Late last night my wife & I found ourselves in the depths of the Sunday Evening Blues—staring out towards the expanse of yet another week of work & school, without much differentiation from most of those before & after it. I’m keenly aware of the following fact, of course:

And yet, oof… it’s okay to acknowledge the petty creeping of tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow. The ennui will pass—as everything always does—but it’s real.

This reminded me of the penguin heroine in what was one of our favorite books to read to the Micronaxx back when they were actually micro, A Penguin Story by Antoinette Portis. Ol’ Edna is always searching for The Something Else—and she finds it! I came across this charming little narration of the story, and just in case you too might need a little avian encouragement—well, enjoy:

Or as I said upon launching the first-ever Photoshop public beta, all those years ago:

“Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.” – Goethe

I’ve been thinking of this trenchant observation a lot lately.

Loving this creative by @Ogilvy .
“The more you connect, the less you connect with others,” the important campaign created by @Ogilvy (Beijing) for the Center for Psychological Research in China. pic.twitter.com/y2HVhXf12F

— Will Finch (@willfinch) December 6, 2022

As I’ve noted previously, this essay from Slack founder Stewart Butterfield is a banger. You should read the whole thing if you haven’t—or re-read it if you have—and care about building great products. In my new role exploring the crazy, sometimes scary world of AI-first creativity tools, I find myself meditating on this line:

Who Do We Want Our Customers to Become?… We want them to become relaxed, productive workers… masters of their own information… who communicate purposively.

I want customers to be fearless explorers—to F Around & Find Out, in the spirit of Walt Whitman:

Yes, this is way outside Adobe’s comfort zone—but I didn’t come back here to be comfortable. Game on.

I, along with a number of colleagues, had the opportunity the other day to speak to Rachel DuRose of Insider (formerly Business Insider) about why we work at Adobe—and why a number of us have returned. In case you’re interested, here are my summarized comments:

——-

“I joined Adobe in 2000. I was working on web animation tools and after a couple years on that, a job opened on Photoshop. I ended up going to Google in 2014 because they were making a huge push into computational photography.”

“I guess a key difference for me between companies is that Google got into photography kind of as a hobby, and for Adobe it’s really the bread and butter of the company. Adobe people tend to come to projects because they really care about the specific mission — people tend to commit to a project for quite some time.”

“I came back in March of last year because I saw what Adobe had been doing around AI and machine learning. I was excited to come back and try to navigate that emerging world and figure out how we make these things useful and meaningful to a lot of folks and also do it responsibly so that it aligns with our values.” 

“In my first tenure and in my return, imaging and the creative parts of Adobe remained the bedrock of the company identity, so I think that’s a through line. I guess the contrast, if there is one, is that now the company has expanded into all these things it really didn’t do before.” 

“Every job is called ‘work’ for a reason. It’s gonna be challenging and frustrating and a million other things, but the caring part, I think, is the distinctive one. I’m cool with people swearing because they care. I’m cool with people who are unreasonably committed to getting something right, or going that extra mile.” 

“Stay hungry, stay foolish…”

Indeed, but sitting in any big fat company, where any of one’s individual efforts is likely to have only a passing impact on the macro trends (growth, stock price, compensation), can be like living in Shawshank: even when free to do otherwise, you keep asking permission, even to pee.

On my way through the in door at Google, a burned-out PM who was about to depart told me about learned helplessness & Brownian motion (think dust particles in a room—energetic, but not actually going anywhere). “You know that guy Reek on Game of Thrones—just psychologically broken? Yeah, that’s what you become here.” Comedic exaggeration aside, he wasn’t wholly wrong.

All this comes to mind as a friend at Google shared a cautionary tale by Søren Kierkegaard that Thomas J. Watson, CEO of IBM in its glory days, used to tell:

There was once a wild goose.

In the autumn, about the time for migration, it became aware of some tame geese. It became enamored by them, thought it a shame to fly away from them, and hoped to win them over so that they would decide to go along with it on the flight. To that end it became involved with them in every possible way. It tried to entice them to rise a little higher and then again a little higher in their flight, that they might, if possible, accompany it in the flight, saved from the wretched, mediocre life of waddling around on the earth as respectable, tame geese.

At first, the tame geese thought it very entertaining and liked the wild goose. But soon they became very tired of it, drove it away with sharp words, censured it as a visionary fool devoid of experience and wisdom.

