About this Blog

There is one thing I want to make clear right from the beginning: I am not a professional designer. I never got any degree that would say something about my knowledge in design. However, I always enjoyed creating stuff that appealed to others and myself. That being said, let’s talk about this blog.

The Idea #

I think I thought about starting this blog for a long time without even knowing it. There always was a for me need to talk about something I just noticed, e. g. when I realized it took me half a minute to find the time my pasta needed cooking to be al dente. I knew there must have been something wrong about how that information was placed on the packaging and started analyzing, almost forgetting about the pasta.
That was the moment I realized a blog could be the right format to not only rant about such unpleasant encounters, but also to analyze them, to find out what one can learn from it and, last but not least, to highlight great* designs.
So stay tuned for the firsts posts to during the next weeks. If you want to be notified about new posts, there is a Twitter account you can follow and an old school RSS feed option hidden in the right sidebar.

* Of course design is a very subjective field, so “great” is meant in a very personal way.

The Personal #

As I already said, I’m not a designer. At least that’s not what I do all day. My current profession is being an iOS engineer for a 100 + people company. Before that, I studied computer science while also developing interactive digital books for children. During that time I also dived deep into photography and attended some of the university’s more creative courses about layout, composition and design.
The interest for this field showed first while I was still at school. I started enjoying the creation of powerpoint – presentations and later joined the team that worked on the school and graduation magazines. Looking back, fiddling with Microsoft Word had its good and bad: It never worked as you would expect, but that meant you started thinking about what you did and if it really was the best solution to layout a page. Only to find a workaround for that bug you just found in Word’s layout engine, of course.

The Technical #

Did he just say bug? Yes. I’m still a software engineer and I can’t suppress this background. That’s why there even is this section. So let’s talk about all that technical stuff behind this blog.
Well, actually there is not too much to say. It turned out that this old saying about software development is just too true:

There are only 2 really difficult things in software development:

1. Naming things
2. Cache invalidation
3. Off–by–one errors

So yes, naming this blog was difficult enough to just decide for a blog hosting platform and not caring about the technical stuff behind it. At least for once.

The other great thing about not caring about the tech behind?

Focus.

I can really focus on writing the stuff I want to write and how I write it.
Did you notice the correct quotation marks? The tiny spaces next to the dashes? The dashes being actual dashes and not minuses? Yes, that’s not by accident. To be honest, I always had an eye for when an apostrophe was grammatically wrong, but caring about the correct symbols and spaces is pretty new to me as well. Big thanks to Frank Rausch at this point for his great talk at UIKonf this year!

So, sorry folks, not so much tech as you expected but one important lesson: Focus on what is most important and look out for solutions that already can do the rest for you.