The things I watch on repeat (and what they did to my work)

I don't have a good answer when people ask what I do outside of work.

I don't build furniture. I don't run. Most of what I do is watch how other people made things, and then watch it again.

For a long time I didn't think of that as anything. It was just what I did at night. But lately I keep noticing it showing up in the way I design, so I wanted to write it down.

What I actually watch

Making of documentaries from Disney and Pixar. Devlogs from people building videogames. Concept artists showing how a character went from a sketch to a final render. Videos about how an architect got to that specific shape for a building. Cases of graphic design that ended up in real life, on a package, on a sign, on something someone throws away.

None of it is really about the finished thing. It's about the part before, when they still had options.

I watch the same ones many times

This is the part that sounds strange when I say it out loud.

The first time I watch something I only see how it turned out. The second time I start noticing that there was a decision in there, that they had two options and picked one. The third time I notice the thing they left out.

Nobody explains this stuff directly. They don't stop and say "this is why this is better". You have to catch it in the small choices, and I never catch it on the first pass.

Then I started building

Electronics is the one where I actually use my hands. I read, I try things, I get something to work, mostly by trial and error.

I like it because it doesn't care about my intention. It works or it doesn't, and it tells me right away. That's a different kind of feedback than design, where something can be wrong for months and nobody says anything.

Around that time I also got into reading physics and math again. Not for anything in particular, just going back to concepts I had seen before and reading them slowly.

And then something started happening that I didn't plan. I began using that when I design. If I'm making something move or bend, I go look up how it actually works instead of guessing.

Right now: a portal

I'm building a site for a hackathon and I wanted it to have a portal in it. The science fiction kind.

So I've been checking that the physics holds. That the distortion looks like distortion. That the curvature makes sense. That if there's an object in there, it has depth.

Which is a little funny, because a portal doesn't exist. There's no reference. I can't compare it against anything.

But I think that's the point. You already know how light bends and how things fall, even if nobody taught you. So something invented can still feel wrong. Not because it isn't real, but because it breaks something you already knew.

The part I don't have figured out

There are two things I want from that portal at the same time. I want it to distort the way I want it to. And I want the curvature to make sense.

Those two don't always agree, and I still don't know where the line is.

The animation people seem to have solved this a long time ago. Squash and stretch, anticipation, exaggeration. None of it is accurate and all of it looks more real than the accurate version. But I think you can only do that if you know the rule first.

So maybe taste isn't something you're born with. Maybe it's hours of watching people decide, plus knowing enough about how things work to break a rule and know why you're breaking it.

I'm not sure yet. I'll know more when the portal is done.