See anything incongruous here? Look to the right. Down, down, stop. That orange and white icon, the thing that’s supposed to represent the iPod—what’s it doing with a scroll wheel?

Anyone who’s not been living in an Antarctic ice cave knows what that logo means. I think it’s incredible that Apple was able to simplify the image of their (previously) flagship product to a few simple shapes and make it instantly recognizable. And I understand that the iconography for that button had to stand for more than just music, since it also is the gateway to movies, audiobooks and podcasts. So it makes sense, despite the iPhone’s distinct lack of an actual scrollwheel, to use the universally recognizable iPod logo.

What I wonder is: When Apple moves to an entirely touch-screen line of hardware for the iPod, and scrollwheel iPods are a thing of the past, will the icon still be used? Is that icon burned into our collective consciousness as the symbol for “handheld media player”? If so, that’s a pretty remarkable accomplishment on Apple’s part.

Are there other symbols out there that have outlived the form factors they used to represent?

Between spurts of swimming, eating and putt-putting, this weekend was spent mostly reading. Sarah and some friends and I headed up to the peaceful confines of Devil’s Lake State Park, in what’s turning out to be an annual summer tradition. I spent the time doing what parks are designed for: devouring a good book. This year, I picked up Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.

Tharp is a choreographer by trade—one of the most famous working today. Yet for the sake of this book, she’s simply an artist. Choreography just happens to be the form of expression she’s chosen to get her creative energies out in the world. She also happens to be a compelling writer, and despite sprinkling her essays with stories about ballet and Barishnikov, she remains completely accessible to the dance-ignorant. Which serves her greater point, which is that creativity, whatever form it takes, is something earned through hard work and habit, and not some magical spark bestowed on the lucky.

This is somewhat antithetical to our preconceptions about creativity. Creativity is often framed as the outcome of serendipity touched by the spontaneous bolt of inspiration. Tharp doesn’t deny this, but points out that the best inspiration comes to those who’ve put themselves in position to do something with it. It’s about getting your tools ready and keeping your mind sharp and attacking the canvas over and over again until finally finding something that clicks. At first this will take a while; hopefully with practice, the duration between first draft and final version will shrink.

Tharp trots out dozens of ways to get yourself into the creative habit. (So many, in fact, that by the end you wonder if she’s just throwing out as much as possible and hoping some of them stick. A small quibble.) A few lessons stand out for me. The first is that you’ve got to give yourself room to fail. Success can’t happen without it. (cf. the tagline of Matt’s great fortuito.us blog.) Most people prefer to do the failing in private, which is fine, but it’s gotta happen somewhere. I hear this lesson a lot, and it resonates, and I think my confidence in my abilities would greatly increase if I started to heed it.

The second addresses a problem that I’m sure many designers would love to have, but which bogs me down: It’s great to plan, but it’s dangerous to overplan. I definitely overplan. I’m good at it and I enjoy it, and that allows me to easily fall into the habit of doing too much planning and not enough doing. The overplanner is doubly cursed: first we never get anything done, since we’re spending all our time figuring out how we’re going to do it; then, when things don’t go exactly according to plan, we get stifled by inflexibility. I need to remember to loosen up.

The third lesson is not something explicitly mentioned in the book, but comes more from the experience. While I was reading, I kept a pencil and open notebook next to me, so I could scribble down any ideas as they came to me. By the end, I had filled three pages of my Moleskine. Some notes were lessons from the book. Some were applications of the lessons to my business. Some were seemingly random ideas about various endeavors I’m currently juggling right now. I say “seemingly” because I hadn’t planned to think about how to organize my guest room, or what to do the next time I set up a blog for a client. These ideas came to me because I had set up the mechanism—an inspiring book, in a relaxing park, with time available to daydream—and given myself a place to collect the ideas as they came.

(photo by Rocketlass)

It’s easy for me to get overwhelmed by work, bury my head, and steam ahead. I need to be careful about this. Tharp’s book is a good reminder to give my mind room to breathe and play, and to do it habitually. The planner in me deserves it; the artist in me demands it.

I went several months after starting the business without a business card. While it’s easier these days to get by without one—any web developer worth half his salt should be instantly Googleable—it does become an issue when someone asks for your email address or website and the best you can do is tear out a blank corner from the Reader and scribble it out on that. Or worse, ask for one of their business cards and write your info on the back. Baaad form.

But then the trip to SXSW appeared on the horizon, and I knew business cards there would be essential. It’s a form of social currency there to measure how stuffed with cards your ID badge is, and I didn’t want to be one of those guys who only received, without something back to give.

I wanted to do something clever with mine, but without sacrificing functionality. I found a useful list online by the Scobleizer, where he lays out eleven elements of good business card design. While I don’t think the eleven would all work together in one card, there was certainly one or there two to build a design on. The one I found especially compelling: number eight. “Put your picture on it.”

There’s one distinct subset of the population that’s famous for putting their pictures on their cards, and while I have some measure of respect for Realtors, I certainly did not want to be mistaken for one. If I was going to have my likeness on my card, it was going to have to be many steps away from a Sears Portrait Studio shot.

My first inspiration came from a slick illustration that Sam had done of himself. I loved the two-bit look. I fired up iPhoto and Illustrator and went to work. I found the perfect photo rather quickly. It was a shot, from my wedding, of me talking on the phone in the hours before the event started. I liked the way I was looking off camera. The only problem was that when I converted it to a line drawing (involving a confusing array of Photoshop filters and Illustrator tricks that I won’t go into now), you could still tell I was on the phone. Here’s the before and after. Notice how I made myself ever so slightly more smiley.

Erasing my arm and hand was no problem. It was the reconstructive surgery on my face that had me stymied. No Illustrator whiz am I. I dug back in and hunted around for something that I could patch in. The best I found was a shot of me in roughly the same position, but looking the other way. It was close enough that a little flip and reshaping and I was able to put together a vectored FrankenSandy.

After deliberating about the type treatment way too much, involving several design-wise friends all who gave me differing opinions, and pushing myself to the edge of the printing deadline, I was ready to head to the printer. And this was the best part, and the biggest reason I went for a two-color design: I was getting these babies letterpressed. As a birthday/new business gift back in the fall, Sarah had given me a gift certificate for 500 letterpressed business cards, to be done by our friend Stacey Stern, of Steracle Press, who did all the letterpress work for our wedding invitations. I picked the paper, sent her the file, and a week later, one day before heading to Austin, I picked them up. They were as great as I’d hoped.

I know the average lifetime of a business card is something less than a day. If you just count the time it’s actually looked at, we’re probably talking seconds. My hope, in designing it this way, in making it stand out a little bit more, was for those seconds to become a minute or two. If it captured someone’s eye, either at the conference, or at her desk the week after, as she was sorting through her collection and entering them into an address book, and made her remember meeting me and maybe encouraged her to visit my site and, who knows, bookmark it, then the card’s done its job.

I’ve handed out several hundred so far. Almost every time I do, it gets a second glance and brings a smile to the person’s face. Usually I get an “Ooh, that’s interesting.” Once in a while I’m asked about the letterpressing, which usually leads into a short discussion about the project. Whether any of these piques of interest have directly resulted in new work is hard to say. But if it hasn’t happened yet, I’m confident it will one day.