I’m a sucker for a good kung fu movie, and one that sticks in my head (although it’s not actually necessarily a good kung fu movie) is Jackie Chan’s Half a Loaf of Kung Fu. In it, Jackie Chan starts off as a wandering kung fu wannabe, with no actual moves. He meets a flatulent beggar (!) who teaches him a move called the ‘Iron Finger’ in return for some bread; but then, when he tries to use the Iron Finger in a fight, he’s bested by another move known as the ‘Concubine’. So he learns the Concubine, only to be beaten by ‘Bow to the King’, and so on. Each time the moves get trickier and trickier, and each time the next person he fights is able to trump him with a move he can’t block.

In some ways, that’s what design feels like to me sometimes: I learn a trick, then I use it wherever I can, until inevitably I come up against a problem I can’t solve with it. For example, I’m big on tabs in my interface designs, but recently I did a large project where the navigation was so complex that it would have required about four or five levels of tabs if that was all I used. I had to think my way around it. The same is true of software development, and probably in more obvious ways.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it doesn’t really make sense to just wait until you meet a move you can’t block: it’s really our job as designers to be constantly stretching ourselves, looking for new techniques, new inspiration, and new ideas. I know I’m quite bad at this, though: if I see something new and different, my reaction is usually ‘ooh, pretty!’ – but then I close the browser tab and forget about it.

I’ve yet to come up with a system that really works for me for cataloguing and tagging all this wealth of ideas. I’ve tried del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and the like, but I think the problem with those systems is that they make reading and writing easy, but they lack what I can only really describe as immersion.

What I mean is, there should be some way of soaking up all that beautiful, nutritious design goodness without having to consciously remember ‘oh, there was that blog article I read back in August that might work here’, or ‘what did I tag that flickr photo with again?’

Recently I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Among other things (it’s a really excellent book, and I highly recommend it to pretty much everyone), it impressed on me the value of becoming an expert at whatever it is you do by surrounding yourself with examples. It really is like absorbing design by osmosis: and my hunch is that if I worked out a good way to do that, I’d be a much better designer.

By the end of the film, of course, Jackie Chan has become a kung fu master. He knows so many techniques that he’s basically unstoppable in a fight – and his ability to learn new tricks has increased as well. In the final fight scene, he’s fighting with one hand while following instructional diagrams in a small handbook. Then, suddenly, he’s fighting on his head.

“What’s going on?” asks the Winsome Princess (you knew there had to be one).

“He’s holding the book upside down,” replies the Old Master.

OK, so it’s not a great film, and it’s a pretty crappy analogy. But it’s something to think about.