This post from “Teach the Web” course participant Sasha Neri is a beautiful reflection on where making, everyday creativity and digital making meet.

“I’m not much of a maker in the third dimension. Sure, I’ve toyed with some things. I’ve put together Ikea furniture, made meals, sketched/painted on paper and walls, cut and pasted (with scissors & glue) type at a printing press, cut and dyed my own hair, and struggled and failed to create sentences that would bring people to their knees.

The machines began their rise as I was leaving adolescence, and due to such perfect timing, I’ve probably spent more hours late at night trying to figure out why a table or div wasn’t rendering the way I had envisioned in Firefox, or trying a new combination of duotones in Photoshop, or taking yet another picture of a flower just so.

There’s really no reason for such a dichotomous view though. Whether the project involved scissors, code, temperas, or zucchini, we begin with an idea, in my case it is almost always an image, and then we begin orchestrating the steps to putting that image together. We add color, we remove distractions, we re-position shapes, we lightly survey for opinions, we re-align our intention, we backspace, we copy and paste, we try and we try again.

My making comes from an open, curious space. Looking back, rarely is the end-result as I pictured from the beginning, and that never feels like failure.”