davejh

I had heard a lot about Manga Studio, so I decided to try it...

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:14:58 -0500

I had heard a lot about Manga Studio, so I decided to try it out. Just a quick doodle, and I’m quite impressed.

Project Unison

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:42:00 -0500

Project Unison is now available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch!

This whole thing started because I wanted a fun way to practice identifying musical intervals by ear. A few musical coworkers and I created this game as a labor of love, and now you can download and play it.

Music itself is really fun, but there aren’t a lot of fun music education games out there. We have a ton of ideas for games about music, and if Project Unison is a success and it turns out there’s an audience for this sort of thing, we can start bringing those ideas to life. So check it out and let us know what you think.

Proteus, Colorblindness, and Flat Design

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 17:54:00 -0500

Last night some guys from work and I were playing Proteus together. Proteus, for the uninformed, is an “art game” wherein you walk around an island and look at things with no particular goals or rewards. It’s got a very unique lo-fi aesthetic that makes strong use of flat shapes and interesting color schemes. We were having a discussion about it, with the artists defending its impressionistic artistic merit and the programmers idly wondering how long it would take them to throw together something similar.

One programmer was especially turned off by Proteus, and was especially offended by its visuals. I’ve got kind of an affinity for ugly and unfriendly art, so at first I just chalked it up to the fact that this kind of thing isn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

Then I remembered that this particular guy is colorblind. Because the use of color is such an important part of what makes Proteus so interesting, I decided to load some screenshots into Photoshop and use the built-in color blindness preview mode to get an idea of what he was seeing. And it looks like Proteus kind of sucks for people with color blindness.

As a UX guy, this naturally got me thinking about the recent trend towards “flat” design in a lot of interfaces these days (think Windows 8). I’ve generally enjoyed these kinds of designs the same way I enjoy the flat, colorful aesthetic of Proteus. There’s a significant portion of the population, though, that perceives these designs differently, and it’s possible that things like texture and bevels and whatnot are what makes an interface not only pleasing to look at, but easier to use for those with color blindness.

It’s ok for an art game like Proteus to be ugly or inaccessible to, well, most people, actually. They found their niche, that’s fine. When you’re thinking about designing a flat interface, though, think about how it might look to someone who isn’t going to see your color scheme. Those Photoshop layer effects some of us are so eager to cast off may be more essential than we thought.

Something to think about.

A while back I was lamenting the lack of good interval ear...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:33:00 -0500

A while back I was lamenting the lack of good interval ear training games for musicians. Then I remembered that I work at an educational game company, so instead of cursing the darkness, I pitched a game. And then we made that game.

Project Unison is currently awaiting approval from the iOS App Store, and soon you’ll be able to get it for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This has been a very special project for a bunch of us in the studio, and I think we succeeded in making an actually fun educational music game.

~~I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it’s available.~~

UPDATE: Project Unison is now available in the App Store!

ON PROCRASTINATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT IN DESIGN (PART THREE)

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:51:00 -0500

Here it is, the final post of the series. Previously I covered the bad habits we learn in design school and the fear of finishing that leaves us pulling our hair out, scrambling to finish at the last minute, and missing deadlines entirely. This time I’m going to finally dig into what I learned from working on video games that fixed the way I work. I think it will help you as well.

Cows and Farmers

I read a book recently that presented a humorous image of a farmer looking over his pasture full of cows standing around eating grass. The farmer shouts at the cows, “Get to work, cows! Quit standing around and let’s make some milk!” Of course, the cows are supposed to represent artists, and the farmer is the evil management type who doesn’t understand that you’ve just gotta let the cows do their thing, man! Let the magic happen!

This analogy appealed to some smug section of my brain at first. It’s true, there’s something magical that goes on in the heads of creative people. We get used to people treating our talents as some mysterious, unquantifiable gift, and it’s easy to start to buy into it ourselves. We solve problems and come up with ideas while showering, while strolling around the block, or even while dreaming, and it creeps into our heads that we should be spending all our time doing those things. My sensitive artist brain won’t produce its art if I just sit at a desk all day!

Let’s get one thing straight: You are not a cow. You do not get to stand around transmogrifying the mysteries of the universe into delicious art-juice that some nice farmer gently squeezes out of you. I hate to break it to you, but you are the farmer, and it takes a lot of work to run a farm. There are cows in your head, and you’ve got to take care of them. You have to feed them right, you have to milk them, you have to process and pasteurize and package and ship the milk. Every day.

