Being positive when speaking to the team is so important - especially when you're about to get the product out the door.
We've recently decided to hold off immediately launching the site into public beta for numerous reasons. From a design perspective, two of the most important ones are navigation and social networking (god i hate that phrase) features. Features such as a sexy photo gallery and intuitive navigation buckets that are draggable will make it into our version 1 release. So there has been a constant (but difficult) balance between getting-it-out-there and nurturing-the-product. An odd but true analogy would be that of a mother - she wants to keep you safe but knows that the bubble-of-love-and-no-oxygen is no good in regards to a child's self-development. This is something Mark and I have been talking about for quite some time and over a month ago we decided to put the product out the door. However, it's not instant gratification, we're still polishing a few minor details and the race against time vs. quality has proven to be an educational struggle. The door is in sight.
I guess I should get to the point of why I decided to start this blog on why to be positive:
Late last night I was talking to someone on my team about detailing. When they create the flash components they should follow the photo shop file to the very last detail (that's why it is there). Specifically, if you look at the image above, there is a navigation bucket in the center of the profile, I had created a semi-transparent overlay that gives the bucket more depth and it wasn't there in the final (so he thought) flash asset. so I finished it of with a cliche ... "The Devil is in the details" and he quickly returned "The God is in the details".
Now that I think of it, he's right - details are a positive thing. I'm changing my lingo, focusing on details and quality while the stopwatch is in my peripheral vision.
