I’ve usually focused on the banner of a blog theme as the foundation of the whole design. The banner is the welcome mat to a site. It’s the first thing people see, it sets the tone and mood, and it works with your content to make people remember your site.
A Stroke of Utter Genius
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary… I made a happy mistake.
While working on Steph Vandermeulen’s new theme (No, you can’t see it yet), I put a section of code in the wrong place.
The result was an idea so incredible it rocked my world to the very core. It affected the whole concept I’d been aiming for on this them. It was one of those ideas where the light bulb that lit up was brighter than a thousand suns.
Things That Make You Go Hm
This happy mistake made me rethink my current methods.
A theme is just that: a THEME. Each element blends and works together to create a single whole. Whether you’re designing a blog, writing a fiction novel or creating website content, you have a single concept that binds every little element together like duct tape.
Each element must contribute something, right down to the last pixel, keystroke, or letter. Each has a purpose.
In fact, that’s the first rule of a good story, isn’t it? Never toss in a character “just because”. That character has to have a purpose or else readers become confused why the character is there in the first place.
Design is no different. When you work on your theme design, whether it’s a template you slip on or whether you’re working with a professional designer, everything has to have a purpose and make sense within the whole concept.
Big Risks Have Big Payoffs
I took a big chance while designing Steph’s theme. Even James had asked a couple of times before, “Why don’t you work on the whole thing at once?” I wouldn’t listen. I had my routine and like a workhorse plodding along day after day in the same deeply rutted tracks, it was very difficult to break that. What if I spent hours working on a whole theme design I think rocks only to have the client take one look and say, “Meh. Do something else.”
It’s much the same with James and the website copy he writes. He never submits pages of content without slipping the client the first page or two for approval before moving ahead.
The tricky part is figuring how much time and effort to gamble. Well, I live in Las Vegas and we gamble here all the time. I hit the jackpot. So did Steph, for that matter.
Taking risks and staying ahead of the others is what this is all about. It’s these gambles that make each of us what we are. It’s looking at a project and asking, “What hasn’t been done before? Can I do it? And if it has been done, how can I make it better or different?”
Ask yourself those same questions each time you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Work on the details and individual elements, but always keep the bigger picture in mind.
Harry,
All I can say is “cool”. I figure that’s how so many great things come to be – by accident (Silly Putty, for example).
-Brett
Brett Legrees last blog post..viking fridays – everything you always wanted to know about life change*
Wow…what clarity and a great way to explain the “Elephant Syndrome”. You need to create the big picture(the elephant) so you can then break it into smaller more manageable pieces. If you work in reverse you never know what you are working towards.
This post is a keeper and will certainly be read and passed on.
Love it.
Elaine from NB
Harry,
I can relate. The first thing I wrote last year was this miserable little short story. It wasn’t good enough to be folded up and put in a cereal box. When I reread it though, something sparked, and I had a new idea for a much larger canvas. The ten-thousand wasted words turned into the first draft of my first novel. And now I know exactly where it’s going. The short story was safe, the novel isn’t. Risk is good.
There’s one statement you make in this post that really struck a cord with me.
“When you work on your theme design, whether it’s a template you slip on or whether you’re working with a professional designer, everything has to have a purpose and make sense within the whole concept.”
It’s not about the flash and extraneous material on the page – in fact, as you point out, it’s about having only the material necessary to convey your message. It’s about less clutter and letting the simplicity of your work shine through. Thanks for this post.
I thought this was a good article, as it is vital to see the whole picture, and so important to give a good first impressionvery early on.
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And let me tell you: I am absolutely head over heels in LOVE with Harry’s stroke of genius! It is perfect. The happiest mistake ever made, in my opinion! When I showed my husband, he said, Wow. It looks like a —. And I said “EXACTLY!! That’s precisely what I told you I wanted, but I don’t even know if I told him that. It’s exactly right! It’s perfect.”
And it’s a huge inspiration. I’d been dragging my feet for a while but when I saw the prelim design I sat down and wrote the site text all at once. I want to get this thing of beauty up and running.