It doesn’t matter how many long walks or showers or dreams you have if you don’t ship the milk.

Why We Need Project Management

Ok, enough with the cows, let’s get down to brass tacks. In game development, we’ve got teams of people working across multiple disciplines over months or years on large, complex, ever evolving projects. Picture the results if we had no method of project management. What if we just had a project and a due date? How would we know what we could get done in that time? How would we know if we were behind or ahead of schedule? How would we know what to work on every day?

In our studio (and a lot of other software/game studios) we use a method called Agile software development with scrum. I can’t claim myself to be an Agile expert or evangelist, and I’m not going to be writing a comprehensive guide to Agile development. There are already entire books on the subject, and it’s mainly focused towards software development, not graphic design. Instead, I’ll be talking about the parts that I have found to be beneficial to my process as a designer.

Breaking Down a Project

Hopefully, as a designer, you already have the ability to define the scope of a project. That is, everything that needs to get done. It might be a logo. It might be a logo and a website. It could be a logo with a website, exhibit, video series, poster, whatever. Already we are starting to break the project into more manageable chunks.

This is a good start. Something like “make a logo” is still too big, though. We need to break each of these down into bite-sized chunks we’ll call “tasks.” For instance, making a logo could be broken into: Research audience and competition, create mood board, sketch ideas, develop three possibilities, finalize best logo, and prepare final assets for delivery. It’s important that each of these tasks are not so small as to be useless, but small enough that you can walk through the whole task in your head, imagining everything you’re going to be doing to get that part done.

Estimating Your Time

Once you’ve broken all the parts of your project into tasks, you need to estimate how long each task will take to complete. This is probably the most difficult step, but also the most important. Time and project scope are inextricably linked to each other. You can’t change one without affecting the other, and you can’t really know how much you will be able to get done without knowing how long it’s going to take you. Estimating time is a valuable skill that comes with practice, so do your best knowing you don’t have to be right on the money, and that you can tweak your estimates later. If you’re not sure how long something will take, be pessimistic in your estimate. If it’s a quick task, estimate in intervals of 15 minutes, and after 2 hours you should round up to the nearest half hour or even hour. If a task gets to be more than two days’ worth of work (16 hours) I take that as a sign that it needs to be broken down further.

It All Adds Up

Now that you’ve got all of your tasks estimated, you can add those estimates together to find out approximately how many hours the entire project will take to complete. Figuring how many hours of work you complete in a week, you can tell about how long it will take to complete the project. If you find that the project is going to go over the deadline, you will have to adjust time by adjusting scope. Look at your tasks and find which features you need to cut to deliver your project on time. Resist the urge to convince yourself you can pull it off if you work 80 hour weeks, or just do everything twice as fast as usual. You are a human being, and you have a number of hours you can effectively work each day before you start to ruin your life. Be honest about your capabilities and your work will be a joy instead of a nightmare. We are breaking down the work so that you don’t have a breakdown, got me?

Something to keep in mind when you’re looking at your estimates and the deadline is that you should leave a good amount of wiggle room. Know that things will go wrong. You might get sick, your car might break down, your computer might explode. Also, you will want to go back and improve or polish parts of your design. You aren’t going to simply tear through the project and call it done. Design is an iterative process, and you are going to reflect and adjust your course as you go. How do we manage this? Collect tasks into what we call “sprints.”

Sprints

A sprint is a level of hierarchy between tasks and the whole project. They are usually one or two weeks. I like one week sprints because it allows for faster iteration. Basically, you start the week by planning your sprint. Pick which tasks you’re going to complete in the sprint, again keeping in mind how many hours of work you will realistically be able to get done. This is a commitment as much as it is a goal. It’s ok to push yourself a bit if you know your limits, but you should be realistic about what you can accomplish in a sprint.

Keep Your Priorities Straight

It’s important to prioritize your tasks when you’re deciding what to tackle first. You should tackle the most important, hardest, and riskiest tasks first. If something is really risky or difficult and could turn into some huge disaster, it’s better to find out at the start than to have it blow up in your face two days before the deadline. Also, by tackling the tasks that are most important to the core of the project first, you will leave the least important things to be cut if you run short on time towards the end, and your overall project won’t suffer as much.

