OCDD – Obsessive-Compulsive Designer Disorder

NOTE: this is a repost of a really old post I had lying around. This works better than actually writing new content for now.

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A debilitating disease is spreading, liable to infecting a creative near you with it’s poison.

Yes, I refer of course to OCDD – Obsessive-Compulsive Designer Disorder.

You can probably even recognise the early-onset symptoms:

• unreasonable or excessive demands on own skills
• worry over seemingly insignificant details
• pedantacism
• perfectionism

There is no known cure.

The effects of OCDD can be managed though, with careful treatment of the symptoms. Many different methods of dealing with the symptoms exist, but your creative would probably benefit from the one that has been deemed most effective by study of creatives in the wild.

Acknowledge that your creative has OCDD – and then leave it alone to work until it has some work it has finished.

This method ensures that your creative is aware of your concern, but is also left to work in it’s optimal environment. Under no circumstances should you offer to ‘clean up’ the creative’s natural environment, nor suggest any changes that could adversely affect it. (An example of this is opening the curtains.)

In time, your creative will emerge from it’s natural habitat with the fruits of it’s labour. It is important to note that even if you do not like what your creative presents, it should still be praised for producing work it deemed worthy of being viewed by other people. This is a key point many owners of creatives miss, and it leads to feelings of resentment within the creative which is liable to manifest in lessened enthusiasm.

It is important to watch for the warning signs. Miss them, and you may end up neglecting your creative and adversely affecting it.

This message brought to you by the Royal Society for the Protection of Creatives, Australia.

Mobile-enhanced.

It’s an interesting side effect of my approach to work that things that may benefit others will only come around once they benefit me.

Case in point: gushMOBILE.

I recently got myself a new iPod touch. It’s awesome, but it’s not the focus of this story. Gush has had a mobile theme for quite a while now, but it has always sucked. I get a new mobile, internet-capable device, and suddenly gush gets a new mobile theme which is a vast improvement on the old one. Case in point, this one is now usable.

This tendency of mine is not a good one, but it’s one i’m looking to fix.

reworking and remoulding

It’s amazing how often things get added to the “To Be Done (for whatever reason)” list and then never actually get followed through or completed. In some sad respects, various items on my list haven’t even made it past the theoretical stage at this point.

It has been a full year since my last set of posts here, as evidenced by the lack of major updating since then, it’s no surprise that this is one of the items on my TBDFWR list that never made it past consistent practice.

Nevertheless, with a yawning gap of time opening up in front of me until university resumes classes, I can only theorise on what my summer holds.

Things I know i’m doing:

• Enjoying the company of good friends.
• Sleep

Things I want to complete:

• Play more games (PC preferably but not opposed to consoles [apart from the fact I don't own any])
• Create a game (in either Unity3D or in the UDK for Unreal Engine 3.0 (you don’t have to know, suffice to say “shiny!”)
• Work with various community groups to enhance and provide the methods for communicating their needs and aims.
• Sit down and actually write a blog.
• Write a proper resume and curriculum vitae.
• Upgrade gush to vBulletin 4.0
• Have a proper university break that also allows time for the beach.

Can anyone see the flaw in this yet?