Hi! If you're reading this for the first time, welcome! If you've been following my journey from the beginning, welcome back! In this blog I'll be chronicling my Outreachy Internship journey, and providing insights into the experiences, highlights, and yes; mistakes - that I encounter (or make) along the way. Today I'll be talking briefly about the minutia, the little parts that make up the whole, and how it relates to designing on the (physically) smaller scale.
When I say "little things", I'm speaking mainly about the things that occur so easily and frequently, when considered from a higher level, that they seem almost insignificant. A small edit here, a shift by two pixels there. I'm also talking about the critical, sometimes unnoticeable actions:
Every step, no matter how small, makes up the journey. What's even more interesting, is that when you're working on the small scale, you get an even smaller number of steps to work with, so you have to find a way to extract greater value. Sometimes, this means that you'll need to take a step back, look at your design in the "big picture sense", and see how you can simplify it. What's more, it pays to keep things organized - group related interests - so they act as one.
You can probably already see an analogy here: just as your design elements collaborate to form one big design, so it is with open source communities - where multiple folks join their efforts toward one goal. Likewise, in Fedora Badges, multiple individuals have worked (and continue to work) to build a system of acknowledgement - a seemingly little thing - with a great impact: rewarding individual members of the community for their contributions and achievements in working toward what is arguably one of the largest open source communities in the world.
I've only begun to touch on this topic, but perhaps in a future post, I'll dive deeper into the little things - and how they apply in the work that I do.