Reflecting and Adjusting Course

When the sprint is over, take some time to reflect upon it. Did you have trouble completing all the tasks in time? Or did you finish everything with a ton of time to spare? This is a great time to reexamine your time estimates if you are consistently overestimating or underestimating tasks. Maybe your velocity (the number of hours you actually worked in a sprint) is not as great as you thought it was, and you need to put fewer tasks in your next sprint, or even look at cutting scope. Also, take what you learned and make any changes you need to make to the project. If you need to go back and do more sketches for your logo, make a new task with an estimate, add it to the project, and adjust accordingly. If revising your sketches now means that you won’t have time to finish a video at the end of the project, you can figure that out now and decide if it’s worth the trade-off.

Similarly, if you decide to skip a day of work to watch a season of Downton Abbey or something, you are cutting features from your project. Realize that you don’t get that time back. Every lost work day cuts a chunk out of your final product.

If you’ve done a decent job at estimating your hours and you’ve been realistic about how much work you can get done in a week, though, you will be right on target. You won’t have to worry about whether you’re going to finish. You will just get to do what you (hopefully) love to do. Make good things. Know when you can take a break from making good things. Get some sleep. Be happy.

What Will You Do Today?

So you have your project, you have your tasks and estimates, and you’ve got your sprint planned. You’re ready to start your workday. At work we have a quick, informal 15 minute meeting called a “scrum” wherein everybody working on a project gets together, tells everybody else what they did yesterday, what they will do today, and if there’s anything stopping them from getting stuff done. This is a great way to keep everybody in a team on the same page, and helps people communicate any issues that they might otherwise forget about. Like, “Oh, yeah! Judy, I need those art assets so I can finish the encyclopedia pages today.”

What you did yesterday and what you will do today. Even if you are not working in a group, you should start your workday writing these out. It’s a great way to create achievable short-term goals for yourself and also reflect on your progress. Some people procrastinate because they’re not sure where to start, they don’t know what they should do. Figuring out what you’re going to do that day is easy because you already have a prioritized list of tasks you plan to complete for that week. As long as there’s work to do, there’s no wondering how to move forward.

Log Your Time

I’ve stressed the importance of estimating your time, but it’s equally important to log the actual time it takes to complete your tasks. Seriously, get a timer, and write it down. Check and see how your actual time compares to your estimates. I write this stuff down in my sketchbook every day, and it’s amazing how much more in-touch I feel with my work when I track my progress this way.

Remember that time and scope are connected, and you need to have a firm grasp on the time it’s taking you to move through the project (your velocity) in order to know what kind of scope you can deliver. This is also how you see how many hours of work you actually complete in a day, which will help you plan sprints and entire projects more accurately.

That Is All

After exploring the bad work habits we pick up in design school and the unrealistic expectations that cause us to procrastinate, we finally took a look at how to manage a project. I’ve always loved design, but learning these project management skills has helped me love it more. By structuring the process, it’s helped me to be more present, more aware, and more relaxed in my work and life. I can say that working this way has absolutely made me a happier person and a more competent designer. I’ve seen too many designers get overwhelmed and stressed out by big projects, so I hope that by sharing what I’ve learned, some of you will successfully banish the painful parts of doing what you love.

On Procrastination and Project Management in Design (Part Two)

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:20:00 -0500

In Part One, I discussed how the unstructured process taught in design school encourages waiting until the last minute and eventually conditions students to procrastinate. This time I’m going to touch on the fear of finishing.

The Most Important Part of Design

I’ve often heard that the most important part of design is the thinking that goes into it. Or maybe that it’s the details. Or was it the research?

I’m here to tell you that it’s none of those things. The most important part of design is finishing. If you don’t finish, nothing else counts. You could have notebooks brimming with brilliant ideas, stacks of research, and rooms wallpapered with moodboards, but it doesn’t count until you Make A Thing.

Fear of Finishing

Finish. That’s a scary word. It carries an idea of perfection, that nothing could possibly be added or removed, that the process of creation has ended and that only then does the project release you to move on with your life. Thinking about a specific project, you might have a vision of what finished means, or worse, a vague idea with the hope that you’ll know finished when you see it.

So you go through your process, searching methodically for perfection, chasing this mirage of being finished. Then you see that deadline looming on the horizon. The deadline doesn’t care if you are finished, the deadline won’t wait for you to reach nirvana. The deadline marches forward, unrelenting. It will arrive whether you are finished or not.

