“You’ll figure it out.” The advice my dad gives has always been the same, whether addressing my grade school homework or paying bills after college. If I was looking for a shortcut, my dad wasn’t going to be the one to provide it.
When I was a kid it infuriated the hell out of me, but what I then perceived to be a lack of understanding turned out to be a keystone in my upbringing. As an adult, I realize the value in not receiving outright solutions, but being forced to figure things out.
Even today, when presented with a roadblock while building for the web, I am temped to get by with the help of the latest grid system, framework, polyfill, or plugin. In and of themselves these resources are harmless, but before I can drop them in, those damn words still echo in the back of my mind: “You’ll figure it out.”
I know that if I blindly implement these tools as drag and drop solutions I fail to understand the intricacies behind how and why they were built; repeatedly using them as shortcuts handicaps my skill set. When I solely rely on the tools of others, my work is at their mercy, leaving me less creative and resourceful, and, thus, less able to contribute to the advancement of our industry and community.
One of my favorite things about this community is how generous and collaborative it can be. I’ve loved seeing FitVids used all over the web and regularly improved upon at Github. I bet we can all think of a time where implementing a shared resource has benefitted our own work and sanity. Because these resources are so valuable, it’s important that we continue to be a part of the conversation in order to further develop solutions and ideas. It’s easy to assume there’s someone smarter or more up-to-date in any one area, but with a degree of understanding and perspective, we can all participate.
This open form of collaboration is in our web DNA. After all, its primary purpose was to promote the exchange and development of new ideas.
Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier “Enquire” work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.
I’m delighted to find that this spirit of collaborative ingenuity is alive and well on the web today. Take the story of Off Canvas as an example. I was at an ATX Dribbble meet up where I met Jason Weaver and chatted to him about his recent work on the responsive layout prototype, Off Canvas. Jason said he came across a post by Luke Wroblewski outlining the idea and saw this:
If anyone is interested in building a complete example of this approach using responsive Web design techniques, let me know!
From there Luke recounts:
We went back and forth on email, with me laying out ideas and Jason doing all the hard work to see if they can be done and improving them bit by bit! Once we got to something we both liked, I wrote up an article explaining things and he hosted the examples.
Luke took the time to clearly outline and diagram his ideas, and Jason responded with a solid proof of concept that has evolved into a tool we all have at our disposal. Victory!
I have also benefitted from comrades who have taken an idea of mine into development. After blogging about some concerns in regards to maintaining hierarchy as media queries are used to shift layouts, Jordan Moore rebounded with some responsive demos where he used flexbox to (re)order content as viewport sizing changes.
Similar stories can be found behind the development of things like FitVids, FitText, and Molten Leading. I love this pattern of collaboration because it involves a fairly specific process:
- Initial idea or prototype is outlined or built, then shared
- Discuss
- Someone develops or improves it, then shares it
- Discuss
- Someone else develops or improves it, then shares it.
- Infinity.
This is what the web looks like when we build it together, and I’d argue that steps 2+ are absolutely crucial. A web where everyone develops their own ideas and tools independent of one another is like a room full of people talking and no one listening.
The pattern itself mimics a literal web structure, and ideally we’d be able to follow a strand from one idea to the next and so on.
Blessed are the curators
Sometimes those lines aren’t easy to find or follow. Thankfully, there are people who painstakingly log each experiment and index much of what’s out there. Chris Coyier does this with CSS in general, and Brad Frost is doing this for responsive and multi-device design with his Pattern Library. Seriously, take a look at this page and imagine what it would take to find, track and organize the progression of each of these resources yourself. I’d argue that ongoing collections like these are more valuable than the sum of their parts when they are updated regularly as opposed to a top ten tips blog post format.
Here’s my soapbox
Here are a few things I appreciate about how things are shared and contributed online. And yes, I could do way better at all of them myself.
- Concise write-ups: honor others’ time by getting to the point. Not every idea or solution needs two thousand words to convey fully. I love long-form posts, but there’s a time and a place for them.
- Visual aids: if a quick illustration, screenshot, or graphic helps illustrate your point or problem, yes please.
By the way, Luke Wroblewski rules the school on both of these.
- Demo it: host it yourself, or put it on CodePen or JS Bin for others to see.
- Put it on Github: share and improve with the rest of the community. Consider, however, that because someone puts something on Github doesn’t mean they’re forever bound to provide support or instruction.
This isn’t a call for everyone to learn everything all the time, but if you’re curious or interested in something, skip the shortcut and get your hands dirty: sketch, prototype, question, debate, fork, and share. Figuring these things out on our own makes us valuable contributors to the web – the thing that ultimately we’re all trying to figure out together.
