Having a pair of nice shoes comes with it a certain responsibility to keep those suckers nice. You take care of them; they take care of you. One of the reasons I hardly ever wear socks is because I wear nice shoes and silky leather feels like a million bucks on my feet way better than cotton ever thought about feeling. Part of that Nice Shoe Maintenance Contract is a clause regularly requiring a good shining. Here’s how it’s done:

Props
Before you dig in, get your gear laid out in a neat little array. Newspaper on the floor, polish, horse hairbrush, three pieces of cloth. If you have laces in your shoes, get those suckers out.

Prep
First we need to get the schmutz off the shoes. The cloth you got out, get one a little damp and wipe off your shoes. Let those fellas dry before the next step.

Polish
The second piece of cloth is for the polish. Apply in circles until your shoe has a heavy matte look and let ‘em dry for 15 minutes.

Brush
It’s mandatory that you use a horsehair brush for this. Buy a nice one so you can give it to your son when you teach him how to polish his shoes. Brush even; brush smooth.

Elbow Grease
Using the same circular pattern as you applied it, press hard and remove the polish.

The important thing to remember here is that there are no shortcuts. You can’t rush the process and can’t skip any steps or the final product will look like shit. So goes shining shoes, so goes design. Some clients just want you to make something, hammer it out and let’s go already. They would just rub the polish on and be done with it. It’s easy to see where shortcuts get made in their work.

When you take the time and put in the care to do it right, not only do you grow more and understand the process better, but you learn to relish in that deliberate pace. The coffee you drink and the article you read in the paper while the polish dries, a little bit of slowing down and breathing in the simplicity of a project done by hand and a job well done.

Like Forrest Gump said, “There’s an awful lot you could tell about a person by their shoes.”

No doubt at some point you have heard the phrase, “Everything is better with bacon.” It’s cute to say and no doubt a chicken sandwich gets a little bit better with some salty smoky pork. But clever as the phrase is, we know it’s not always true. You can keep my lemon meringue pie bacon free, thanks. And most of the time people can make a pretty clear judgment whether or not some pork will pimp your lunch. If ONLY it were so easy with design.

We economists sing a little ditty that some designers and their clients need to learn the words to. It’s called “Fallacy of Composition” and it goes a little something like this:

Just because their website looks great with that Cool New Thing.
Doesn’t mean your website will look great with that Cool New Thing.
Their users appreciate / understand / can use the Cool New Thing.
Yours use IE6.

We creative types have a cast of common punch lines: Flash, IE6 (see above), Comic Sans, etc. The problem isn’t the stuff we know to watch out for; the problem is the new thing that your clients love and you are dying to work into a website. And it looks fantastic, and everyone loves that wacky gizmo that does the Cool New Thing, but it doesn’t take long for people to become confused about the massive Ajax application on that website you built for the Earlobe Iowa Antique Gallery. You took a simple store’s simple website and supercharged it so much that the folks who are regular users have no idea what’s happening. And even though the client asked for it, you should know better. You are the one being paid for your expertise, not them. You just stole their money. And you added bacon to my lemon meringue pie.

As Padma says, “Please pack yours knives and go.”