#but sometimes i’m swiping on my home screen and have a moment of clarity

[hollywoodsargeant]

“i mean he’s my favorite driver but i’m not like obsessed with him or anything” then her phone looks like this

[jack-manpain-zimmermann]

On My Way Home

for @checkplsdude who is having a really rough time right now and could use some distraction

pre-zimbits slightly angsty fluff, sometime after they lose the playoffs - roughly Jack’s POV - the alternating of Bitty’s nicknames and real name is intentional and not just sloppy writing :) read on AO3

- mentions of a near-panic attack (very very brief)

- mention of Jack’s OD (very brief)

- a very sexist/phobic remark from Jack but it’s only said out loud because he knows he needs to fully address and correct it (thanks, Shits) and basically a cover for Jack not yet downloading the Emotions™ upgrade to his software

- please don’t read though if you sense that might be upsetting!

Jack awakes to a scream, or at least the ghost of a scream. His eyes fly open to take in where he’s slumped on a chair in the living room, computer screen on his lap gone black and the room dark with the blinds drawn shut.

Another scream, not heard through a haze of sleep, has Jack flinging his laptop onto the coffee table and rushing to the front doorway with lightning speed. Bittle. Outside. Screaming.

He stumbles to a halt in the blinding sunlight, blinking furiously to adjust his vision.

“Fuuuuck, Jack, what’s the dilly dally?” Shitty’s voice comes from the Haus steps and Jack can just about make out his startled and prone, half-naked form. “Dilly dally? No. Commotion? No…”

Jack zones out Shitty’s burbling and finds his breathing again at the sight of Bittle being shoved by Ransom and Holster into the tree in their front yard. He’s yelping more than screaming now and thank God. Thank God. Jack sinks onto the step one up from Shits and rests his elbows on his knees, trying to slow his heart rate.

“Dude, the fuck happened? You have a nightmare?” Shitty’s blotchy eyes are vague but earnest, reaching out a hand not holding the joint to pat Jack’s bare knee where his shorts have ridden up.

“Yeah, man, I mean no, I’m just…” Jack wipes a hand over his face and sighs. “Wanna hear something really offensive?” It’s a code phrase they use between just the two of them. He’s never this unguarded with anyone but Shits.

Shitty stretches out like a cat wearing cut-off shorts. “Fuckin-A I would!”

Jack looks pointedly over at where Bits is still wedged in the tree, striped tank top covered in leaves and his absurd shorts invisible where he’s bent at the waist, looking like he’s not wearing any at all. One of his flip-flops is on and the other is wedged down the ass-side of Ransom’s shorts.

“It’s like having a little girl around.”

Shitty’s eyes follow Jack’s to Bitty, then widen and he whistles low. “Duuuuuuuuude!” he whispers in awe of just how little he was prepared for the offensiveness.

Jack squints his eyes once and tries to trace back his thinking, the way his therapist had taught him to do when his brain supplied him with an unexpectedly terrible thought. (“Social conditioning, Jack. You can undo it.”)

“No, it’s like,” he says with deliberation, “it’s not like a girl. Obviously I don’t think of Bittle as a girl.” He notices Shitty’s posture loosen a bit once he’s said this. “But also because I never panic about Lardo like this. Or any girl. I don’t think girls are weak. It’s more like Bittle is a target and everywhere he goes someone wants to hurt him. Like he’s just constantly about to get hurt or…” Jack doesn’t say ‘killed’ because that would be indulging his anxiety to a dangerous degree.

Shitty’s expression softens into understanding. “You mean the way you see a little kid and you know all the scary, horrible shit that they don’t know yet?”

Jack nods slightly, now watching Ransom and Holster tuck leaves into Bitty’s hair and singing some ridiculous medieval-type song at him while he conducts them from the tree.

Shitty takes a drag from the joint and speaks without breathing. “Bits isn’t a little kid,” he breathes out slow and deep, “but his innocence despite knowing the world is full of fuck and shit makes him seem even more special and you want to protect him even more?”

Jack blinks. Slowly he turns one of his arms over and points directly at Shitty’s face. Shitty writhes in delight.

“I know, I’m a poet and a scholar. Anytime you need me to de-asshole your masculine thinking, man.” He sits up only to slump against Jack’s step. “Is that Enya? How do they know Enya lyrics?”

Ransom and Holster have gained passion in their singing and are making no attempt to help Bitty back down from the tree. Each time he tries to escape they push him back in.

“Git!” Bitty yells, joyful but very firmly. “Go on and git!”

This earns him his release but only because Ransom and Holster have doubled over laughing. They start playfully shoving at each other’s shoulders shouting “gyeeeiiit!” in ridiculous twangy voices while Bitty wriggles and finally falls out of the tree.