Comments
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03/12/2012
Hey Trent,
What a wonderful piece that feels very apt for this time of year. You hit on lots of important points, one of which was about gaining a better knowledge of the materials we work with in the form of tools like plugins and frameworks.
I liken the blind usage of such tools to someone handing a professional skydiver a backpack and telling them “I packed your chute for you buddy!”. It’s crucial to know the contents. (I know can be guilty of this).
As you mentioned by understanding, contributing to and improving upon the tools, ideas and things we make as a community, things work out for the greater good.
I regularly think how lucky we are to live in an age where we can easily seek input and guidance from makers the world over; where products can be improved over any physical distance by a meeting of minds that doesn’t require the participants to be in the same room. This sets us apart from makers of the past, imagine how they would have fared and improved lives had they had such a tool at their disposal.
Like your content choreography article (thanks for mentioning my rebound!), you planted the seed – I hope people take home this message and figure things out together in a time where it is so easy to collaborate with each other. We are very lucky.
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04/12/2012
Fantastic thoughts here, Trent. I particularly love the collaboration pattern you describe. For those who haven’t already seen it, it’s similar to some thoughts from Dave Gray’s book Gamestorming about the shape of a game (which, coincidentally, is the exact same shape of a successful brainstorm). It describes the different kinds of thinking that lead to successful ideas: opening (divergent) thinking, exploring (emergent) thinking, and closing (convergent) thinking. You can check out Gamestorming on Google Books .
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03/12/2012
I just recently forked Jordan Moore’s Palm Reader project to help me research how specific retina/high resolution media queries work on different browsers/devices. Being able to use what he had already put together and tweak it for the specific research I was doing made my testing a whole lot easier.
It does feel weird sometimes iterating on someone else’s idea/project. I always try to give credit where credit is due. I know I appreciate the same when people have iterated on my projects.
I feel that collaboration and iteration on ideas and projects with others is at the core of how we move the web forward.
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03/12/2012
I really appreciate the message of this post and I agree with Jordan, we’re extremely lucky that collaboration is so easy and that everyone can benefit from it.
However, to add to Jordan’s skydiving analogy, sometimes I (and I’m sure others like me) just have to jump out of the plane as quickly as possible and deal with any chute issues on the way down. What’s worse is that sometimes I come up with a great way to pack a chute but can’t necessarily share it with others because it was a proprietary jump.
Great read, thanks for the write-up, Trent. This is especially timely for me as I’m doing a little soul-searching to figure out how I can best give back to the community.
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20/12/2012
I think a lot of us younger developers have a fear of really contributing. We see so many wonderful open source projects moving the web forward and end up a little paralyzed. And since our clients and customers usually don’t care how we got the job done, there’s incredible temptation to apply a quick fix. And it would be so damn easy, too.
Jumping off from what Jordan said, I know there are developers out there who have never worked with vanilla JavaScript and are entirely too dependent on jQuery. Despitte all of the rich resources for learning core language on the web (including the jQuery source itself), developers can get overwhelmed and reach for the nearest framework.
Libraries and frameworks are wonderful. I know devs would have killed to have browser compatibility issues ironed out behind the scenes 15 years ago. I’ve definitely benefited from the rich web education community as a self-taught designer & dev And my endless curiosity makes me dissect every library and framework I use; learning before implementing.
We can argue that the client won’t care about how we solve problems through design and code, but we should. We should totally care if we start defining our skill set by what tools we use rather than the languages they were built upon. With the wealth of resources out there, at what point do we stop developing the web and simply produce it?
I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.
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06/12/2012
I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that the best benefit we can give and receive. And I think the web community is dangerously moving away from this potential.
I actually just wrote an article about that fact, focusing on something similar: http://bckmn.com/a-meaningful-web-through-comment/
I think that, in order to make the web a better place for our online lives, we need to not only embrace the faculties for commentary, but also discourage superficial interaction.
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12/12/2012
Hi Trent,
I agree with you, the mass community that the Web as a whole is, sharing and developing together helps keep up with this ever changing landscape.
Even criticism online can help a Designer, Developer and other creative, adapt to provide the best solution.
Nice post.
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10/12/2012
Thanks for this thought-provoking post! I have just lately started contributing code online, and think its a really exciting time. There are so many immersive tools for sharing code, designs and proofs of concept, which should really help as the pace of technology change accelerates. As we say at work, “sharing is caring!”
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04/12/2012
great article, thanks a lot
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