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The Case for Side Quests

I have a ton of side projects—various Slash Pages hosted on my personal website, but side projects are not the same as side quests. Side projects focus on what you are good at, while side quests are defined as doing something you are not good at. A distinction I recently learned from a random YouTube video in my feed.

The other day I was chilling in Barnes and Noble. It felt good to be away from the computers, and most importantly not furiously prompting AI to do shit. The smell of paper and ink made me happy.

I was looking at magazines—admit it, all graphic designers are guilty of just looking not reading—with beautiful covers and typography.

The magazines featured poetry—Paris Review, The New Lit Scene, The Drift, etc. The text was typeset so beautifully that I found myself scouring the credits for the typeface. I never found it.

Eventually, I started reading. I saw how some poems were structured: sentences can break in weird places, each line does not have to rhyme, and there is no strict length.

I thought, I want to write a short poem myself.

It was then I started a side quest.

Why is poem-writing a side quest for me?

  1. I am not good at it. I suck at writing, let alone writing poems.
  2. It does not help with my career. I am a designer, not a writer.
  3. It satisfies me and me only. In other words, it brings me joy.

I pulled up the Notes app and started writing. I wrote about how I felt about those magazines.

Mesmerized by the typesetting
I flipped through the
pages at the beginning
and the end
frantically looking
for the colophon
but came away with
nothing.

A typeface unknown—

A poem about fonts? What a nerd, haha. I also posted that to my Notes page. I felt good.

Side quests should be fun. Side quests should allow you to be a beginner. Side quests should have the potential to fail.

Every day we are focused on doing what we are good at. We forget about the fun of starting at zero and being sucky. And with AI, we jump directly to results and skip the process altogether—we do not get to learn from making mistakes and failing.

I wrote a few lines to express myself, read them over and over, paused to think, replaced some words with other words, put in some intentional line breaks, and ended on an em dash. I felt like a noob. Those few lines went through many edits.

However, I was happy. A side quest made my day.