Dear Japan.

We’ve been in this love affair for so long now, I can’t even remember.
I was 7, when I first discovered the intense feeling of Japanese comic books, reading under my bed side lamp the not-really-suitable-at-that-age Akira. At age 10, I discovered there were more and started gulping frantically on everything I could, from Ghibli productions to low-quality anime. At age 12, I played pokemon in Japanese, and learned every single name I could. At age 13, I started to learn every word I met, and had a notebook full of them. At age 15, I officially started to learn Japanese at school. At age 20, I had my first sushis. At age 21, I worked on my graphic design diploma, only focused on japanese design. I’ve listened to your music, watched your tv show, read sociolgy books and art essays about you, learned about zen and shintô.
You’ve rocked my world for so long, I always considered you as a part of my life.

That was maybe a little stupid, a little too much, a little useless. So, at age 25, I decided to come over and visit. To finally accept that you were going to be a lot different from what I excpected. To learn and embrace what you really are. On April the 6th, I was going to meet you for the first time. For many reasons, it was one of the most important day of my life. So many things had to be done. Be sure I never felt that happy before.

On March the 11th, you blew up. Earthquakes, Tsunami… I said I wasn’t going to give up. Then Fukushima. I had to admit my defeat. I fear for you Japan, but not for your people. Because they are straight and strong, and are going to survive all this in a breeze. And yet I fear. I shiver.
I don’t want you to give up. This is so much bigger than I could ever envision. This is probably one of the most important part of your history.
Be strong, Japan. I know you will. I’ll held my breathe, with the thousands of people who met you like I did.

Lets meet next year.
Gambare!

With all my love, admiration, dedication, and from the bottom of my heart.
Zélia

PS: Please help. Give to your national red cross. even tho it doesn’t go to Japan, it’ll go to people in need.
PS2: Thanks for the following hotels for their kind words and great responses: Momiji-so in Miyajima, New Kamakura in Kamakura, and Ichinoyu in Hakone. I’ll be there in a year.

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

This 4 part documentary needs your support. See here!

Or why it serves my job better than anything else.

Have you ever considered the question you’re asked when you go through a recruiting meeting? What are your top qualities? What do you think makes you a better applicant? Most of the time, people go straight to the motivated, hard-working part. (Most of the time they also lie, just like when I ask them about what they do on the internet. Suddenly, everybody sticks to Google and never ever use Facebook. Ahah.)

Well. My top quality is that I’m very, very lazy. I’ve always been. And I’ve always found ways to stay that way. Add to that another invaluable quality: I love my free-time. So you won’t see me haunting the office late at night. If you combine those two traits, you get one result: my job needs to get done in my regular work day. Being lazy, I don’t want tasks to fill a whole day without having a few breaks. In order to accomplish this, you need one thing, again . METHOD.
My tasks are rationalized. I’ve got a very strong process that helps me get through every bumps of a project without too much pain. By the end of the day, I always know exactly how much work is left to do and how much time I’ll need to fulfill it.

Benefits for the company? Work is done on time. I’m fresh and creative on the next morning. Free time give me plenty of time to do other things. I make solutions to be more effective next time I have to accomplish this task.I do my best to achieve a goal at once, and not in numerous and laborious attempts. Being lazy makes me being efficient. Quality over quantity.

Maybe some people fin it offensive to put it this way.
But really, being dedicated to your job isn’t really the same as spending all your time in the office.  If all you do is staying late at work, and miss the outside world, you’ve lost the game as a designer. Being a workaholic is not something to be proud of. Having a fulfilling and balanced life, on the other hand, definitely is.

Dear designers I’m working with on a daily basis. (Note: I work for a webagency, where we got some patnerships over with some huge print/design/marketing agencies)

You are, at least most of you, print designers. I am, most of the time, an interface and user interaction designer. I respect and enjoy your work. I love brochures, flyers and posters  as mush as one can do.
Actually, I used to be a print designer once. Yup, I even made books. And magazines layout.

Anyway… Our usual scheme is: you design a print campain, send it to our agency and ask us to make it go digital. Which we do. When we can. It always sounds like : make this kakemono a 450 pages catalog. Now!

Actually, it ain’t that easy. Where you design for a medium everyone knows how to use, we design for mediums some people have never touched in their whole life. May they be touch screens, iPad, web browsers or software. So you send us some of your work, like a huge .EPS in 300 dpi, CMJN (yeah well, I’m not good a pre-press files myself, so don’t bite me here) and ask us to do our magic. But not touching anything. Not rescaling your insanely huge comp that will not ever fit on a screen. Not adding anything. Not even adding things like buttons, links, whatsoever. Not listening to advices on usability, accessibility, technics, or others.Well. This, actually, saddens me to no point.

I understand the visceral need to protect your perfectly executed work. I do so too. But when I call a printer, I ask him what he’d do to make my work shine even more on paper. The same applies here. We’re not here to crush your work down. We’re not here to make things “just because” we fancy them. We’re certainly not here to battle our egos. To be honest I don’t give a damn who the credit will be unto after the job is done. My concerns are the users, the results, and the goal the design must attain.

I’m sure you can understand this without having to be beaten by a baseball bat.
Love,

Zélia

Side note: This is for fun purpose only. Bitching is what life is about. If you find it offensive, just write your own complaint to the webdesigners, saying how stupid we are. Nothing can beat that. :3