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About Flush

Flush cleanses the mind and scoops up any crappy (as well as those genuinely good) graphic design ideas, notes, and thoughts.

Posts Tagged “Tweets”

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/Flush/2009/10/18

To Twitter or To Blog?

The few of you who follow this blog notice that it is not updated as frequently as it should. I know this probably falls under the “hey guys, sorry for like, not updating this blog in like, FOREVER” category, since like most people who aren’t professional bloggers, I have other things that require more of my attention.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep this blog fresh, creative, and interesting. I started this blog (and naming it so) with the intent to “dump” my ideas, or, if you prefer, throw them onto the wall, and see what sticks. Between the lack of time and the growing concern to produce good, original content on this blog, I have started to regard it as a burden. Also, I started another blog, the Experiments, to actually materialize some of those ideas. So what type of content is left for this blog?

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Posted

18 October 2009

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/Flush/2009/07/30

Testing Twitter Tools Plugin on Flush

Testing same plugin for Flush blog so that now whenever I post on Flush and the Experiments sections, a new tweet is created!

Flush.

Posted

30 July 2009

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/Flush/2009/05/20

Flash Forward – What Did You See? – ABC.com

Flash Forward – What Did You See? – ABC.com.

What Did You See? Question screenshot

As a huge fan of Lost and time travel, I sort of look forward to this new series. Saw the promo on the site (link above), and there’s also this little semi-interactive aspect to the promo, where you submit in 120 characters (sort of like Twitter) what you think will happen, or “what you see,” six months from now.

But that’s not it. In six months, they’re going to send you your “vision” submission to see if it’s true. I suppose that is perfectly planned to remind you to watch their show when it premieres in the Fall.

I didn’t submit one, or I did, but it requires me to be registered to abc.com and I just don’t really want to register for another thing online. And that might be a flaw in the campaign. No submission=no reminder to watch their show.

But I’m sure I’ll check it out anyway. Not sure if I would watch it religiously, though, because learning from Lost, I don’t like being dragged out week after week not getting answers. I’ll probably wait for the series to be over and see if it’s worth watching in a marathon style.

Flush.

Posted

20 May 2009

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/Flush/2009/05/13

Learning from TED

I sort of left out something from the monthly review that I forgot to mention. For the past month, I started watching through a bunch of TED videos at a time on the Adobe Media Player. I wanted to see what some of the smartest and and most successful people have done and can inspire me with. Some were hits, while others misses.

I am often amazed at how some of these presenters think so differently and creatively to solve their particular problems. I’m sure some of it was BS in their presentations, but the rest is quite impressive.

This evening, I watched IDEO CEO Tim Brown’s presentation on creativity and play. He explained how as children grow up, they learn to self-edit and develop judgment of their actions, thus the ability to create freely and to brainstorm diminishes.

I certainly feel that way. Based on the environment in which I grew up, it’s practically inevitable that I’d learned to be all about perfection and accuracy. But I’ve also since learned to pull myself away from that and am now finding a balance between entropy and order (this explains my equal love for visual design and programming).

At the same time, my head is constantly filling with so many ideas about everything, it’s ridiculous. For the past few years, I’ve used many tools to download those ideas, with different levels of success. Currently, I have this blog Flush, though you can tell how much success I’ve had with it as my ideas-unloading medium (but hopefully that will all change now that I’ve switched to WordPress), I have my GTD “Someday/Maybe” system that safely stores my ideas for a later time, and I have Twitter, to my followers on which I apologize, for the thoughts there are less design and more… unusual.

And now, I am working on another medium that is the most related to design, the Experiments. It’s one of the main sections of my website that I am redesigning, similar to what I’ve done to Flush, and hopefully, this will be an easy medium for me to work with and that the convenience will encourage me to finally do experiments on a regular basis. Here is a screenshot of the design I’ve worked on today:

Yes, it’s going to be blog-based, but the individual categories will be in a slightly different format. This is going to cut down on the programming but still have room for me to be creative and explore with code and design.

So with the opening of the Experiments section in the coming days, I am optimistic that I can more easily take Tim Brown’s advice to explore and to play, and to keep creativity regular.

Flush.

Posted

13 May 2009

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/Flush/2009/03/11

What Am I Doing? (Mar 2009)

Freelance

Things are going well with my freelance project. We’re pretty much wrapping up with the foundation of the site, with a few more adjustments and fixes. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to present it here with some process work.

GTD

I finally had some time to revamp my GTD system, and it seems to be working better than before. I basically digitized my projects list and actions so that they’re easier to look through (and therefore, less intimidating for me to review and organize). There are still parts of the system that I need to streamline, but things are definitely more efficient already.

Twitter

I recently started using a public Twitter account. My username is ivanwlam, and you’re welcome to follow me if you want. So far, some of the “famous” people I’ve followed include David Allen (the GTD Guy), Ze Frank, swissmiss, Armin and Bryony at Under Consideration, and TED.

Cut&Paste;

Me. Me. Me. The fact that I forgot to mention that I went to watch my friend Sam Sellers talentedly compete at the SF stop of the Cut&Paste; Competition Tour is unacceptable. Long story short, Sam did a great job and was robbed of his first prize. I love the piece he did for the first round, which was (and will be again) my Facebook profile photo.

Motivation

Something happened in the past week that retriggered and intensified my motivation to advance my career and my life as soon as possible. I can’t go into the details, but I now have a stronger desire to be independent and self-sufficient and to take control of my own life. So hopefully, in the coming months, I will have more exciting things to report.

Really Simple Designer Web Comic

Within the past month, I ended one blog and started another. Really Simple Designer Web Comic was an experiment to create a daily web comic starring Point, Line, and Plane. Every start of the day, I take about half an hour coming up with a concept and quickly draw a comic for the next day on my Wacom tablet. The idea of this project was to become more comfortable with my tablet, and I definitely am now. I ended it after two months because it was taking too much time of my day and the creative juices just weren’t flowing as fluidly as I’d like.

One Per Day

One Per Day is a much simpler project. Every day, I post about the day before, using only one word or phrase as the title of the post, and only one sentence describing the day. This keeps my post lengths short and to the point. It’s sort of a practice for me to pack as much content and meaning into one word and one sentence as I could, instead of dragging on and on about an incident (which I tend to do quite often… like right now).

The idea for One Per Day originated from a revisit to Ze Frank’s The Show, which indirectly kept a record of Ze’s personal life and experiences behind the scenes during its running. I have tried to keep a record of my life ever since I could write and had self-awareness. I used to write by hand with special notebooks and special pencils, and then switched to LiveJournals for a while, then to design blogs with monthly reviews (like this one).

But all these posts were taking too much time of my life to sustain, as I write really long posts, usually about now-apparently trivial things, and I wouldn’t want to return to them if I wanted to recall events of my life at the time.

One Per Day reaches a compromise between wanting to document every experience of my life and cutting down the number of words that I would have to read later on. One year from now, the individual events that happen every day will mean very little to me. In the end, a day is just a day, even on special occasions. What’s more important is the overall mood.

I just started blogging on One Per Day on WordPress (my new friend, perhaps my fortune cookie best friend?), and I haven’t gotten to redesigning it. But the presentation is going to be more streamlined and intuitive. Subscribe to the feed, and stay tuned.

Quotes I Go By Lately

“A day is a day. Every event, however trivial, will, by definition, influence and change the rest of my life.”

“Keep it simple (and easy), stupid.”

Flush.

Posted

11 March 2009

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What Am I Doing?

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/FLUSH/TAG/Tweets