Matt Wilcox says he is an optimizer. I can see myself within much of his article, bar a few sentences. And I prefer to call myself a Conceptualiser, though it’s much the same definition as an Optimiser (in this circumstance).
Matt writes about those of us who obsess over things that mean a lot to us, and attempt to fix the errors of things that we shouldn’t need to care about (like a road safety advert) but do because we like to make a difference.
But where I differ is that I can see the puzzle along the way, I can see a finality within a blank canvas, and I can find all the paths to a common destination. Where I fail most is taking just one of those paths. Generally I’ll try to take two or three paths concurrently. It’s a painful process which often means I dwell on details, refining the curves, taking myself on a spiralling curve of learning (both up and down) … yet I complete my duties. Howso? Because I do all of that in the blink of an eye.
I’m one of those guys who never gets bored because I always find something new and exciting to attempt. I often draw furniture and house designs (since the age of twelve!), potential sites designs (I have a office-bomb of paper filled with CSS doodlings), and many more half-baked HTML mock-ups filling my hard-drive. (I should upload a few to fiddle and pore over…).
My desk has two notepads running, with ideas going in multiple directions, some pages are just words as starting points for future articles, more pages have pencil-scrawls of overlapping named #layers that do amazing things across the page. Oh, the joy of being multi-skilled in a multi-faceted medium!
Matt and his few commentors are correct: Success and Closure can be a bitch because we obsess in possibilities because we live by the belief that nothing is impossible.
Optimisers and Conceptualisers find errors in their designs, in the pixels of images, dust on the monitor, cat-hairs on the television, every dirty-finger-print in the car-windows, and milliseconds in slow-motion. The internet age has enabled us to travel the world in a single night, yet binary-seconds take an eternity to pass by because we can accomplish, write, code and become something new at every web page we stumble upon.
Oh boy, Matt, we’ve finally created ourselves.
Creativity & Artwork of Stephen Mitchell 
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