Ideas

We work in talent driven industry fueled by creativity and innovation; ideas are plentiful! We have them everyday, some to scratch and itch and others with ambitions of changing the world. As designers and developers, we are particularly dangerous, because we not only generate ideas but also have the skill set to potentially bring them to life; but how?

The reality is that ideas alone are relatively worthless; it most simply comes down to execution and follow-through. Last week the nclud team went up to Damascus High School to speak to, the ever popular, Mr. Jeff Brown’s advanced web students. Instead of talking about the industry, agency life or the snore-fest that can be HTML5 and CSS3; we decide to try and drum up a bit of excitement and energy in these soon to be best-of-breed designer and developers of tomorrow; to try and encourage them to make their big ideas happen.

We figured, why not share the slide-deck (it’s a bit high-level/vauge independent of the actual presentation). The focus is on ‘making ideas happen’, what it takes and what our process was when working on a little side-project with a big personality; GDZLLA.

We at nclud literally have ideas every-day; some of them bigger than us and others useful, just to us. GDZLLA was a great example of a simple idea contrived from a basic need that could be brought to life within just a week. We just wanted a way to post photos to our Flickr account from Tweetie 2; if each member of our team could do just that, we’d hit success! But, we quickly realized that others wished for the same functionality; so with just a little extra work the idea got just a little bit bigger. It will never generate any revenue, and properly named, it will itself be extinct as application developers build the functionality into their upcoming releases.

It’s important to remember that there is a distinction between and idea and a business; it’s always important to pursue your ideas when you’ve got the right combination of passion and excitement behind them – regardless of an audience or revenue. Never create what’s already been created, but never think you can’t create something better than what exists.

We love working on our own ideas most simply because its an excuse to work with advanced technologies as well as to expand our skill set to which we might not otherwise be able to do. And, it’s a whole lot of fun.