Christopher Murphy · 27 September, 2020
Summary: Get into the habit of documenting your progress. Taking frequent screenshots (or photographs) evidences your journey and learning. This not only shows the value you have acquired, it also evidences your growth.
When you’re developing a product +/ service, you have to get into the habit of capturing screenshots as you go. This allows you to document your progress:
It’s so important to keep some form of record. You might not be thinking about it now, but in ten years, or twenty, you’ll be thankful that your younger self took this advice.
In the early 2000s, I was invited to be part of an exhibition curated by the team at PlayStation. (PlayStation! Amazing.) The exhibition, Interact 1, gathered some of the world’s best designers (and me).
As a young designer, beginning to make a name for myself, this was an incredible opportunity. PlayStation was (and remains) an iconic brand and to be a part of an exhibition curated by their team was a career highlight.
The trouble is, I have no record of it.
I was invited to participate in Interact1 by one of the mentors – my friend, Adrian Shaughnessy – and I exhibited alongside a who's who of design talent.
Two decades later, apart from the work that I created – an audio-visual (or, more accurately visual-audio) sequencer titled 'Baudot', that I built in Flash (which sadly no longer works) – I have absolutely nothing to show for it.
Flash has been discontinued and the sequencer no longer works. All I have are some low fidelity screenshots. I'm frankly embarrassed.
Don’t make the same mistake. Screenshots take up very little space on today’s increasingly spacious hard drives, so err on the side of taking too many and not too few.