I’m sure there’s a great metaphor that would suit here, but I’m too tired to remember.
Sometimes you try new things and they enrich what you already have. Sometimes they lead you in entirely new directions. Sometimes they remind you why you were doing the old things to start with.
I’ve really enjoyed my journey with html. Writing semantic content without any design taught me a lot about communication. But then I reached a point of complexity where I’d need to learn lots of non-design related programming, just to build a framework. Terminal commands, and compiling builds. Lots and lots of acronyms.
The metaphor I’ve used in the past about learning digital design was of climbing mountains, only to reach the peak and discover a new and higher mountain behind it. I hiked so far that I didn’t realised I’d crossed the border into a whole different country, not graphic and certainly not visual. No layouts to sketch, only a pad full of coding notes.
Sometimes you have to pick a direction. It’s been a while between posts because I’ve been working on a very labour intensive drawing about, ironically enough, working hard. Then there was a “quicker” drawing I was squeezing in about an extra project that had taken up a lot of time.
This was a single session, no rethinking. And no ctrl-z.