Look At Your Fish

I love this essay:

If you aspire to be really, truly great at creating things, you need to have an eye for what “great” means. There’s no better way to build that skill than to take a long, hard look at the things you cherish, and stare at them over and over until you can start to pick apart the myriad decisions, constraints, and bits of craft that went into making something.

Look at your fish.

Look at it.

Go back, and look at it again.

You can learn a ton by copying the greats. (Don’t go out there and claim the copy as your own, but consider it a kind of homework.) Hunter S. Thompson once re-typed The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, so he could more deeply understand Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

If you’re just getting started with making apps? Find your favorite app, and try to duplicate its interface in Sketch, or try and replicate a part of its interface in Xcode.

Look at your fish.