Alas, unfortunately the wild goose had become so involved with the tame geese that they had gradually gained power over it, their opinion meant something to it – and gradually the wild goose became a tame goose.

In a certain sense there was something admirable about what the wild goose wanted. Nevertheless, it was a mistake, for – this is the law – a tame goose never becomes wild, but a wild goose can certainly become tame.

If what the wild goose tried to do is to be commended in any way, then it must above all watch out for one thing – that it hold on to itself.

As soon as it notices that the tame geese have any kind of power over it, then away, away in migratory flight.

Or as Frederick Douglass said, “I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

Now let’s go into the weekend, sticking it to The Man with some Arcade Fire.

They heard me singing and they told me to stop
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock

[Via]

I had a long & interesting talk this week with Erik Natzke, whose multi-disciplinary art (ranging from code to textiles) has inspired me for years. As we were talking through the paths by which one can find a creative solution, he shared this quote from painter Chuck Close:

Chuck Close: I thought that using a palette was like shooting an arrow directly at a bull’s-eye. You hope that you make the right decision out of context. But when you shoot it at the bull’s eye, you hit what you were aiming at. And I thought, as a sports metaphor, golf was a much more interesting way to think about it.

If you think about golf, it’s the only sport—and it’s a little iffy if it’s a sport, although Tiger made it into a sport—in which you move from general to specific in an ideal number of correcting moves. The first stroke is just a leap of faith, you hit it out there; you hope you’re on the fairway. Second one corrects that, the third one corrects that. By the third or fourth you hope that you’re on the green. And at one or two putts, you place that ball in a very specific three-and-a-half inch diameter circle, which you couldn’t even see from the tee. How did you do it? You found it moving through the landscape, making mid-course corrections.

I thought, “This is exactly how I paint.” I tee off in the wrong direction to make it more interesting, now I’ve got to correct like crazy, then I’ve got to correct again. What’s it need? I need some of that. And then four or five or six strokes, I hopefully have found the color world that I want. Then I can sort of celebrate, you know, put that in the scorecard, and move on to the next one.

Bonus: “Is that a face made of meat??” — my 11yo Henry, walking by just now & seeing this image from afar 😛

Do you ever play the game of “Feature or Bug?” with your own characteristics? Being tall, for instance, could be a feature until you’re crammed into a tight airline seat.

For me it often comes down to wildly ambitious, encompassing visions. They’re exciting, they’re inspiring… and then I lose folks. Time & again I’ve found myself talking with a colleague, getting them excited about some idea or other—but then I go blasting off in my one-man rocket ship, watching through a lonely porthole as their smile & energy fade, then disappear under a plume of my conversational exhaust. As my old boss Kevin observed the other day, “It’s not leadership if no one follows.”

I still want to take people to the moon, but lately, to borrow a phrase from Chris Rock’s character Cheap Pete, I’m first trying just to take ‘em to El Segundo. It’s a little like this…

After our Scottish Buddhist friend Bruce Fraser passed away ten years (!!) ago, a group gathered in SF to celebrate his life. Graham Nash, if I remember correctly, described the moment of clarity Bruce had that convinced him to change up his life. For some people that “moment” is vague, but for Bruce, Graham said, it was very clear: he was playing “That’s The Way (Uh Huh Uh Huh)” in a crummy Scottish bar band, and between “Uh” and “Huh,” he said, “I’ve gotta get the f*** out of here.” 

Pay attention to these moments. I’m just sayin’. 🙂

Why am I here? Why do I deserve to exist?

Yes, I’m one of those young guys—now not so young, as I watch the last grains swirl through the hourglass of my thirties—who’s always been given to asking these questions. You know those guys, the ones to whom people give Rainer Maria Rilke quotes on cards for high school graduation. It’s all kind of tedious—but fine, so be it. Aspire to the words of Chuck D: One in one million residents/Be a dissident/Who ain’t kissin’ it.

Professional I’ve tried to translate my hierarchy of values like this:

• I want to be a good man (to lead a just, meaningful, and useful life)
• …by helping others
• …by unblocking the light of their creativity & expressiveness
• …by building software they love.

Now, though, that’s at best what my lawyer friends might call “necessary but not sufficient.” I catch myself wandering far out on the leaves of that tree, far from the trunk, wondering why I don’t get closer to the action of being good & helping others.