That’s when you freeze up. You could get your project done before the deadline arrives, but it won’t meet your expectations of finished, and that’s scary. You’ll have a half-formed freak of a project left haunting you, like a scar on your portfolio. A black mark on your reputation. So you push it out of your mind, you distract yourself with something else.

Your Own Worst Critic

It’s really a fear of disappointing yourself. There’s a vision in your head of what you believe you are capable of, and if you can’t hit that mark, you don’t know how to cope. It’s easier to withdraw completely than to let yourself down. Sometimes the deadline comes up and smacks that fear right out of you, and you scramble to put something together at the last minute. Sometimes you just let the deadline blow by.

Feeling terrible about yourself yet? I know I am. Let me tell you a story.

Quality VS Quantity OR Learn To Suck

There was a pottery class. The first day, the teacher split the students into two groups. One group had all semester to make one pot, the quality of which would determine their entire grade. The second group was told to make as many pots as possible. At the end of the semester, the teacher would put their work on a big scale, and their grade would be determined by weight.

At the end of the semester, the students that had focused on quantity had created far better work than the students who had tried to make one great pot. While students on Team Quality were researching and theorizing about pottery, students from Team Quantity were getting their hands dirty actually making things, failing, learning from their failures, iterating, and naturally learning and improving their skills.

In order to improve at anything, you have to suck at it for a while. Sometimes a long while. That’s pretty much the definition of improvement; you sucked more last time, and you’ll suck less next time. You get better by doing this over and over and over and over…

Redefine Finish

So how do you finish over and over if finishing is such a scary idea? It’s time to change the way you think about finishing.

In software development we have a different word. We don’t finish something, we ship it. We get it out the door, we get it into people’s hands. Perfection doesn’t even enter into the equation. It needs to work, it needs to be a viable product, but it doesn’t need to be perfect to ship.

If a product needed to be perfect to ship, there wouldn’t be a new iPhone every year. Hell, there wouldn’t be an iPhone at all. Imagine all the Apple engineers toiling year after year to improve the resolution of the screen, adding cameras, changing the materials, updating the software, but never shipping because it’s never perfect.

In order to ship, you have to decide on a project that’s good enough, knowing full well that you will do better next time. In fact, the whole point of shipping is to stick your flag into the ground and say, “Today I have gone this far. Tomorrow, I will be up there.” You can’t plant that flag if you don’t ship.

Breaking It Down

So here we are, another long-winded essay, and I’ve yet to tell you anything useful or applicable about project management. We have laid an important foundation here, though. We’ve explored how a lack of structure in school has rewarded waiting until the last minute, and how unreasonable expectations of perfection create a fear of finishing and hinder your ability to learn and grow. Now that we’ve identified and isolated these problems, we can learn to deal with them.

So why have I broken these ideas apart into smaller posts instead of delivering it all in one big essay? Well, a core idea of the next topic is breaking down big projects into small, manageable pieces, and what kind of person would I be if I didn’t follow my own advice?

Next time we’ll get our hands dirty and talk about project management. And then we will be finished.

Part Three can be found here.

A trowel for a game about gardening.

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:04:41 -0500

A trowel for a game about gardening.

On Procrastination and Project Management in Design (part one)

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 10:11:00 -0500

A lot of graphic designers I know believe they have a procrastination problem. Having worked in the design world, gone through design school, and now having entered the realm of game development, I’m convinced it’s more a lack of project management education in the curriculum. In this first part I’ll be exploring the bad work habits we pick up in design school. Later, I’ll delve into reasons why we procrastinate and what I’ve learned about project management from making video games.

The Design School Process OR How I Learned to Wait Until the Last Minute

As a graphic design student, you learn to work within a certain process. Usually you are given a task (make a brochure, a logo, etc.) and you develop a brief taking into account the target audience, the client’s needs, whatever.

Modern graphic design tools (read: The Adobe Suite) are complex, but allow for even a moderately practiced user to bang out finished work within a span of a few hours, depending on the complexity of the design. This means that once a student gets a handle on the software, the actual execution of the design is one of the easiest and shortest parts of the process. If you have a solid concept, you can wake up early, throw together an Illustrator file, print it out on the school’s laserjet and have it ready for an 8am class.