“Look what you guys have done to him,” Jack chides, extending his arm and making a beckoning motion with his hand. Bitty literally skips over to the steps and lets Jack pull leaves and wipe dirt from his clothes. His chest is rising and falling like a bellows with giddy energy but he stays still. “Completely covered in it,” Jack says in a grumble. The guys all hear the amusement in his voice as he swipes off patches of dirt stuck to where Bits is sweaty.

“Oh hey, you missed a spot!” Shitty reaches over with one hand to wipe imaginary dirt from Bitty’s ass, who rolls his eyes but is still glowing and smiling. Ransom and Holster both hoot and laugh from where they’ve reclined on the lawn chairs, egging Shitty on. Jack smacks his hand and tugs Bitty to stand closer between his legs with a comical look of disapproval at the shenanigans.

“Ey Shits, you got any more of that blunt left?” Holster bellows.

“Ey Shits can you even fucking walk, bro?” Ransom chimes in, mimicking Holster’s voice.

Shitty lets himself fall bodily onto the bottom step with a thud and attempts to rise into a dignified pose, ruined slightly by the wide berth he cuts across the lawn before finally arriving at his destination. He makes a grand gesture of placing the joint in Holster’s fingers before collapsing in Ransom’s lap.

Jack is so wrapped up in watching Bitty’s eyes squint shut as he laughs that he doesn’t register his hands still holding him lightly by the hips between his own spread legs. He doesn’t attempt to move them when he does. This is the type of moment Jack’s mind had clung to when his body felt cut off from the rest of him, lying cold and limp in a hospital bed. The feeling of innocent joy, warm sunshine, affection and belonging. Rare but crucial moments from his childhood and teens that he could summon up in perfect clarity even through the haze of the drugs. A something sweet in particular that boys like him were not supposed to experience after childhood. He knows to recognise and hold onto those moments even more now. This is the feeling that reminded Jack of all the sensations of Life. Here with his friends on a perfect early summer day, the grass grown long, laughter singing in the air like a breeze…and Bittle, who feels like a ray of sunshine caught between Jack’s two hands. Whose light never seems to age or dim no matter what happens to him. It’s no wonder that Jack had so viciously envied him that before finally accepting a share of it into his own life.

“You okay, hon?” Bits’ expression is concerned as he comes back into focus.

Jack attempts a smile and hopes his deep happiness is evident behind it. “Yeah, just got lost for a bit.” He pats Bitty’s side reassuringly, not knowing how to break the spell that’s come over him.

Then Bitty’s soft tan arms are looping over his shoulders, one smooth cheek pressed against Jack’s neck. It’s a sweet if hesitant little gesture, and Jack can feel a quick heartbeat against him for the moment it lasts. Bitty pulls back, barely looking into his face and Jack longs for the kind of easy, lingering embrace he sees Bits share with the other guys.

“Thanks, bud,” he says low and more meaningful than he intended. He ruffles Bitty’s hair with one hand and wipes at a streak of earth at the top of his cheek. “Hey, you’ll let one of us know if we ever get too rough with you, right?”

This earns him a glowing smile, the little cluster of Bitty’s slightly crooked bottom teeth showing. “Of course I will, Jack! You guys never roughhouse with me as bad as you do with each other, lord. I think I get it pretty easy.”

Jack’s brain has just begun to commandeer his hands into tugging Bittle into his lap without fully knowing why when Lardo waddles through the front doorway, balancing the biggest roll of canvas known to man alongside her giant satchel and computer bag.

“Jack…dude…little help?” she grunts out and Bitty pulls out of Jack’s grasp to let him up.

Jack shoulders the canvas like it’s an empty rucksack, remembering he’d offered to help her transport materials. He looks back down at Bitty, putting on his best stern captain face.

“Bittle! Shower. Class.”

A little thrill passes over BItty’s face before he scrambles up the steps and through the door.

Jack notes the smear of dirt under the hem of his shorts as he goes, idly regretting not seeing it before to wipe it off.

[myinterface-blog]

4 ways I’ve fucked up as a designer 😬

1. That time I got single Indonesians to hate me

When Tinder pioneered the card interface, back then it made sense to accompany the cards with yes/no buttons. Those buttons served as a backup option in case people didn’t figure out how to swipe the cards.

Tinder

A few years later, the card interface became so widespread that you could find a job or an apartment only by swiping cards. So, when I was redesigning the Home screen for Paktor (Southeast Asia’s largest dating app) in 2014, I decided to strip those yes/no buttons because everyone knows how to swipe a card, right?

I made gazillion versions, and exactly zero of them had yes/no buttons. What was I even thinking

Wrong. As soon as we rolled out the new cards, Indonesia suddenly forgot how to swipe. Wait, wut? Our AB test results were telling us that Singapore and other tech savvy markets had no problem with my sudden outburst of minimalism, but the numbers in Indonesia dropped significantly. A whole country, overnight, simply forgot how to swipe. That was the moment when many single Indonesians collectively thought “Mati aja lo, Nina”. I totally ruined their day. Pretty sure someone was minutes away from finding the love of their life, but no, Nina decided to try something cool, and effectively cockblocked a whole country. So… Why only Indonesia was affected? As it turns out, different markets are at different phases of design evolution. That means markets which joined the internet or smartphone revolution a bit later, are now going through early stages of familiarization, and can‘t simply jump into advanced concepts like pull-to-refresh or swipe-to-dismiss. It takes a bit more guidance and clear affordance to effectively communicate an action. Takeaway: When releasing one product for multiple drastically different markets, always design with the least advanced market in mind.

