People don't seem to understand the difference between stealing and copying.
When you copy something from someone, you have a copied object and the other party has the original object, or maybe vice-versa.
When you steal something from someone, you have the stolen object, and the other party no longer has what you stole.
This is why stealing an idea is so fundamentally different and difficult. Proof of possession requires you to take that idea, and manifest it into the world to the point that there is no doubt that that idea is yours and yours alone.
A task made more Sisyphean, because furthermore all ideas exists in context and as derivatives of ideas past and present, local and global. To carelessly claim ownership of an idea is like asking for a deed to a wave in the ocean.
The distance a good idea asks you to travel is far, as great ideas are reflections of you. It represents everything that you are; memories, talents, goals, dreams, and identity. In detail, story and purpose the expression and therefore existence of an idea is an embodiment of your past, present and future.
Hello, my name is Josh Leong and I'm the product designer and CEO behind GRID. I have a fairly strange design process that people have asked me about so I thought I'd write a little about it.
The product of my design process is this, a full motion graphic video, narrated, designed, and written by yours truly. Some designers express their ideas in photoshop-mockups, but for me personally I'm at my best when I can simultaneously weave function, story, emotion, animation, visuals, and interaction together at the same time. I don't sketch or draw much as i'm also not a classically trained designer, my education lay more in the realm of business and computer science. So for the most part if I'm not traveling I go straight to Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects and if it's a particularly tricky interaction like messing with speech to text input I might code something up.
Those are technical details however, what I wanted to talk about was how that output actually gets created, which is really just a story about having good ingredients and a Chef crazy enough to put them together.
The first key ingredient is music, the song you hear in the movie is called “The Best Paper Airplane Ever” by Lullatone. This one caught my ear as I was walking around San Francisco, I would imagine that it was overlaying and soundtracking the particular adventure I was having that day, it was a particularly special emotion that I knew I wanted to capture and build something around.
Inspired by the first ingredient and quite literally looking for a reason to make a movie, I become much more receptive to the second key ingredient, stories. My friends went on an actual camping trip to Point Reyes which I got to observe from them going from planning & organizing the trip, to them going, capturing it, enjoying themselves and then talking about it on their return. After which I began to reflect on trips that I have been on in recent times, and other stories I've heard over the past month, I was able to start on collecting basic material to weave another story together.
The third and final key ingredient is just knowledge and experience. I worked on Excel 2013, I've been collecting not only anecdotal and personal stories but also doing a tremendous amount of user research. Many of the data structures that you see in the movie actually come from other cases such as wedding planning and etc. Also much of the interactions in the movie are tempered by experience in trying things out and prototyping constantly. By far the most boring and difficult ingredient to acquire, in fact it's less of an actual ingredient as it is a grueling process of slaving in a kitchen for the formative years of your design life.
Inspiration, Life Material & War Experience are the three key ingredients that get mixed into this idealistic dish, with supporting ingredients and techniques such as features, visual style, animations all with the goal of creating a product that speaks to that emotion I felt, to how we use things in our lives and what we need, and how it will get there.
As a bonus here is the music “The Happiest Person I know” by Silas Hite that inspired me to come up with the input system that we use in GRID called Maestro.
