Web Designers Need to Shut Up

2 months ago I read a post by Derek Sivers and it gave me a massive boost in motivation.

The premise of the article is that if you announce your goals before you complete them the chances of you actually completing them is much lower now that you blabbed about it.

Web designers are known for flaunting their goals in the form of mock ups or works in progress (wip) before we even begin marking up the HTML & CSS.

I started thinking about Derek’s argument and realized he was right. On August 1st I took on a challenge to design 3 Shopify themes in 3 days. I made regular tweets updating my progress and on my final day I tweeted the graphic below.

It’s been over 3 months since I posted that, and guess how many themes are finished? None.

I got quite a bit of praise regarding those 3 themes and maybe that’s why I didn’t have the motivation to finish them – I had already impressed the people that I wanted to impress or as Derek eloquently writes: it gave me a “premature sense of completeness”.

A month ago I began testing Derek’s theory of shutting up, and wow did it ever work. Below is a hastily assembled collage of all the projects I have completed outside of work hours.

A few notes about some of the designs above:
1) The Shopify/Vision logo was just for fun
2) The Shopify wiki design is live, but you have to login to activate it. I have decided to abandon this design.
3) For the Vision page, I just needed to ftp it and it will be good to go.