve got two months to do four months of work.

Breathe.

Why were you excited again?

What excited me – still excites me – about the web is its com­bi­na­tion of dis­cov­ery and cre­ativ­ity. Dis­cov­ery of this new world where there are no rules, just peo­ple mak­ing things up as they go along; find­ing new ideas and new ways of doing things. Along­side this are the cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties of design – mak­ing some­thing from noth­ing, craft­ing an expe­ri­ence. It’s these ele­ments which keep me passionate.

Pas­sion isn’t fixed in stone. I have a knack for CSS and JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean they excite me as much as they did five years ago. Peo­ple mature, and change, and nat­u­rally the place you belong to changes with you. It’s not the tools you use that define you, it’s the moti­va­tions you have for using the tools.

Most peo­ple don’t know my moti­va­tions, they know the prod­uct of them. Clients couldn’t care less about whether you want to explore the use of Per­lin noise fields for the par­ti­cle sim­u­la­tion of flock­ing behav­iour. They just want you to deliver on your promise of mak­ing some­thing cool and/​or use­ful. And that’s the prob­lem with work. It has a ten­dency to be one step behind you.

“Can you make me a logo like the one you did for Bizzy­Corp­Soft?“
“I really don’t want to do another … How much? Well, if you’re going to give me that many truck loads of money, then …”

Just when you’ve packed your bags and are about to move onto the next place they pull you back in with money, guilt, lazi­ness, or an irre­sistible com­bi­na­tion of all three.

Stay­ing pas­sion­ate about your work

It’s often hard to stay self-​​focused when so many peo­ple are demand­ing your atten­tion. Here are some tac­tics that I use to keep the flame alive.

  1. #1 Do what you want to do

    You will become known for doing what you do.
    Jonathan Har­ris (cre­ator of wefeelfine​.org)

    Peo­ple will ask you to do what they know you can do. There’s no point sit­ting there wish­ing that a client would come along and ask you to make that 3D under­wa­ter iPhone shop­ping appli­ca­tion you dream of mak­ing, when you’re best known for con­vert­ing prod­uct cat­a­logues to PDF.

    So, if you want to be paid to make semi-​​submersible e-​​commerce sites then you’ll have to make your first one on your own time. Or you might be lucky enough to sneak it into an exist­ing project. But you’ll still have to put in the hard yards because your client’s unlikely to pay you a pre­mium for it. It’s a lucky thing you’re pas­sion­ate about it.

  2. #2 Don’t be afraid to change

    A period of eco­nomic cri­sis is prob­a­bly not the best time to quit your job and ful­fil your dream of becom­ing a yodel­ling por­trait artist. Then again, maybe it is. I’ve always believed that you’re much bet­ter off doing some­thing you love. How­ever, you don’t always have to be so dra­matic; some­times it just requires a change of costume.

    Thank­fully, in the age of the inter­net it’s quite easy to cast off the shack­les of a pre­vi­ous per­sona. If you don’t think that your blog about web devel­op­ment is the right place to intro­duce your inner gourmet chef, then start a new blog! If your day job feels like 8.5 hours on the rack, cul­ti­vate your ulti­mate career at night. This imme­di­ately gives you the clean slate you need to start focus­ing on what you really want to do.

    The inter­net makes it easy to get atten­tion. Once you start pro­mot­ing your work and ideas, it feeds into point one above – you get known for doing what you do.

  3. #3 Cre­ate some­thing new every week

    This has a twofold pur­pose. It gets you into the habit of doing some­thing that you’re not cur­rently doing, and it gets you to make some­thing tangible.

    Doing some­thing new is about dis­cov­er­ing what’s inter­est­ing, what you like and what you can use in your work. Most times I approach ‘new­ness’ from one of two ends – either doing some­thing I nor­mally do, but with new tools (say … Flash ver­sus JavaScript), or try­ing to do some­thing totally dif­fer­ent with exist­ing tools (‘how do I paint like Picasso in Photoshop?’).

    Hav­ing to make some­thing tan­gi­ble means that you actu­ally have to work through the process of cre­ation, not just think through it. But most impor­tantly it gives you some­thing to show people.

    You don’t nec­es­sar­ily have to show it off on your blog. It’s pos­si­ble to get cre­ative sat­is­fac­tion from a quiet sense of per­sonal achieve­ment, but if the aim of this exer­cise is to ulti­mately let you work on your pas­sion, then it makes sense to let it wan­der free – see point one above.

  4. #4 Keep up-​​to-​​date in an area you never work in

    Every­one has out­side inter­ests, but it’s easy to give them a low pri­or­ity when you’ve got more ‘press­ing’ mat­ters to attend to. I make it a point to keep up-​​to-​​date with the lat­est in archi­tec­ture, whether it’s on BLDGBLOG or in the pages of Mon­u­ment. It has no direct rel­e­vance to my job as an inter­face designer, but it’s a superb source of cross pol­li­na­tion for aes­thetic ideas and gen­eral day dream­ing. The same can be said for com­puter games, auto­mo­tive design, or quan­tum physics – all sorts of weird and won­der­ful con­nec­tions can be made with your pro­fes­sional life. And who knows? You might even be able to merge two of your passions.

Whether you make use of my advice or not, the most impor­tant thing is that you have pas­sion for what you do. It’s easy not to notice as your dream job slowly morphs into paid drudgery, so check every now and then to make sure you’re in the right place. If the train to the next town looks appeal­ing, buy a ticket and jump on board.

2 back to overview

Comments on this article

  1. Written byCrystalyn on the 15th of May

    I took that plane last sum­mer, after I grad­u­ated from uni­ver­sity and it took me half way around the world. You know, some­times it gets lonely, when you ven­ture off to fol­low your dreams all alone, espe­cially as a deter­mined young woman. Some­times you think you’ve gone a lit­tle crazy, leav­ing every­thing famil­iar to you behind. All your friends ask when your com­ing back and par­ents fret over the secu­rity of your dreams, as par­ents should. The irony of it all is, it would be so easy to just go home, to the sup­port of friends, fam­ily, and maybe some dead-​​end, mind numb­ing jobs. How­ever, the power of dreams can take you to places that you never imag­ined you would be. They free you in ways you never thought pos­si­ble. Thanks for the blog. It meant a lot today, when all odds seemed against me and my passion.

  2. Written bytkjune on the 17th of August

    I fully agree with Crys­talyn and thank you for the blog. It’s so hard to chase for the dream in the very begin­ning when you have noth­ing, I mean, noth­ing even includ­ing food. After some years of work­ing, some work that does not quite match with the ini­tial dream, bring you $, you may get used to it. That’s what I felt for a long time. And your blog wakes me up that I do have an option now. Never too late to start from right now. Thanks again.

  3. Written byhttp://Bing.com/ on the 26th of February

    “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Keep­ing your place by Cameron Adams” Accieee
    in fact got me per­son­ally addicted on ur site!

    I actu­al­ly­will wind up being back again a lot more often.
    Thank you –Georgina

  4. Written byhttp://Samsjsu.org on the 21st of April

    “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Keep­ing your place by Cameron Adams” ended up being a superb blog post.

    If only there were a whole lot more web blogs just like this par­tic­u­lar one in
    the web. Regard­less, thanks for your pre­cious time, Chloe

  5. Written byprimeonlinesolutions.blogbaker.com on the 23rd of April

    The fol­low­ing post­ing, “Scroll Mag­a­zine | Keep­ing your place by Cameron Adams” dis­plays the fact that you really com­pre­hend what
    pre­cisely u are writ­ing about! I per­son­ally thor­oughly approve.
    Thank you ‚Gilberto

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