Yesterday, I came across a post by Christopher Penn about a martial art exercise he practices.

Bud’s drill goes something like this: for this drill, your attacker will do whatever they want. You as the defender are only permitted to use your footwork for evasion and your right hand in a shuto (hand blade/hand sword) form to protect yourself.

The goal, of course, is to develop mental flexibility and agility.

Creating for the mobile world is similar to this exercise. (By that I don’t mean we get to make crazy ninja moves – though that hasn’t stopped some of our guys from trying.) What I mean is that there are limitations that are entirely out of our control. We just have to learn to work with these limiting conditions, whether they’re the phone’s capabilities, the mobile network’s restrictions or the user’s own knowledge of their phone.

However, limits and boundaries, whether imposed or chosen, are wonderful things. They require resourcefulness and a dose of creativity, but see them with the right attitude and take on the challenge!

This video is possibly one of my favourite examples of boundary-driven creativity; Ophir Kutiel, otherwise known as Kutiman, created a series of music videos using only existing content from YouTube artists. The result is beautiful, and below is my favourite one.

During South by Southwest, Paul Annett from Clearleft dedicated an entire presentation to showing us clever and inspiring little Easter Eggs site designers have included in their web projects. Small delight after small delight, Paul took us through a range of sites – including Silverback’s site, Clearleft’s very own gorilla-saving usability testing software, which uses the neat parallax effect. (Just try resizing the window width for some eye candy, if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

So you’re working with a web browser’s limited capability. A mobile browser more contrived than you’d like. A team smaller than you’d wish for. Take it in your stride and see what you can achieve – I bet you’ll surprise yourself if you treat the boundaries as assets!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Tips and tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.