2. That time I created art instead of design

I used to love hamburger buttons because they’re so elegant. They manage to reduce the whole menu into beautiful three lines. However, tapping a hamburger button is like bumping a “?” block in Super Mario, since it employs the exploratory mindset “Let me check if the thing I’m looking for is hiding over here”. Also, tapping it requires you to stretch to the farthest edge of the screen. Which sounds like torture. So, it’s basically this:

In contrast, a navigation bar employs the mindset of “ok, I can see the thing I’m looking for”.

Bottom navigation bar

For bonus points, bottom nav bars are usually located in the most comfortable tapping area, so no need to stretch. I really wanted to continue loving hamburger buttons, but the facts make it hard. After extensive AB testing I realized that navigation bars will always outperform hamburger buttons, despite their aesthetic inferiority •́︵•̀ ˢᵒʳʳʸ ᶰᵃᵛ ᵇᵃʳˢ. Takeaway: Yes, sometimes uglier design can perform better. And this is the ultimate proof that design is not only about aesthetics, it’s also about usability, clarity, affordance.

3. That time I tried to design a font, but ended up with 26 circles instead

I’m a messy person. My room is never tidy. I have no idea what my desktop wallpaper looks like, because it’s always covered with piles of files. If you ever try to prank me by replacing my wallpaper, it won’t work. Because I’ll never see it. Yet, when it comes to design I’m eerily tidy in my mind. I always have sets of rules that I cannot stand to break. It’s like a weird case of OCD where I have to keep everything consistent. Very often that works out great, giving birth to stuff like this:

Rule 1. Use very limited color palette. Rule 2. Create every object using only a rounded wavy pattern. Rule 3. Direct everything at 30 degrees

Imagine if I also included triangles, and a few more colors, and the direction of the objects was random. It wouldn’t have been that impactful and simple. It would’ve been messy and chaotic. So, for illustration and most other things, blindly striving for consistency gives great results. It brings order to chaos. So this one time I set my mind on creating a geometric font that would be based on circular shapes. Halfway through, the rule “based on circular shapes” turned into “is circular shapes”. I over-minimalized the shit out of that font. I quickly realized that in typography, consistency is nearly impossible. You gotta make an occasional exception here or there. Each letter is its own story, with its own geometry and proportions. Some letters don’t even make sense! I mean, small “L” and big “I” is essentially the same line. Small “r” looks totally unfinished. And the line at the bottom of big “Q” was probably a mistake by an intern, but they went with it anyway. Having a circle in every letter didn’t work out as well as I planned. What makes sense for one letter, doesn’t make sense for another. And I was going crazy here, so for the sake of my sanity I had to forever stop trying to design fonts. Another reason being that I doubt people would find a font like this useful:

Actually, I’ve managed to nail one letter.

Takeaway: Forcing consistency is not always the best way to go. Sometimes it’s necessary to design for context, even at the price of breaking the consistency. Fonts are a good example.

4. That time I turned into the client from hell

We all know the client from hell. Ten changes per second. A severe case of tripolar disorder. A ton of emails at 3am. I thought these people are born like that. Disorganised and they don’t care. But not really.

Back to my story. I started my own side project. Completed the design. Hired a developer. Great guy. He started working and after a while he started asking all these questions. Completely valid questions, like ”Hey Nina, how do we handle this edge case?” Or, “What do we show if an in-app purchase fails?” I’ve never really thought about that. So I ended up giving quick ideas: “How about we show like, you know, a toast message. Or, make it a popup. Wait, no, popups suck. Hm… what if we dont show anything”…3 minutes later…. “Actually, you know what, let’s just go with a toast message. This is final”. And of course it wasn’t. That’s when I realized I had just turned into the client from hell. I was the guy every freelancer hates. I could almost hear the developer at the other side of the planet telling stories about me and how horrible of a client I was. And I thought “Oh, wow so this is how it happens”. Clients from hell are nothing but ordinary people who don’t have a good workflow and end up improvising a lot. I remember I skipped half of the process designers usually do, so I ended up with unfinished flows, half-assed ideas, unhandled edge cases. Takeaway: Don’t skip process. User flows? User scenarios? User stories? User jokes? User lollipops and user flashlights and user sinuses? Yes please, give it all to me. I don’t care if it exists or not, I’ll learn it and I’ll find a way to apply it. Because these processes exist for a reason.

You are still free to fuck up any way you like, but at least you can now avoid the exact same ways I’ve fucked up :)