None of this is new to me. Three years ago, for example, I spent a little time in a Guatemalan orphanage, hoping to help others a bit and at least improve myself, deepening my perspective and gratitude. But damn if it all isn’t some abortive feint—some vanity inoculation against the sense of having to do anything material. Back I come into my regular world, which takes hold, submerges me… Never again is what you swore the time before.

But not this time, mofo (I say to the mirror). Not this time. I am not going to blow my life.

The search is on.

I just re-read Slack (and Flickr) founder Stewart Butterfield’s essay from two years ago (right before Slack launched), and man, it eats like a meal. If you care at all about product development, you should read the whole thing. I jotted down a few of my favorite observations & am sharing them here:

• [O]ur job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms. … [This] something we all work on. It is the sum of the exercise of all our crafts.
• We should be working carefully from both the product end and the market end: Doing a better and better job of providing what people want (whether they know it or not); Communicating the above more and more effectively.
• We are setting out to define a new market. And that means we can’t limit ourselves to tweaking the product; we need to tweak the market too.
• Innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave.
• What we’re selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build & ship.
• We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams.
• The best possible way to find product-market fit is to define your own market.
• Who Do We Want Our Customers to Become?… We want them to become relaxed, productive workers… masters of their own information and not slaves… who communicate purposively.
• Be harsh, in the interest of being excellent. [Or as I’ve always put it, “I swear because I care.” —J.]

My central existential tension living in Silicon Valley, as captured by Leonard Cohen…

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch.
He said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?” 

…and voiced by Willie Nelson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZutD7E-toOI 


[YouTube]

Wise words for makers of every stripe.

[Via Peyman Milanfar]

What the hell am I doing at Google, anyway? Why am I here, specifically?

I like what Neven Mrgan had to say about an ambitious screenshot/OCR app (emphasis mine). The last paragraph resonates with what we’re trying to do here (composing movies, stories, and more that you can edit):

Now here’s where magic meets honesty: OneShot shares its uncertainty with you. If it’s not totally sure about which article you want to highlight, it has you choose it.

Easy enough for you take it from here, right? OneShot tried, and shaved off some work from this task, and that’s helpful enough. If it got it wrong, oh well, no harm done. My instinct says Apple wouldn’t ship a feature like this—they’d want it to work 100% of the time, or not at all.

I’d like to see more software try to do a good job of a fuzzy task, let you help it with the last mile, and give you a fallback option. That kind of magic can be more delightful than behind-the-scenes, guess-and-stick-with-it magic we’re often promised.

I love this bit from Khoi Vinh, occasioned by Google’s recent Smarty Pins map/trivia game:

Apple fans like myself often criticize Google for doing things that Apple would never do, and Smarty Pins is a prime example of that. Aside from being an unfair criticism, it’s pointless. The fact that Google endeavors to produce silly things like this is on the whole a positive thing, I believe. It’s acting according to its own compass, which is what every company should be doing.

At Adobe I used to say, “We’ll never out-Apple Apple. We’ll never be more mysterious & magical, so let’s be ourselves—conversational and down-to-earth.”

Or as Steve Jobs said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Thus I’m delighted that in iOS 8 Apple is adding the ability for apps to provide one another services. The news reminded me to re-read what I wrote three years ago when requesting just this:

Poor integration leads to bloated apps: if jumping among apps/modules is slow, customers gravitate towards all-in-one tools that offer more overall efficiency, even if the individual pieces are lacking. […]

Remember the promise of OpenDoc? Despite all its well documented faults, I still love the idea of assembling a dream team of little parts, each the best in its class for doing what I need. […]

Why did Photoshop 1.0 succeed? It offered excellent (and focused) core functionality, plus a simple extensibility system that enabled efficient flexibility (running a filter brought no need to save, navigate, re-open, etc.). The core app could remain relatively simple while aftermarket tuners tailored it to specific customer needs. 

With this support coming to iOS (and already on Android & Windows), I think all our lives (as app users) and my life (as an app developer) are about to get a lot more efficient & interesting. We shall see.

tl;dr: In text apps just as in photos & video, limiting choice gets more people across the goal line.

Lately I’ve had text-upon-image apps on the brain. Notegraphy promises “beautifully designed writing;” Pictual offers to “turn your words into visual statements; and Overgram can “add beautiful typography to your Instagram photos.” They’re all nicely done, but how many people have cared?

