For awhile, instead of constraint systems, I thought I'd do writing systems, and it would be a series of different writing interfaces + sites. The interfaces and the presentation would reflect different writing intentions. One for stream-of-consciousness notes, one a level of polish on top of that (or maybe a level of structure), and one fully polished. The idea is to experiment with how interfaces and presentation can make expression easier.

Scrawl is a version of the unpolished app and so far I would say the experiment is going OK? It is easier for me to write here knowing the expectations I have set for myself is that it will be unpolished. It will be interesting to see when/if I structure this stuff up into something more polished. I might need to make some sort of external commitment (maybe a talk?) to make sure I get that done at some point.

One piece that is not in place yet is a system for creating sketches or graphics along with this content. I would like to make an app where you could switch into drawing mode at a similar fidelity to the level you're writing at. That's partly what some of the constraint system drawing apps could become -- you could write a paragraph, switch to drawing mode, and a keyboard-editable canvas would be dropped in. There too, I would try to productively limit options so that you have what you need to get a concept across visually, but not to fiddle beyond that. Draw quickly, and switch back over to writing. The idea is to keep you in flow. (It might be a keyboard-based diagram-ish thing or it might be that you can switch to free-hand drawing and it's just the stroke is big enough to convey that this is a rough sketch.)

I'm going to keep experimenting. I'll keep running scrawl and see how that feels. I'll think about what it could look like to take some of these scrawl notes and structure them up. And I'll keep experimenting with the drawing tools at constraint systems. And maybe at some point they'll merge.

I think I know what branding is now. Mostly I've been thinking about interfaces lately, but as we rethink the Fast Forward branding to better fit within Cloudera, I've been thinking again about just what branding is and does. Part of my recent thoughts are based off Ben Pieratt's Pre-Brand concept and discussing the idea with some co-workers.

I'm especially thinking about this slide, which diagrams how a start-up may disregard several early identities before settling on a stable identity. The diagram is missing some things that I think are implicit in the rest of idea, but not drawn out. I think the diagram should be more zig-zaggy, and the branding is a marker for where the group wants to go. And it travels along the path towards the idea in that brand for a while, before reorienting towards a different idea, discovered during the work on the previous. Maybe sometimes the course is reversed, but mostly it's probably a zig-zag, where you keep moving in one general direction even as you zig-zag to get there.

Writing that, it's fun to see how much the idea of a 'problem space' has influenced my thinking. How much I tend to see things according to that lens now.

But the thing I want to emphasize, when I look at the proposed pre-brand process, is that the three developed concepts are not just things that might or might not fit. They're looks at what a start-up could be. They're all illuminating different positions within a problem space, and because the start-up being made is moving and developing, they're going to influence that development just by being known and seen.

Of course the brand here is just one aspect in the multi-dimensional stew of how the start-up is going to develop and what it is going to be. That course of development is being pulled along by a lot of other forces, but the brand influences some of those directions.

An early brand is a cultural marker for where you want to meet your users and audience. It stakes out a place for the company in relation to other markers.

I think the new thing that I am starting to believe is how important the brand can be to the start-up itself, to the people working there. In early days, it's probably more important for them than the audience. It can be a reminder as you're doing the mundane, everyday stuff, that this is all working towards something bigger. The brand can be a visual slot for the workers to put all their associations and aspirations for what the work could be. I think this makes me feel better about the usefulness of branding, although of course in that function it could be put to good/mixed/evil use depending on the work.

Scrawl is a new project where I try and write my notes quickly, without much editing. Eventually I hope a lot of this will feed into more polished writing elsewhere. I've been thinking about doing this for a while. Lately, I've been excited about some of the work I've been doing with Constraint Systems and some of the connections I'm making between ideas in my head, but I want to do a better job of exploring some of those ideas with other people. And I'm pretty sure that means writing.

I have some other places for writing, but for a while I've been playing with the idea of a site where the stated purpose is unpolished notes. It's an opportunity to try out some of the constraint design concepts I've been thinking about. The basic idea is that by providing a constrained tool, you free people to express themselves more because you can't distract yourself with formatting decisions. This is closely connected with an idea of staying in flow.

So for this site the posts are run off text files. There's no headings, and there's basically just paragraphs (it actually uses the 'pre-wrap' whitespace setting to preserve the formatting from the text file, which leaves open some opportunities for stuff like formatting a basic text list). There are no images. I can put in links using markdown syntax. I want to write basically stream-of-consciousness and see how things develop. Files are titled according to the date and "hour quarter", where the day is split up into 96 (24 * 4) hour quarters: as shown here.

Hopefully, this serves as a sort of companion to my feed. I think my feed has weirdly been one of my most successful product designs, and that is almost all down to constraints. Specifically, how the constraints make it easier and clear for me to post. One screenshot (or GIF) plus text. A few times I added the ability to do video or quote, but those options are mostly unused now. The goal above all was just to do something where I post. The syndication to Twitter and Mastodon have also been helpful for getting feedback from others. I should probably set up a similar system here. Anyway, I think one of the main things lacking in feed has been context. It's fun to post little cryptic messages, and not needing to explain the background of everything has certainly made it easier to post, but I do want to do more writing and thinking through of my ideas. So now there is scrawl, which is a kind of variation on feed.

All of this stuff is exploratory and provisional. One thing I am pretty sure of, though, is that making different parts as new, separate projects, that live in their own repo and then get a fun subdomain is a great way to do side projects. It hits the right spot for me of forcing me to get it into a releasable state but not a perfectly polished, final state. This is one thing, it's here, I might do a different version but it will be something else, not an update to this one. There is a definite influence there from the idea of immutability in programming and stuff like immutable deploys in Zeit's Now. One of the things I definitely want to write about here is how programming concepts are influencing how I think about design and just process in general.