Exhaustive, sometimes bizarre notes… wireframes… mind-bending blends of art and science. Is it a GitHub repository? No, it’s the life of a Renaissance genius. With the right lessons, we can all write some da Vinci code.
Web development is a pretty big tent. It encompasses color, mathematics, accessibility, typography, photography, copywriting, ethics, and the list goes on and on. The web is a near-infinite world which — for all its relentless innovation and disruption — inherits many of its most beautiful qualities from old ways.
It is in that spirit that we’ll be looking at the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, the latest in a rather eclectic lineup of old maestros I’ve had the pleasure of writing about:
Perhaps more than any other person in history, da Vinci showed the kind of magic that can happen in the overlap between art and science, where much of web development lives. His methods and outlooks are as applicable today as they were in Renaissance Italy.
Document Your Thoughts, Ideas, And Work
Da Vinci was a fastidious writer, producing tens of thousands of pages of notes and sketches during his life. Their content ranged from mundane to genius, and that was part of their value. One day it’s a shopping list, another it’s flying machines. There was no filter, no preciousness, only expression and exploration.
This exhaustive documentation was valuable for a number of reasons. They were of benefit to him as an outlet for his thoughts, ambitions, and experiences and as points of reference for long-term projects. Getting his thoughts down allowed them to be tested and iterated on.
The benefits of such extensive documentation were not limited to da Vinci himself. Writing his ideas down also allowed them to survive him for the benefit of countless millions since. Centuries on his notebooks continue to surprise, delight and educate.
Da Vinci’s zeal for writing and sketching lends itself to web development. First is the powerful — sometimes downright mysterious — creative freedom of jotting down what’s going on inside your head. Sometimes you start writing down idea A and suddenly find yourself at solution X.
Not everything we do has to be perfect. Anyone expecting to arrive directly at the final product is going to be disappointed or have a pretty shoddy final product. Writing and sketching give you the license to be playful, maybe even a little bit audacious. Many timeless ideas are born on notebook paper.
There is a sense sometimes that the code we write is akin to sand sculptures — pretty but temporary. This doesn’t have to be the case. Even if the final form of websites continues to change, the thinking behind that evolution is invaluable. How did we get here, and why?
Documenting your pull requests to survive when you’re dead may be a bit strong, but your successors at old jobs will be grateful for the insight and guidance.
Web devs and designers ought to document their own journey, be it through PR descriptions or an actual notebook of their own:
- Flesh out ideas,
- Jot down idle thoughts,
- Doodle page layouts.
May future generations be delighted and awed by your pull request descriptions. May the feature ideas in your GitHub issues be as aspirational as da Vinci’s flying machines.
The best ideas in the world are of no practical use for as long as they’re stuck in one’s head.
Obsess Over Geometry
As most famously demonstrated by the Vitruvian Man, da Vinci was a lifelong student of geometry, shape, and proportion. He was fascinated by the recurrence of various shapes in nature, as well as by the workings of proportion and perspective. He understood their value to paintings and architecture alike.
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