Compare that to the highly popular Secret (current $40M valuation) and Whisper ($24M in funding). Both share captioned images anonymously. Secret only lets you set text (no control over font or positioning), then use a colored background or image. Whisper looks at your text & offers matching images, then offers a rudimentary set of fonts & the ability to slide a text block.

In both cases the essence is to make something that you’ll want to share, without giving you enough creative options that you’ll get lost en route to doing so. You can’t go too far wrong or be judged for not getting the look “right.” Immediacy whomps visual control. It’s Instagram all over again.

By the way, speaking of fun text/image projects, Nathan Ripperger makes fun art from the weird things his kids say. To help parents do something similar, JibJab has released Kid Quoter, but I haven’t seen it take off. See also Linzie Hunter’s Spam One-Liners, “a gorgeous, colorful set of hand-lettering based on spam email subject lines in Linzie’s inbox.”

It’s really been an extraordinary week, with such a crazy-generous outpouring of support from friends, colleagues, and readers. A guy could get pretty high on his own supply. That’s why I like remembering bits like this (quoted once previously):

In 1983, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy summarized his mission as follows: “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip’.”

Note to self: People say you’re great; now let’s show, not tell.

“And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here…?”

And if you ask me, the answer will sound much like this podcast I did with Marc Edwards, Rene Ritchie, and Seth Clifford. I enjoyed wildly digressing with these guys about my semi-bizarre path to this gig, the challenges of building Photoshop & new apps, and more. I hope you enjoy it, too. Towards the end I talk about the possible mobile future of Photoshop & Lightroom.

I love this short reflection from Steve Jobs, reflecting on technology, impermanence, and legacy.

It’s funny to hear him describe the Mac as being on its way out in 1994. By returning to Apple he invalidated his own prediction, and now at WWDC we hear Apple talking about a naming scheme for OS X for the next ten years. Funny old world. [Via]

Upon joining Adobe our designer Dave pinned up a simple list of five rules. We consult them frequently while crafting our new app:

As you may well know, it’s much easier to meet some of these qualities while sacrificing the others than to maximize and balance them. We’ve already killed off a number of concepts that fell into the “Pepsi Challenge” trap (very appealing at first, but quickly cloying). But hey, if this stuff were all easy, it wouldn’t be fun, and they wouldn’t need to pay us to do it.

Once you skip past the hand-wringing & platitudes, Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have some interesting things to say:

Complexity is the coward’s way out. But there is nothing simple about simplicity, and achieving it requires following three major principles: empathizing (by perceiving others’ needs and expectations), distilling (by reducing to its essence the substance of one’s offer) and clarifying (by making the offering easier to understand or use).

It’s interesting to hear that Trader Joe’s curates their selection, offering 1/10th the product diversity of other supermarkets (though that still means 4,000 different items for sale) and produces twice the revenue per square foot as Whole Paycheck. Such an approach has worked wonders for Paper in beating back the paradox of choice. [Via Dave Howe]

While building new apps I keep thinking of the quote attributed to the CEO of Black & Decker: “People don’t buy our tools because they want one-inch drills. They buy them because they want one-inch holes.”

As technologists we think about the guts of things, but customers often favor the simpler thing (Twitter, Mac OS Spotlight) over the more conceptually powerful one (Google Wave, WinFS). My career’s full of this: advocating general, interesting stuff (e.g. HTML layers for Photoshop) only to get pantsed by simpler approaches (just tweaks to the existing PS vector tools).

I’ve heard that Amazon starts projects by writing a press release of what features the user will see, then working backwards to check that they’re building something valuable. We’d do well to do the same. As Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

Seven years, 3,395 posts, 27,286 comments… It’s been quite a ride since I started blogging here seven years ago today. The blog has been a terrific way to share ideas, engage with customers, wrestle tough issues, and occasionally start (well-intentioned) trouble. Thanks so much for reading, writing, and even ranting. I couldn’t do it, and wouldn’t do it, without you.
Have I learned anything interesting along the way? Nothing too profound, I think: Love it, or don’t bother faking. Respect your readers’ time & attention, rewarding steady visits while omitting anything you wouldn’t want to read. Be loyal to them & they just might return the favor. Don’t try to be a kamikaze social media hero over weekends & holidays, unless you absolutely must. Remember that your writing, even your comments, lives forever, and someday someone (let’s say a lawyer) might present you with an inch-thick printout (flattering!). Like I say, you’d better love it. But remember, too, how insanely lucky we are to have the time & tools to connect like this, and hopefully to illuminate one another’s lives just a bit.
Thanks again, and please keep those cards & letters coming,
J.
[From the archives: Turning 1,000]

The stars aligned Monday, and two of my favorite creative people, Russell Brown & Panic founder Cabel Sasser, got to meet. Cabel (who commissioned Panic’s awesome homage to 1982-style video game art) was in town for a classic games show, and as we passed Russell’s office, I pointed out the cutout display for Atari’s notorious 1982 video game “E.T.” Russell had worked at Atari back then, and I rather gingerly asked, “Uh, didn’t that game kinda suck?”

