Some day you’ll realise you can’t doeverything…
@ Net Magazine
Miriam Suzanne creates experimental experiences
with her band and her fellowdevelopers.
“Some day you’ll realise you can’t do everything.
You have tofocus.”
My accountant was helping me sort out my taxes,
and I wasn’t making it easy.
I had a successful web agency,
a small theatre company,
a band preparing to tour,
my second novel ready for publishing,
an art show about to open,
and an assortment of side projects –
all creating a tangled mix of income andexpenses.
My accountant wasn’t the first to scold me,
and she won’t be the last.
From the outside it’s hard to see
that I already have settled down.
Both my music and web design
come directly out of my training
in what the kids call ‘devised’ theatre.
Instead of working from a stand-alone script
and then learning to act the parts,
an ensemble iterates on every aspect of the performance,
collaborating from start to finish.
It’s agile development for performanceartists.
I learned the Adobe Suite
in order to design show posters,
construction tools for building sets,
electrical wiring to run lights,
and HTML/CSS to launch my first theatrewebsite.
My band Teacup Gorilla
and my web company OddBird
are both continuations of that work:
designing multimedia experiences
based on experimentation and user feedback,
using whatever tools and skills we have on the team,
and learning new skills when they’reneeded.
When I have a team of musicians,
we call it a band –
and when my team is full of developers,
we call it an agency.
It’s all the same tome.
I never meant to be a graphic designer or web developer,
but I learned the skills
and people started offering me work.
I feel very lucky to be where I am,
and proud of the team we’ve built over theyears.
Teacup Gorilla also developed organically –
it was originally formed to underscore a devised performance.
After the show was over the band stayed together,
and we’re now a mix of spoken-word stories,
subtle melodies, and raucous instrumental builds.
It’s not a well-established genre,
so we put a lot of work into testing andadjusting.
My main takeaway is the same in art and web development:
trust your audience and yourself.
Users are smart, and they are happy to think.
Let them.
My job isn’t to give them all the answers,
but to invite them along for a ride
and make it worth their time.
The user isn’t always right,
but they are always worth listening to.
Experience design is acollaboration.
Miriam talks to Now What?
about why the internet looks the way it does,
why designers and developers need to collaborate
and how the future of the web
must be built around inclusivity andrespect.
A podcast focusing on front end development
but also covering a wide range of web development and design topics.
We talked about CSS, Sass,
and work being done in the W3CCSS WorkingGroup.
I talk with Claire and Steph
about my journey into webdev and onto the CSSWG,
what I find frustrating about how others use CSS,
and the three specs I’m workingon.
Starting a new season of the Smashing Podcast
with a look at the future of CSS.
What new specs will be landing in browsers soon?
Drew McLellan talks to Miriam to findout.
I join Ari, Ben, and Tessa to talk about
getting into CSS from other languages,
the absurdly massive problem CSS is designed to solve,
and the mental model behind thelanguage.
On Episode 18,
the TalkScript team continues the live-ish at JSConfUS podcast series
with guests Myles Borins, Tim Doherty, and Miriam Suzanne. Listenin!
It feels like CSS Grid has been coming for a long time now,
but it just now seems to be reaching a point
where folks are talking more and more about it
and that it’s becoming something we shouldlearning.
Chris Coyier interviews Miriam
when she joins the CSS Tricks team
as a Staff Writer.
We talk about gettting started in the industry,
name confusion,
fouding OddBird,
building Susy,
andmore.
In this episode of the Versioning Show,
Tim and David are joined by Miriam Suzanne,
best known for Susy, a responsive layout toolkit for Sass.
They discuss going from being a lurker to finding your voice,
the importance of writing about what you’re learning,
stumbling into fame, approaching new projects, and unit testing inSass.
This interview serves as a follow up
to my performance of
The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World
as Represented by a Post-Obsolete Book About Dance
at the Media ArcheologyLab.