Marci Ikeler

Photo Credit: Alfonso Jimenez

This past week, Aaron and I decided to move from New York City to Los Angeles. Aaron accepted his dream job at Riot Games in Santa Monica, and I'll be continuing Little Arrows from the West Coast.

Needless to say, the idea of leaving New York has sparked some mixed feelings. I moved to New York when I was 17 to attend NYU. The year was 1999, Guiliani was mayor, the dot com scene was bubbling, and there was a sense of possibility and excitement in the air.

Moving to NYC was leap of faith; I had only been there once before, for a few days with my family, in order to visit NYU. The city was huge, impenetrable - I remember being in a cab driving over the Manhattan bridge, completely dumbstruck that the highway descended into the vertical walls of the skyscrapers and projects. All the lights; each of them a person, living their solitary lives behind closed windows and doors.

Driving into the city from JFK, I feared I had made a huge mistake. It was pouring rain, and the dreary gray houses of Queens made for a gloomy welcome. I have always had an affinity for sunshine - I grew up in Arizona, a place where 60 degrees is considered cold. I don't know what brought me to such a frigid city. I suddenly felt panicked.

However, once the rain stopped, I quickly began to embrace the city. I read Robert Caro and Jane Jacobs. I watched out the windows for a glimpse of the beautifully graffittied abandoned station at 18th Street and stowed away on a 6 train as it made its u-turn in the abandoned city hall station. Gradually New York became the language of my dreams; when I sleep, I'm frequently transversing a toy model version of the village, of downtown. Every time I left the city, I never felt quite like I could breathe until the car exited the Holland tunnel and surfaced in Manhattan.

Terrible things happened, of course. I ran from the falling Twin Towers and watched armored tanks drive down Canal Street. I lived through my 20s, which naturally included personal drama too petty to recount. I watched helplessly as 7 feet of East River water flooded my apartment during Hurricane Sandy. I kept moving further east until I finally ended up in Brooklyn.

All this is to say that NYC is a part of who I am. I have experienced my entire adult life here; in 2 more years I would have lived here longer than my childhood in Phoenix. But the pull has weakened; those breaths of fresh air are progressively weaker. And I'm getting older, and more appreciative of life's creature comforts, which are increasingly hard to come by in New York.

Long reads I enjoyed this week:

How Disruption Happens - Manifesto from Greg Satell, at Forbes, on an an alternate model of technological disruption: he argues that a threshold model of collective behavior drives change rather than individual influencers. I enjoyed his "new rules for a disruptive age", summarized below:

Seek Out Interest, Not Influence

Build Inside Before You Build Out

Connect To Higher Threshold Groups

It’s Not The Nodes, It’s The Network

The Good, the Bad, and the Downright Ugly of Parallax Web Design - Good primer for those new to the parallax effect in web design, with lots of useful examples.

The Ten Commandments Of Efficient Design In Axure - I'm neck deep in a really complicated Axure file and this useful list of tips & tricks taught me a few things.

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction - Validation on the emotional value of reading high-quality fiction. Good news for voracious readers like me!

Last week I took a well-deserved vacation to a remote location without a solid internet connection. It was lovely to disconnect, and to find so many interesting topics upon my return.

Replacing The User Story With The Job Story - Alan Klement has a useful article that applies the "jobs to be done"a> strategy theory to user stories. Looking forward to giving this model a try when I next need to create this type of deliverable.

What inner city kids know about social media, and why we should listen - Very interesting article about the unusual - and frankly, genius - ways that kids exploit social tools to serve various social purposes. Fascinating.

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens - The most interesting part of the ongoing revelations about the N.S.A.'s data collection practices, to me, is the fact that they have created a sort of shadow social network (codenamed "Mainway") that tracks personal connections through phone and email metadata as well as publicly available information from places like Facebook. I think the combination of data that feels "private" (when I made a phone call and to whom) and data that is readily public (my Twitter feed) is what makes this issue so complex and confusing. It's a perfect example of laws and organizational practices getting out of synch with cultural expectations, which seems to happen faster than ever with technology.

Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup: Lessons Learned from the rise and fall of @Sonar - Must read from Brett Martin about his experience building a widely downloaded, critically acclaimed, and ultimately failed app. Great insights.

The past few weeks have been tumultuous, between travel, family, and work obligations. To catch up, here are some of the long reads I've enjoyed recently:

<LiDiary on the evolution of communications - Rebecca Solnit thoughtfully considers how our communications practices - from letter, to email, to text, to tweets - affect our experiences of community and connection.

How to Present Your Animation Ideas - The always excellent Barrel NY has a tutorial on how to present ideas for animation in web design.

To make up for my silence last week, I have lots of great stuff today... less about technology and more about life in general.

UX is not UI - Related to my blog post from a few weeks ago, this article presents a summary of the differences between a UX process and the resulting UI design.

