So I’m reading this great AIGA LA interview with Todd Dominey and I stumble across the following passage:
Q: You’ve become a pretty accomplished scripter, programmer, tweaker … for Flash in particular. Does the technical fluency your output requires feel at odds with the mindset you need to be a creative designer?
Here’s what I’ve noticed — virtually everyone I know who works in interactive/web design, myself included, is mentally split right down the middle. Some days they wake up with a dominant left brain, other days right. This is drastically different than the days when I worked in print, where most agency people I worked with lived exclusively in the right. I think I knew web design was right for me very early on when I was the one guy in the office who could fix a crashing build of Quark or replace a corrupted extension in the System folder. I appreciated the technical as an integral part of the creative process, and felt the greatest professional satisfaction when both paths crossed.
Bam! Todd nailed it exactly – I was always the same way, the dork who enjoyed manipulating graphics pixel by pixel, futzing around with his computer for hours, that sort of thing. I’m not the greatest living artist/writer/programmer/whatever, but my spot is right at the middle of all of those areas, and figuring out how to blend them together.
Today, though, I don’t want to do any of that. Yesterday I woke up early and energized, and proceeded to work all day without once leaving the house. I hate days like that, and I always wind up paying for them with days like this. I woke up today bleary-eyed and wincing every time I saw a coding book. In the last week I’ve made banner ads, a 30-second simple animation for a band, laid the groundwork for some cool new projects, accidentally utterly shattered Ken’s weblog, and launched a little site for a local chocolatier. All in all, a ton has been done, but there’s still loads left to do, and at the moment I’m teetering. I woke up this morning with one thought going through my head: I don’t want to be here today. Ugh. It’s only 9AM and I’m blitzed.
What do you guys do when you’re torched?