I’ve identified myself as an artist since middle school. Somewhere along the way, I garnered some praise from my middle school art teacher. This praise immediately went straight to my head.

When I got to high school, I threw myself into art classes. I volunteered for the art club float in the homecoming parade. I stayed after hours whenever I could. I finished projects early and then started additional work that was also completed before deadline.

I even acted like an artist. I was moody, depressed. I sought to express my supreme frustration with life through my art. I think I scared my art teacher. I’ll admit that I might have just been a teenager, but I felt like an artist.

During this formative time, I read a quote from Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” (Wikiquote) This tiny collection of words changed my life. Like a flash of lightning, I realized that creativity is more about the clever recombination of existing parts than it is the invention of something new.

I like to look at it this way. The iPhone is amazing. The iPhone is made out of materials that have always existed. Over many generations, man developed the ability to turn those materials into an iPhone, but nothing new was made.

This sounds like an oversimplification. But in many ways, it isn’t. Technically, the raw materials to create the iPhone have always been available. But you and I both know that nobody wakes up in a hut one day and creates groundbreaking technology the next.

And so it is that each of us works to carve out an existence. And each incremental improvement we make along the way is left to the next generation. And then that generation starts with where you left off, because, of course, it is silly to reinvent the wheel.

The video below is the first of a four part series. (Thank you Chris.) It is a humbling reminder that I shouldn’t “try to be original, just try to be good“.

Susan Kare made the icons for the original Macintosh interface. In this poster, she’s drawn the late Steve Jobs in her traditional bitmap style.

Lumi – Photography you can touch..

Tango-style apple icon

A while ago, I posted an article about design standards. As an example I included an image of an apple icon that I made using the Tango Desktop Icon guidelines. I had a good experience following those guidelines and still think of the Tango Icon Library first whenever I need an icon.

To show my appreciation for this great project, I’m providing the vector format of the apple icon free and open-source It should probably be provided in SVG format but unfortunately, I don’t have the time to do that. If anyone does, feel free to convert it. If you do, I’d love to post an SVG copy here too. I’m releasing this under a GPL license.

As an artist I crave this for my life. An artist’s studio is a reflection of the owner’s taste and intelligence, I tell myself. If I am an artist, I should not rest until every aspect of my life is a testament of my refined judgment and aesthetic sensibilities.

However, the sad truth is that my home and office do not even approach such great heights. In all honesty, it is nothing like this. Allow me to paint the picture.

I sit in an office crowded with boxes, boxes that overflow with unsorted papers, mail, notes, photos and more oddments. Pictures lean against the wall instead of being hung properly. A shirt hangs on the outside frame of the closet. The closet itself is burgeoning with boxes and disheveled shelves. Half folded laundry on the floor spills out of it’s container—which is not, by the way, a laundry basket but the lid of a storage box.

Why doesn’t my realty approach my ideal? Am I lazy or are there more important things than stark modernism? If I’m lazy then it’s my fault my office is in disarray. If there are more important things, then I’ve made a wise sacrifice of order for a higher cause.

Maybe it isn’t so black and white. When I moved into this new home office, I hung pictures, found and purchased new and new-to-me furniture. I even purchased new equipment to do my work. These significant investments bring me great pleasure and satisfaction, and they helped me organize my work. It wasn’t messy when I moved in—it was neat and orderly.

So what happened? Have I let down my militant guard against the non-designed life? It’s not that simple. Life is messy. Family life, in particular, is one fantastic, ridiculous, unfathomable, epic, were-you-raised-in-a-barn-!? mess.

When it’s the holiday season and you’re hosting, ‘life’ will get shoved into the home office because, hey, there is space there and we don’t have time right now to go through all this stuff.

When you have a new baby, there is an explosion of clothes, furniture and accoutrements. We have a cute little dresser that stands empty. We would love to put clothes in the drawers. Wouldn’t that be clever; to put the clothes in the drawers? But if she’s asleep we can’t get to the drawers without disturbing her. And if she’s awake then she needs feeding, changing, and care. Dresser draws are way down the list.

But I won’t give up. It is in the struggle that the man is made. I chose the life I have. And despite having clothes everywhere but the drawers, I find immense satisfaction in the living of this messy existence.

After all, this is what I wanted. I wanted a family. I wanted a wife. I wanted children. And now I have them. I have the perfect wife. I have children in abundance. And they are not orderly. I think they were, in fact, raised in a barn. But I love them.

Oh, how I love them.

Never was any man more blessed and happy than me. My wife is beautiful, caring and attentive. She is creative and intelligent. She is powerful. My children a beautiful and talented. They love me when I don’t deserve it and desire nothing more than to please me. If I get nothing for Christmas but a hug and a kiss from each of them, then I will have received far more than I deserve.

But what of my dream of the perfect home and office? Do I give up on it. No. I’ll keep working at it. I’ll spend a little less time on Facebook and a little more time on cleaning and organizing. When the clutter flows, I’ll ride the tide. When the mess ebbs, I’ll double my efforts to keep entropy at bay.

It may never be perfect. But I suspect those glossy pictures are a lie anyway. The set was probably a mess a few moments before the photo was taken. Maybe it was a mess again once the sets were taken down.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is to strike a balance between order and disorder that allows us to think clearly without being overcome by unrealistic expectations. Maybe the life well-lived is not the picture-perfect image frozen in time, but the life filled with love and peace despite it’s imperfections.

Take a look at this table, designed and printed by House and assembled by Herman Miller.

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Second, and more to do with technology than with the article itself, is their use of Twitter and Your-Own-Blog to facilitate discussion. First we had ‘comments’. Then spammers arrived and we got rid of comments. Then Disqus came and our comments came back and someone else handled the cruft. And now we can talk to each other with the tools we are already using. This is the way I would like to run comments on my site. It feels more personal, more direct. If we talk to each other through our blogs and Twitter then we are talking to each other instead of through a translator.

The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers