king talk

Of all the projects we worked on here at envis precisely, one personally stands out to me. It is not our most prestigious project and certainly not the one that generated the most money. Yet it is special to me because it taught me an important lesson about the design process and about life in general. The project I am talking about is iScraper.

The idea to do something like iScraper actually came to us almost one year before it had been released. Now you’re saying: “But Phil, iScraper certainly isn’t that big a project. It didn’t take one whole year to program that”. And you are right. It didn’t. And that’s exactly the point.

Why falling in love with an idea can be a bad thing

Having an idea in your head can be captivating and paralyzing at the same time. You feel that the concept is good, that it would be a hit on the market, a great item in your portfolio, or at least a cool personal experience. Your thoughts are revolving around how great this idea is and whenever you think about it, another awesome aspect comes to your mind.

But then there’s the point where you start to think about actually putting your idea into practice. You get a little anxious (will it turn out as great as it is in my head?) and a little lazy (you actually have to start to work now). Let me tell you two things. One: it will most certainly turn out different than it was in your fantasy and two: if you stop now you’ll never get any reward for your great idea.

It’s probably easier than you think

That phase – being stuck between a cool concept and a decent reality – is what took iScraper almost a year to materialize. The funny thing about it: once we started actually working on the app (as a side project) it took us less than a week to complete it and bring it to the app store. In retrospect, we regularly laugh at ourselves for being so overly timid about firing up Xcode and getting to work.

The lesson all this told me is simple: as intimidating as a blank sheet of paper in front of you can be, waiting for a better time to start will not get you anywhere. You don’t have to fool yourself and pretend that putting things into practice is easy (few things in life are easy). But you are probably fooling yourself right now by hoping that things just magically start building themselves.

No more drama

Personally, I have no intentions to let another Project lie around for a year without even trying to put it into practice. If you don’t have any time left to do it, chop off that time in the concept stage. Conceptual stages almost always last too long and more importantly, you’ll learn much more on how to improve something conceptually when you are actually building it.

Do you have some idea in your head right now? Then close the browser, put on some decent background music and get going! (And, perhaps, tell us about it in the comments)