The thing is, as much as I love the design, I wasn’t paying attention, and my text did absolutely nothing to reflect its perfection. As Harry said, everything has a purpose, and everything has to meld together. The text has to marry the design, and vice versa. I can’t just stick in any old text, like that errant character, or people are going to wonder why it’s even there, when the design says something else — and better, at that.
Harry told you how to approach design. You have to approach the text almost the same way. I was focused on the details and thus failed to present the big picture of EditQuest.
Maybe James can write about this, because it’s really a good topic, the marriage of text and design. Aside from how to write good sales copy, text also has to convey mood, and not only to address the readers’ emotions but also to enhance the already great design, as the design enhances the text. My text, because it failed to keep the design in mind, will either diminish the design or let the design override it so that people love it and look at it, but don’t care what the site’s actually about.
In my opinion, neither of those scenarios is good.
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
To clarify, I was focused on the details, on writing the same way I have forever for normal business sites. I did not take risks, I did not gamble. In fact, I did worse than what I normally do: I didn’t even pay attention to the client, I was more focused on what I had to offer rather than on what their problem might be.
WRONG. Back to the writing desk, then, to be brave and daring.
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
Yes, one can very easily get carried away by detail and meander all over the place leaving the big picture to look after itself. This is a timely reminder.
Hey Harry,
I’m just working on a post that touches on these same ideas — not so much making happy mistakes as finding ways to expand creativity (and to get out of the creative ruts we sometimes find ourselves in…)
I think what is important to underline here is that there are no “mistakes”. You can experiment with different things, test them with friends and colleagues, and *then* launch it. Even then, nothing on the Internet is set in stone — if something isn’t working, you change it.
Can’t wait to see the new design you and Steph are raving about!
~Graham
Graham Strongs last blog post..Blogging Au Naturel
Hey Harry: Remember that discussion that was going on here a while ago about people thinking all you guys did was Revolution sites? That many, while individualized, were similar layouts?
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” Tony Robbins. This quote just appeared at the top of my gmail. Whoa.
You did something different. And mine looks nothing like a Revolution site, I think .
I also think this means something really huge for you guys, and I’m excited about that!
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
Sounds like a happy mistake to me. Glad you came to this insight.
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Steph,
Mine isn’t a revolution site either and looks nothing like one. It also looks NOTHING like Karen’s and I am willing to bet looks nothing like yours will.
The Pen Men are out of the box and running wild with creativity. They match the site to each person’s needs very well I think.
Harry,
I am happy for you and Steph about your *happy accident.* But I don’t really believe in accidents in that manner. I think when we are open to new experiences and willing to take a risks and chances and are not rigid in our path exciting things can happen to everyone.. It’s all out there waiting for us to grab on to if we are willing to look. You could have just as easily stuck to your plan and not even deviated from your first instinct. But you didn’t. You were open. I am excited for both of you.
Wendi Kelly- Life’s Little Inspirationss last blog post..The Habit of Winning
It was funny. A few days before Harry made the mistake, I was telling him that he should stop focusing on just the banner, a single element, and start working on the whole theme. Presenting a beautiful full blog to a client versus just a portion and asking *them* to imagine the whole loses impact.
A couple of days later, he writes this. (Of course, and claims the glory and credit for it all in true James style, a move I approve of highly) It’s kind of neat to see how it all worked out.
@ Wendi – I have to disagree. This isn’t a Law of Attraction thing going on (which I strongly feel is dangerous thinking).
Harry made a literal mistake. “Oops, misclick, damn, wrong place to put the code.” When he saw the results, he was smart enough to see the opportunities. It’s all him, not the Universe.
James,
he was smart enough to see the opportunities. = open to new experiences and willing to take risks and chances and are not rigid in our path.
I think you misunderstand what I am saying. I think you agree with me more than you think you do and I am not being clear. I do NOT believe in the Law of attraction and have posted to that effect on my own blog. The busy Bus is NOT coming. People have to be willing to put in the effort for what they want to get out of life.