Cracking suicide: hackers try to engineer a cure for depression - A subject close to heart. How hackers and other techy types deal with depression and efforts to help them avoid suicide.

Killing Big Strategy - Great article from Eric Portelance at Teehan+Lax on why "big strategy" doesn't work in the digital age, and on healthy alternatives to the process.

Writing - for health and happiness? - As someone who repeatedly tries (and fails) to keep a journal, I found this interesting: apparently writing out one's emotions helps avoid bottling up feelings that can evolve into mental illness and other health issues.

I hate Strong Female Characters- An amazing, amazing article on why the idea of a "Strong Female Character" is in and of itself sexist. The article is so great that I'm in danger of quoting it in its entirety, but here are a few particularly good parts:

The Strong Female Character has something to prove. She’s on the defensive before she even starts. She’s George from The Famous Five all grown up and still bleating with the same desperate lack of conviction that she’s “Every Bit As Good as a Boy”...

Nowadays the princesses all know kung fu, and yet they’re still the same princesses. They're still love interests, still the one girl in a team of five boys, and they’re all kind of the same. They march on screen, punch someone to show how they don’t take no shit, throw around a couple of one-liners or forcibly kiss someone because getting consent is for wimps, and then with ladylike discretion they back out of the narrative’s way.

And finally:

What do I want instead of a Strong Female Character? I want a male:female character ratio of 1:1 instead of 3:1 on our screens. I want a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness. Badass gunslingers and martial artists sure, but also interesting women who are shy and quiet and do, sometimes, put up with others’ shit because in real life there’s often no practical alternative. And besides heroines, I want to see women in as many and varied secondary and character roles as men: female sidekicks, mentors, comic relief, rivals, villains. I want not to be asked, when I try to sell a book about two girls, two boys and a genderless robot, if we couldn’t change one of those girls to a boy.

Yesterday, I answered a question on Quora about making the leap from a full-time job to freelance or independent company. It's something I've thought about more than most, both through my transition to Little Arrows and when I previously freelanced several years back.

These are the two tips that I give anyone who approaches me looking for advice on the topic; they've certainly kept me afloat! Enjoy.

Tip 1: Get coffee with everyone you know

Make a list of everyone you know who might have work for you or might know someone who would have work for you. This list should include everyone from old co-workers to people you follow on Twitter but haven't met IRL. It should also include your peers, mentors, ment-ees - even though they might not have work for you, perhaps they will know someone who does.

Now, you're going to prioritize what should be a long list of names, and start emailing 2-3 a week to see if you can meet them for coffee. Even though you have a full-time job, you should be able to take off 1 hour in the afternoon to grab coffee a few times a week.

When you have coffee with these folks, you should casually mention that you've been considering going freelance but are concerned about taking the leap. Do they have any advice? Do they happen to know anyone who might need the kinds of services you provide? Anyone they could introduce you to?

It's important to note that you'll rarely meet someone who says "oh, yes, I have a gig for you!". But, 6 months later, when that person is at a cocktail party and someone mentions they need a freelance web designer, they might think of you and introduce you. Successful business development is all about the long game.

On the other hand, if nothing comes of the conversation, it's not a big deal - you've wasted $5 for coffee and a half hour of your time.

This leads me to:

Tip 2: Find one or two "anchor" gigs

As you point out, you're not going to be able to fill up a full client list while you're sitting at a desk 8 hours a day. But you should be able to land one or two key gigs that will last for 3-6 months. Ideally you'd be making 50% of your income from one of these "stable" sources. That will allow you some financial wiggle room if you're not able to fill the rest of your time.

Sometimes, you'll have to compromise. Some of my "anchor" gigs have been for boring clients, paid less than my usual hourly rate, required me to use skills that I don't enjoy as much, or had other annoying qualities.

However, these types of jobs gave me the freedom I needed to make the other half of my time interesting. They freed me to take an awesome project with a small budget, because I knew my bills were still getting paid. They prevented me from worrying too much about a 6-week slow spell.

And, most importantly, locking in one of these should give you the confidence you need to quit your full-time gig.

Long reads I enjoyed this week!

O.K., Glass - Gary Shteyngart used the idea of an "Äppärät" - a Google Glass-like device that allows people to experience a layer of information on top of the real world - to great effect in his awesome novel Super Sad True Love Story. Now, fiction has become reality as Shteyngart experiences New York City through the lens of Google Glass.

Trial by Twitter - Another great article from The New Yorker this week on the effects - positive and negative - of social media on the Stuebenville rape case

Today, I answered a question on Quora about how UX designers can keep their skills sharp, stay on top of their games, and never be in want of work:

Never stop creating and connecting.

Whenever you have extra time, spend it re-designing websites that you think need a facelift, writing about the craft of design, learning new tools, and networking with people you respect.

Keeping your “dry spells" productive will ensure that you continue to get work and keep your skills up to date. It’s also incredibly refreshing to reconnect with your personal interests and learn something new.