Three modalities of creativity I am keen to explore: dirt, screenshots, monk-like.

1. Dirt, metaphorically

Take something worthless (e.g., literal dirt, metaphorically non-working code), put great effort into it, get something nice in the end:

Sometimes things don’t go as planned and the product that comes out the other end is really not what I wanted or needed. At that point, the right thing to do is usually to start over from the original specs (and possibly the wrong code) and restart the spec and design process. Then implement again from scratch. There are absolutely projects that I’ve run through this process five or six times as I figured out what I actually wanted or the right way to explain what I was going for.

Dorodango is, essentially, the process of polishing a ball of dirt into a beautiful, high-gloss sphere. The result is genuinely amazing.

— Jesse Vincent, Dorodango

2. Screenshots

Knowledge workers are all taken with our text files, spreadsheets, or design files. We invent ideologies and workflows, have very specific opinions about how to do this thing, know all the keyboard shortcuts, organize them just so, or not at all!

And then, there are eccentrics who have these giant collections of screenshots, thousands of them. Of order screens and login flows and memorable conversations and receipts and profound quotes on the web and sports scores and seventeen iterations of one document/screen/logo.

During the opening of the conference, Omar honed in on the subversive nature of the screenshot. In popular computing, it circumvents the app siloes that define our contemporary digital ecosystems. A screenshot doesn’t need a log in, bypasses DRMs, and is interoperable between practically every single computational device. Even in the “high-culture” of computing, where text is dominant, screenshots prove subversive. The screenshot is unstructured information which must be parsed to offer the tidy data best suited to computer hacking. They are seen as verbose and unwieldly, despite universal adoption. The Tao of Unix is text files, not bitmaps.

— Cristóbal Sciutto Rodríguez

3. Monk-like devotion to the craft

Deep, monk-like devotion to the craft of software development and its output, the application. I love an in-depth, illustrated essay on decisions that go into a carefully considered application.

The initial vision for Paper was simple — build something that has the core tricks of iA Writer, but in a package that feels even more elegant and minimal

…Have people noticed the effort? Most — probably not… but some have.

— 11 years of Apple text editor solo dev

I don’t have a big connection to make here! Deep attention to detail, knowing when to polish and when to start over, trying to make different media work – that’s it. Make interesting things, interestingly.