But I do think that new ideas and creativity and ways that one idea could spark another are in our midst a lot of times and it takes a certian mind set and a certian willingness to be open, creative and take chances to see it when it happens. They just see the problems in life, not how the situation just sparked a new opportunity. Another person might have just been mad about making a mistake, gotten discouraged and missed the brilliance of the idea.
Wendi Kelly- Life’s Little Inspirationss last blog post..The Habit of Winning
@ Wendi – Hmm… I see what you’re saying now, and we agree more.
But I think that new ideas and creativity are not something that we need to change our mindset to achieve. I think we always had ideas and creativity, and we bog that down with other stuff that stifles it. This means we need to shed what bogs us down, which isn’t really a change in mindset. It’s getting rid of the fears that hold us back.
I think we’re saying very similar things but looking at it from a different perspective.
Well now I’m really curious about this “mistake” that caused your snowballing epiphany. Code fascinates me, and I can only imagine what sort of happy mistake took place. Maybe once the site is up you could share with the geeks in the group who just can’t let it go?
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Ooh, marriage of text and design. SO true. I’d never have come up with my tagline if Harry hadn’t come up with the Ninja Sword of Inky Doom.
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Smiling
Harry,
I can feel your excitement. Love those ah ha moments.
Can’t wait .
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Also, random note for you guys, since I clearly am incapable of getting my blog to do cool shit – the Comment Luv seems to not believe in apostrophes, which makes Wendi Kelly’s blog in particular look sort of weird. Inspirationss. Rogue Inks. BELIEVE in the apostrophe! The apostrophe believes in YOU!
Tei – Rogue Inks last blog post..Customer Service: Its Existence is a Very, Very Good Idea
@ Tei – We didn’t make that plugin, go blame the developers. You think we haven’t noticed? Take a look at what Men with Penss looks like. Hm hm?
Thought-provoking post as usual. Can’t just spend all our time looking a the trees, we’ll miss the beauty in the complexity of the forest, right.?
Cheryl
Let me just say, this really was a mistake in the purest form of the definition. I was already in the process of trying out a new idea and the fact of the matter is I put the line of code below the line I had originally intended in the first place.
This was followed by a “WtF is that? No…wait, I didn’t want that..” And then I looked more closely and said, “This is good. This can stay. Now let’s make it better.”
@Graham: There really are mistakes. The mistakes lead to the experiment. Look at all those Oops moments of some of the world’s greatest discoveries. Scientists start out looking for one thing and stumble on another.
Hm, wait, this is starting to sound like which came first, the chicken or the egg?
@Nicole: No magic code going on there. Just a hack from one part to another.
@Steph: Tony Robbins said that? I thought it was Aerosmith in “Get a Grip”
Hi Harry,
Oh, I know there are mistakes (trust me!).
I was simply saying that the article I’m working on right now is similar to your post, except that mine isn’t about mistakes per se (or perhaps it’s about making your own mistakes on purpose…)
As an aside, I am currently (for the past 30-ish years) working on a Coincidence Theory that touches on this very topic of mistakes leading to discoveries. I believe that chaos is the natural order because it causes these little mistakes that can have profound effects on a localized population or a species as a whole.
If everything was “perfect” in the natural world, it would likely die out quickly because there is no introduction of outside forces to help things grow and change. Random mistakes can (and do) inadvertently change things for the better.
(Yes, and sometimes also for the worse, depending on your viewpoint. Ever-changing viruses are not necessarily a “good” thing for human survival…)
Anyway, looking forward to seeing your mistake go live!
~Graham
Nicely done Harry! I hate thinking about the details – as you know from working with me on my new design, I do a lot with details, but that’s with the whole in mind, so to me, I’m not working on the details, I’m working on the big picture.
When I worked directly with clients as a professional organizer, I often encouraged them to get rid of things by saying “let’s get your life working so that all you need to think about is the big picture and the details will take care of themselves.”
