Over the weekend, I watched the documentary I am Trying to Break Your Heart which is about the band Wilco while they were recording Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which I think is just a great album. I really enjoy seeing how artists and designers work, what their processes are.
Jeff Tweedy, the singer/songwriter of Wilco, was explaining their songwriting process and noted that, at first, the band rehearses and plays a song in the most straightforward manner it can. Then they go back and try to break the song into bits, to deconstruct it and see if they can’t get more musical juice out of it. It’s an interesting way to work, and I wonder how well it would work with design (if it doesn’t for some designers already).
Personally, I tend to focus on the bits as I work. I have a vision for the product as a whole, but I refine and tinker with each bit as I create it. Perhaps I should try the Wilco method: build things in the simplest way possible and only then go back and deconstruct the parts, making them richer. Something to think about.
a concept akin to editing (the most performed design “iteration” of all).
Dan,
Irrespective of personal creative styles and so forth, I think your comment points to something I’ve been fascinated with for a long time, and that is the intrinsic differences of mediea types, or modes of expression. Music, being time-based, is apprehended differently than image. Whereas we can apprehend an image in its entirety simply by looking at it, music must be listened to over time. This creates a memory issue for those of us in the editing suite, and is I think the reason it’s easier to lay something down before rearranging and tweaking.
I’m always amazed by stories about composers who wrote (e.g. Bach, and Beethove when he was deaf) to a score. Back then I suppose it was difficult to ask half the violins to leave, or for the voices to to wait around till their part was ready…
We’re able to edit in any medium on the fly now, but there are still intrinsic differences that no matter what, will influence the production process.
(here’s a thought: we live in a time when production and recording occur simultaneously (thanks to recording technology))…
Great movie btw.