“Oh yes!” said Russell–and thank goodness it did: if it hadn’t, Russell (and hundreds of others) wouldn’t have gotten laid off, and he wouldn’t have gone to Apple (where he met his future wife) and from there gone to “this little startup called ‘Adobe.'”

If that hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t have snatched my neck off the chopping block in ’02: I was days from being laid off post-LiveMotion, and it’s because Russell saw my “farewell” demo at his ADIM conference that he called the execs to say, “Really–we’re canning this guy…?” And, of course, had that not happened, I likely wouldn’t have met Cabel, wouldn’t have been introducing him & Russell, wouldn’t be talking to you now.

Of course, we joked, if it weren’t for the three of us talking just then, we’d be off experiencing some wonderful life-changing strokes of serendipity right now–but so it goes. 🙂

Note to self: More Demosthenes, please.

In 1983, advertising pioneer David Ogilvy summarized his mission as follows: “I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march against Philip’.”

[Via]

I’m a sucker for companionship & social pressure. I used to hit the gym several times a week with a friend, and our friendly competition left me strong & feeling great. Then he moved away and I’ve largely turned into a wad of cookie dough.

Lots of apps & services exist to help to help people stay honest & to support one another’s diet & exercise. (Peer pressure can be a wonderful thing.)  Meanwhile I’ve seen years of advice that designers should commit to making something new every day, I haven’t yet seen one that

• pings you with a daily (or weekly, etc.) challenge
• provides assets or a theme to build upon
• lets you see & comment on others’ work
• provides a rewards system (highest rank, possibly prizes, etc.)

So, hypothetically, let’s say Photoshop Touch said “Today’s 5-minute challenge: Create the most interesting thing you can using just these elements…,” let you upload your work, and then vote on others’ creations. Would you do it?  I think you might–but only if the rewards were enticing enough.  It’s like brushing your teeth, doing sit-ups, etc.: you make things part of your routine if they make you stronger, fitter, richer.  Could we help you practice your skills & become those things?

“I didn’t expect a road-to-Damascus, life-changing snap,” I told a fellow volunteer on my last morning in the country.  “I didn’t expect it–but I guess one can always hope…”

The phrase “cognitive dissonance” keeps coming to mind: How does one work half days in an orphanage full of kids lacking toilet paper & teeth, then cruise off to swim in waterfalls with 18-year-old girls? None of it makes a great deal of sense. Much in our world doesn’t.

What follows is a lumpy mixture of the life-affirming, the very sad, and mostly the totally banal.

Continue reading →

“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.” -Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist (1795-1881)

One hopes, anyway.

I dreamt all last night, as I have many previous nights, about hanging out with Steve Jobs. As usual it was fascinating, combative, funny, and enlightening. As usual I wish I could remember more details.  And as usual, I woke up, and it was just a dream.
I never did get to meet Steve. I’d see him in the grocery store or at a conference, but I never wanted to bother him. I thought I might meet him at the D3 conference, but no joy, and I made this little self-deprecating graphic to amuse my wife & friend (click to enlarge):

So it goes.
To all us perfectionists–would-be “unreasonable men”–Steve’s example was a beacon: it said that sweating “the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill ^[1]” would matter. People would care.
When OS X 10.4 was announced, some Mac engineers visited Adobe to show the new features.  One pointed at Dashboard’s analog-style clock: “Do you have any idea how hard it was,” he asked, “to make the quartz movement of the second hand measure up to Steve’s standard??”
Ironically, it was Steve’s example that caused me to pass on joining Apple. Back in ’06 Intel-based Macs had just shipped, and Mac customers were stuck with Photoshop running slowly in emulation mode. I spent all summer waging a crazy, unreasonable battle to launch the first (and so far only) public beta of Photoshop, bringing native performance to hundreds of thousands of Mac customers six months earlier than we could have otherwise. Yeah, working at Apple sounded great, but nothing was more important than seeing our mission through. The Photoshop team was willing to be crazy ones, and I couldn’t walk away from them. It remains my proudest achievement here.
I’ll close with the one mail I ever got from Steve. During the whole Flash/iPad controversy last year, many at Adobe questioned the wisdom of building iPad apps, or whether we’d even be allowed to ship them. I opted to bypass the bureaucracy & just ask the man himself. He replied,

“We’d love some kick-ass Adobe apps on the iPad… Hope this helps.”