Cheers,
Alex
Alex Fayles last blog post..Pursuing Happiness: Gretchen Rubin Interview
@Alex: Ah, but you can’t subscribe to the theory of letting the details take care of themselves either! There’s a whole other school of thought (one I learned in my study of martial arts and the Japanese culture) that says it’s the details that provide the foundation for the Big Picture. All those little pieces add up and you can’t forget them either.
@Harry
I attend to the details, but as a part of the big picture. Things out of context bore me. I can spend hours and hours on the smallest detail as part of the whole, but tell me to just do the detail without giving me the big picture and I’ll resist doing it until the death.
So when I say let the details take care of themselves, I mean do what needs doing to achieve the big picture – but focus on the end result. For my cluttered clients it helped a lot because they could look at a piece of paper, picture the big picture and know what needed to be done with the piece of paper (for example).
It’s all about semantics and playing tricks with the ego.
Alex Fayles last blog post..Pursuing Happiness: Gretchen Rubin Interview
In light of the whole, every detail counts.
That used to be my tagline for my old editing site. Editors HAVE to focus on details. The details are totally important (one comma can drastically change meaning!). BUT if we only focus on them and not at all or not enough on the big picture, the whole manuscript, all we’ll have is a bunch of perfect details that may not gel with each other and the ms as a whole. Then there’s no flow. In that case, you need balance. Each contributes to the other. A marriage of details and wholes, so to speak!
For Harry, the details are the code. The overall look and feel is the whole. If he messes up a detail in the code, something doesn’t look right. Or in my case, happily, something looks far better! The point is, we have to be willing to see both and to experiment with both. The point is not to get stuck only in the details or only in the big picture. Not to get stuck in a rut.
Harry: Well, that’s what the quote said! Maybe Robbins was quoting Aerosmith!
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
@Alex: Then we are indeed on the same page
@Steph
As a writer, I am well aware that I’m not an editor/copyeditor. This is a real drawback in the new era of “the book needs to be near-perfect before an agent will look at it” – I have typos, I have edit-widows, I have too many line breaks… The story details all work together but the format/typographical details? UGH!!!
Alex Fayles last blog post..Pursuing Happiness: Gretchen Rubin Interview
@ Graham – What mistakes actually do is jar us from our usual frame of thinking. We want X. Y happens. WTF? Oh… hm. Well, I never thought Y was possible. Y is pretty good. Onwards!
It isn’t that chaos or order affect our creativity. It’s that as human beings, we prefer patterns and schemas to make sense of events and reach goals. Remove the plan from its context or pattern, and you have something new that triggers the thought that maybe what you didn’t think you could do, you can.
A Whack On the Side of the Head (thank you, Kelly!) illustrates this brilliantly.
I’m in between Alex and Harry on this. I need to know my goal to work on reaching it – but I cannot work on the big picture all at once. So I work on the little details that I can fix right now, hoping that by doing so, some of the puzzle of the big picture falls into place without effort. But without the big picture focus, I’m lost. Seriously, big time lost.
I think for this reason, I’m able to envision things – and do what it takes to make them happen. Never lose sight, in other words. Even when you’re looking at your feet.
I just love it when things like that happen. But what really sucks is when you do something like that and then before you save it or know exactly what you did, your computer reboots or some other event happens which causes you to lose it.
Yup. Has happen to me. Yup. It sucks.
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James: I wholeheartedly agree with these last two comments!
Thanks for always letting me know when I lose sight, btw!
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
Alez: what’s hard about being an editor is finding that balance between details and big picture. It’s so easy to get stuck in rogue commas and sentence splices and forget about flow and consistency and elements of a good story: characterization, plot, setting, dialogue, point of view, etc.
The best editing takes place in about eight stages, though rarely do we have the time to do it that way!
Gotta go. Severe thunderstorm overhead and power flickering. I’m going to lose this if I don’t leave now!!
