There’s so much shit that I’m into. Writing, music, design, art, coding. None of it’s simple, though I suppose there isn’t anything that is. Once you dive deeply into some thing, you come to understand the nuance of that thing, and you never look at that thing the same way again.
I was in a band right out of high school. We were a three piece outfit; I was lead singer and guitarist. We weren’t too bad either. I wrote most of the songs. We played a bunch of shows. And ultimately, we didn’t work out. From there, I turned to electronic music production, which is an entirely different monster. Producing drums alone is a job and a half, though as I progressed in my work, I came to thoroughly enjoy building drum tracks and became the one who would handle the drums on collabs. But this was only one facet of an entire process.
Bringing a track to completion involves understanding a metric fuck ton of nuance in mixing and mastering. I would write great songs that sounded like absolute shit when I played them back in the car. So I began to learn how to mix. And that helped, but what I would end up with was a shit track that sounded great. It took me awhile to arrive at a point where I began to feel confident with the work I was producing. Mixing is no simple thing. Mastering is no simple thing either, but if you have a solid mix to work with, mastering becomes far easier to work through. Get the mix right, and everything else falls into place.
But you gotta get the mix right. And that takes a metric fuck ton of nuance.
I love coding. I love building shit. However, there’s so much to building shit. It’s not enough to write the code to make the shit. Wanna build an app? You’ll need to learn a coding language (JS, TS, Python, etc.). You’ll need to learn version control (git). You’ll need to learn how to navigate a terminal. You’ll need to learn any number of support tools and languages to get your app up and running. What platform will your shit live on? You gotta test the features. You gotta audit the code for bugs. You gotta squash the bugs. Then you gotta deploy that shit. Then you gotta manage the deployment. That shit takes work, and a metric fuck ton of nuance in terms of how to approach the actual writing of the code.
Building apps is no simple thing. It’s fun and interesting, but far from simple. This is why devs make the big bucks.
Writing, design, and art are no different in terms of the effort required to understand the nuance necessary to do any of these things well. However, I think what sets these three apart from coding or mixing is that the quality of each is determined by the taste of the consumer. You can build a shitty app, and as long as it works, people will use it. Google’s a great example of apps that work but have shitty design; people use them despite that. There’s no accounting for taste. Google uses the same fucking color scheme for everything and everyone just defaults to using their software. The design’s shit but the app works.
Google understands this and capitalizes on it. Ditch the design budget; throw everything into research and development. However, Google may be one of the few companies that can get away with this.
Most companies go to incredible lengths to get the their branding right. And what is branding?
It’s fucking design.
Good design is rooted in recognizing a metric fuck ton of nuance. From color scheme to various design elements and style, there is no part of this process that can be done mindlessly if you want it done well. From Xbox controllers to book covers to craft beer cans, nuance in design surrounds us in damn near everything we use. They tell us not to judge a book by its cover, but publishers spend a fuck ton of money on designing those covers so that you’ll do exactly that.
There is nothing simple about design. It’s entirely steeped in nuance.
Scroll through a handful of sets on this site and it’s easy to be captivated by the quality of the work. The photographers for SG are so damn good, you don’t notice how good the photography is unless you’re actively paying attention to the photography. The vast majority of these sets are incredibly well done, and the models are just so damn gorgeous in each set! But do you have any idea what it takes to have this kind of mastery in light writing? That’s right! A recognition and understanding of a metric fuck ton of nuance.
What this ultimately comes down to is that I have some very expensive hobbies. And what I mean by “expensive” is the cost in time I spend learning how to do them well. There’s nothing simple about any of this shit. It all requires an understanding of a metric fuck ton of nuance.