It very much did, and I promised we would. The best tribute, the best thank-you I can devise for a great creator is to go out and create.
And so, back to that work.

Real innovation is, in case you haven’t noticed, kind of a bitch.

As a product manager I want to provide my team with really solid direction, thinking that there must be shining, slam-dunk use cases that will present themselves, rendering all debate moot.  Sometimes that happens; often, though, you’ve got to take some leaps of faith (“skating to where the puck is going to be”). By chance this week I came across a couple of interesting remarks:

The first comes from Steve Hayden, who helped develop Apple’s breakthrough “1984” commercial:

One of the many agency heads I’ve worked with over the years said, “When it’s great, there’s no debate.” I can’t imagine a more fatuous, false statement. There was plenty of debate around “1984.” It very nearly didn’t run.

The second concerns the creator of the famous James Bond music:

It’s impossible to imagine James Bond without Barry’s music, but apparently it almost happened:

Shortly after this Barry would receive the fateful phone call from Bond producer Harry Saltzman. “I got a phone call from Harry,” recalled Barry in a 2006 article in the Telegraph. “He never used to come down to the recording sessions, and he says: ‘John, that is the worst f*cking song I ever heard in my life. We open in three weeks’ time, otherwise I’d take that f*cking song out of the picture. I’d take it out! Out!’”

It’s not just that people didn’t grasp the concepts up front: it’s that even when presented with finished, ready-to-ship products that were about to become classics, they still didn’t get it.

I offer this simply as encouragement to anyone trying to break new ground.  If this work were easy, it’d be boring, and everyone would do it.

These days I’m reminded of a Saturday Night Live bit from the ’08 campaign, featuring an exchange between Sarah Palin & Hillary Clinton:

Palin: It’s truly amazing, and I think women everywhere can agree, that no matter your politics, it’s time for a woman to make it to the White House!

Clinton: No-o-o-o!! Mine!! It’s supposed to be mine!! I’m sorry, I need to say something. I didn’t want a woman to be President! I wanted to be President, and I just happen to be a woman!

I used to joke that I was largely unemployable, that my skills and ambitions are so specific that I could work at only a handful of companies, on a handful of projects*.  Sometimes there’s not much joke to it.

I didn’t come to Adobe because I wanted to “develop software,” or “work in high tech,” or “do product management.”  I came here to make Web design software suck less.  Everything else–the working in marketing, the moving coast-to-coast three times in two years, the blogging, the whole up-at-dawn pride-swallowing siege–is just a means to that end.

Why do I mention this now? It’s a note to myself as much as anything.  I’m not working on mobile software now because I want to work on mobile software per se, or to be trendy or whatever.  I’m working on it to solve real, specific problems, and to enable myself & people I care about to express themselves in particular ways.

Would it be better to be broad rather than deep, to be an MBA who’s interested in expanding markets, vertical integration, and “the art of the deal,” instead of an unfrozen caveman Web designer with an obsessive interest in graphics software?  I don’t know; maybe I never will.

“To thine own self be true.” I’m working on it.

* The night before a big demo few years ago, I had an anxiety dream in which I was being really obnoxious to my boss. Terribly disappointed in me, she said, “Wow, you were doing so well, and now… I could make one call, and you’d be product managing FrameMaker!” It was an illuminating moment: the deep threat isn’t losing my job, it’s working on something for which I lack passion.

“People pay for features because it’s easier to justify the expense. People adore polish because it makes the product feel good, and that adoration will carry you farther in the long run than features.”
— Key Photoshop/Lightroom engineer Mark Hamburg
I was drawn to Photoshop–first to use it, and much later to help develop it–because of the high level of fit & finish I saw in the application. I’ve worked on Photoshop not because I think it’s perfect, but because I’m hung up on the imperfections. (Why work on something that’s already perfect?) At root I’m a frustrated, middling Web designer who just wanted the damn software to be better.