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
Sorry, I meant Alex, of course, not Alez. Crazy details. Heh.
stephs last blog post..No Lamb For the Lazy Wolf
Great post over time I have become more confident that I have hired the dynamic duo to design my site/blog. I should be getting the samples of my welcome mat soon and I cant wait. I agree with you that everything we do in our site will be for the visitors to subscribe to our free account and test our online billing solution with no risk. We need to quickly get new subscribers up to speed highlighting the benefits of our online billing solution. And encourage them to upgrade to the $9.95 UNLIMITED EasyBilling plan. That is our initial big picture then it will be up to us to continue developing solutions that will benefit our subscriber community.
As you are probably aware, likely through James muttering under his breath about duelling blogs and wildcats and comment feeds and great banners, the Lion and I are taking a serious look at our websites. Yesterday, on the boat (threw that in to make people jealous), we were talking about website Must Haves. What was absolutely fascinating was the Lion jumped in with “I want this widget and that widget, and this feature”, whereas, I couldn’t even begin to think about the gizmos and gadgets until we had a clear vision of the Big Picture. In the end, the conversation bounced back and forth between concept and detail, and by 8 p.m. (with some credit to James) we had a surprising and exciting new Big Picture that had never occured to us. End of ramble.
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One of my professors (he taught us a series of problem solving courses) spoke of “optimum sloppiness”.
A balance between being totally down in the weeds, and being at 40,000 feet.
(Something quite a few folks at The Factory could have used today, in fact.)
-Brett
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@ Urban – This is why having someone who knows, understands and cares – no matter who that person may be – matters. Even between Harry and I, we work very closely together and having two pairs of eyes on each project makes a huge, huge difference. We see things in different ways, we pick up on small nuances or various angles… it’s great.
And anyone can have this. If it’s not with a family member or friend WHO KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT AND CAN BE OBJECTIVE AND NEUTRAL, then it can be a peer, a partner, or even a mentor. I have clients who just email me to bounce off ideas – it’s all good.
@ Peter – It’s a great vision, and the excitement you have over your project is fantastic. Just keep the vision grounded in reality and work on each milestone as it comes. Little details, big picture… it’s a nice whole.
@ Steph – Luv ya, but no way are you putting me through eight stages. (Heh, we had the same storm at the same time, that was too funny).
@THE ONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT I bow down to your wisdom, oh Great One.
Urban Panthers last blog post..The evolution of dance
Some of the greatests inventions of mankind came to light because of a mistake; the microwave oven, the wheel, me….
Never be afraid to make mistakes. You never know how close you are to a success story. Whenever i made costly mistakes as a business owner, I always wrote off the expense as education upgrading for the staff. Isn’t that what learning from your mistakes is all about?
@Lion – you aren’t a mistake, darling. You are a masterpiece! (yes, you may all gag now)
Urban Panthers last blog post..The evolution of dance
@Panther: No need to bow, you are worthy of my wisdom
@Harry – Um…..I was talking to James. *chuckle*
Oh man… that’s too funny!
@Panther: I know. Couldn’t you hear the sarcasm?
@Harry – oh yes, all the way from California. Loud and clear. However, you were not the one I was sharing a long distance glass of wine with and discussing website design with. However, it is quite possible you were IM-ing with James during all this and ‘feeding’ him the information. Geepers, some friends take credit for everything, eh?
Urban Panthers last blog post..The evolution of dance
HOY!
No, seriously. Harry would not be the one to come up with some of the crazy-assed wine-fueled visionary ideas I did last night. He’d be the one to say, “You said I could do this?”
@Tei
Re: apostrophes – In the plugin options you can change the text, so I added an apostrophe in on my blog and it comes out grammatically correct now (well except for the Men With Pens’s thing but English is just too full of exceptions for easy automation).
Alex Fayles last blog post..Pursuing Happiness: Gretchen Rubin Interview
My favorite and most ironic mistake… when Alexander G. Bell invented the telephone while trying to invent a hearing aid. Instead of inventing something to help the deaf and hearing impaired, he invented something that put up a bigger barrier for them.
Kinda the same thing with email and the internet. Gave us deafies a way to communicate, but added another barrier… audio and videos without captions or scripts.
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