A note on heart by Hillman Curtis:

I once gave a talk called “Putting Your Heart into Design” at a design school in Connecticut, and one of the students asked me what advice I had for people who, just starting out, will no doubt be doing the same things all the time, just churning out banner ads — or like me, when I started at Macromedia years ago, building executive presentations over and over. “How do you put your heart into that?” he asked.

I told him about my first year at Macromedia, about the corporate presentations that consisted mainly of bullet points, pie graphs, and dull charts. I told him that I decided to focus on the exactitude of each design, and made each pixel as perfect as I could. I got deep into exploring the Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann and grids. I focused on typography and consistency in design. And through all of the repetition I became aware of the power of restraint and simplicity. On the few occasions that I incorporated motion, I was always very conservative and moved elements in ways that reflected the theme of the presentation. They were not simply gratuitous.

I came to believe that even though a viewer might not be able to point to the screen and indicate exactly where an element had move two pixels from page to page in a presentation or Web site, he or she could sense it, and too many of those mistakes could leave the viewer with a feeling of imbalance. I explained all of this to the student. When I was finished he replied, “So, rather than just taking on jobs you can put your heart into, you should find a way to put your heart into everything you do.” Which was a wonderful way to put it.

From Curtis’ book Creating Short Films for the Web.