But why would a design student wait until the last minute to do this? Well, because the hard part is coming up with that concept. We are taught that our first ideas are the most cliché, that we must perform exhaustive research, paste together elaborate moodboards, and fill our notebooks with hundreds of thumbnails and doodles. Once you have properly filled your soul with information and inspiration and plumbed the depths of your mind for that wonderful, original concept, you can sit down and actually make the damn thing.

Unstructured Process Breeds Procrastination

Now, I’m not here to demean the process. The process is still vitally important. The thing is, if left unstructured, the process conditions you to procrastinate. Imagine you have a project and a due date. You know that the design process is the most important part, and that the longer you spend ideating and refining, the better the final product will be. So you are trained, project after project, to spend as long as possible in the undefined wibbly-wobbly creative zone so that you’ve got the best possible idea that the time constraints will allow when you actually execute the design at the last minute.

The Successful Procrastinator Meets Real Life

Many design students are extremely successful when they work like this, and most design school projects are small enough in scope to allow for this unstructured process to succeed, which reinforces the wait-until-the-last-minute behavior. The problem is, when you need to tackle a bigger or more complex project, this behavior will destroy you. A poster or a logo might be relatively easy to execute once you have your brilliant idea. A multi-page website, though? A full-fledged identity, complete with standards manual? A magazine? An exhibit? A video series? A video game? That wibbly-wobbly creative zone process isn’t going to serve you well. You need structure, or else you’re going to wind up with terrible compromises, all-night crunches, and blown due-dates.

Stay Tuned

In design school you learn a lot about the process, but very little about how to work, which is critical when, you know, you want to do work in the real world. So how can you develop a healthy, more structured process if you don’t know anything about project management? Next time I’ll start talking about procrastination and the fear of finishing, and what I’ve learned from making video games that will help improve your work and life as a designer.

Part Two can be found here.

Part Three can be found here.

50,000 red LEGO bricks.

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:36:07 -0600

50,000 red LEGO bricks.

A little planetoid made in Blender.

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 18:46:12 -0600

A little planetoid made in Blender.

Learned how to make 3D type in Blender, made a little homage to...

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 11:20:50 -0600

Learned how to make 3D type in Blender, made a little homage to film noire titles (and Dribbble).

Typeface is Lavanderia from Lost Type Co-op.

Learning Blender, practicing with some low poly landscaping in...

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:52:53 -0600

Learning Blender, practicing with some low poly landscaping in the style of Geo a Day.

So, I make video games for a living now. How about that? Anyway,...

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:34:56 -0500

So, I make video games for a living now. How about that? Anyway, here’s a hot little toggle button from my first iPad app.

Hey there, i found your lumpinstein on a friend's facebook as just a link to the picture and no source, so i posted it on my tumblr because i am so deeply in love with it. I just found you yesterday and have now content sourced/linked to your blog. If you want me to delete it, i totally understand, just let me know!

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 07:56:06 -0500

No worries, share away! That’s what it’s for. I don’t make money off this stuff, I have a job for that. Lumpenstein is just a good idea and an afternoon spent doodling. It makes me happy that other people dig it, so share all you want. As for credit, it’s not a big deal for this one. Thanks for asking, though, you kind-hearted internetizen!

What is your policy on prints of your art? I'd like to hang your Lumpenstein art in my room but didn't want to print a copy of it myself without permission!

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 14:36:51 -0500

Go ahead and print/share/remix Lumpenstein. Since it’s a derivative/transformative work, I won’t be trying to turn any profit from it. That’s just how I roll. It’s a gift from me to you, internet! I’m just happy that I had an idea that other people are enjoying.

I was at a Roy Lichtenstein exhibit, and I realized that his...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:02:36 -0500

I was at a Roy Lichtenstein exhibit, and I realized that his paintings are much more entertaining when read in Lumpy Space Princess’ voice. And then, of course, I had to make some fan art.

I call it Lumpenstein.

Determination.

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 13:56:07 -0500

Determination.

Father not-in-law kicking off a triathlon.

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 13:39:55 -0500

Father not-in-law kicking off a triathlon.

I was asked to design the letter “O” for some kind...

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 11:26:36 -0500

I was asked to design the letter “O” for some kind of literacy campaign alphabet project, so I made this Blade Runner inspired neon ring thing.

Nice smokestacks.

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 20:58:45 -0500

Nice smokestacks.