Pixar Sketches, Self Doubt, and Consistent Blogging on Medium

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Philosophie is Thinking

4 min readNov 10, 2016

I was at Cooper Hewitt back in May and got to see the Pixar exhibit, Pixar: The Design Of Story. And wow the sketches! I captured a few with the pen and six months later I am finally sharing. I did not sketch these. These were sketched by Pixar animators. Cooper Hewitt has this gadget you carry around to record imagery and information about exhibits. When you leave the museum, you get a personal link to visit your captures online.

Pixar sketches, from left to right: Inside Out, Luxo Jr., Ratatouille

I sketch a lot, almost every day at work — task flows, UI sketches, wire flows, storyboards, and other UX stuff. Nothing I sketch comes close to these. They are so expressive. The lamp and hands convey so much motion.

Here’s a sorry-looking sketch of mine. I drew it in a few minutes to convey a possible solution. Compare my stick figure to the personifications of emotion from Pixar in Inside Out. Compare the Ratatouille hands which, in their movement, convey Remy’s emotional state—generously offering a strawberry, tensing his arm into a fist, or making the rock and roll sign. If I were able to convey a story through motion, like the Luxo Jr. sketches above, my teammates might have better understood my intention and the context of that stick figure.

Ya know what? Maybe I should just add some rant on self-doubt and the purpose of the post to the bottom of the post.

I wanted to get this quick, sloppy post out the door fast to chip away at the self doubt that I inevitably deal with whenever I click the Publish button. “Is this meaty enough? Did I explore it enough? Is it true enough? Do people care? Does it make me look dumb?”

I don’t want to care about those questions.

Or so I thought, until Christopher Chandler challenged me with some feedback to this post. He said:

How about you just assume the answer is yes and see what happens — what if your hypothesis is that people will care about your perspective JUST BECAUSE it’s your perspective?

This blew my mind. I’m going to just answer the self-doubt questions, instead of indulging the negative emotions that crop up.

Is this meaty enough? Yes! I can always revise it later, after publishing.

Do people care? I won’t know unless I publish. Since this is a few hours of my life, the risk seems pretty low.

Does it make me look dumb? Maybe! More likely, it might make me look misinformed. And if that’s true I can learn from the post.

Practical takeaways

Here are three writing resolutions that I hope will help me sketch more posts and, maybe, help me increase the fidelity of posts in the future.

Confront my self-doubt head on. Any question in my head that could lead me to doubt the writing, I will answer just like the questions above.
Set a schedule and stick to it. I will publish a Medium post once every other week. I have dedicated time once a week on my calendar to jot down ideas for posts. There’s a separate time and calendar event, biweekly, to sit down and draft the posts.
Leverage my peers. I’ll need a little help from my friends to get conversations going to motivate me and spark ideas. I want to draft posts quickly and stoke conversations that help me refine the ideas and add meat to the posts. I’ll share posts three to five days before my publish date and refine quickly.