Bumping The Lamp

No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do. But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see. In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: [this video] This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different. But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design. You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map and buttons. No one would probably notice. But if you go for every detail like it was the most imp

This one about whether designers are crazy because the OP didn't understand why designers would care about minute details in their work. It is because attention to detail creates superlative work. It is similar to why premature optimization isn't necessarily bad for engineers. [link] """ No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do. But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see. In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: [this video] This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different. But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design. Yo

I am often pulled towards this comment for an article that asks, "Are Designers Crazy?" [0] """ No, designers aren't crazy. You just don't understand a very fundamental concept of design. It even applies to engineering. It's okay—many people have the same frustrations as you do. But those who care about the details achieve truly high quality results overall. It extends to all areas of the design, not just to the parts you can't see. In the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," there's a scene in a dark room where Roger Rabbit (an animated character) flies across the room, knocks a hanging lamp around, and the lighting becomes so dynamic that all the shadows move around including the animated character's shadow. Here's the scene in question: [this video] This was such a small detail that it would have been forgivable if the animators had left it out entirely: if they had not moved the lamp, kept the shadow steady, no one would have really noticed the difference. It would have been 100 times easier to animate and the effect wouldn't really have been that different. But they did it anyway. The term was later coined, and "bump the lamp" is used throughout Disney (and probably other organizations) to mean something akin to "go the extra mile"—but I see it as having a special significance to design. You're right, most people won't notice. By that logic, you could cut corners a lot of other places too. You could be lax about button colors matching exactly, or per-pixel sharpness on the map an

> It's pure insanity that people ever drew, by hand, mountains of individual drawings each slightly changed and assembled them into compelling illusions to tell stories. Traditional animation by itself is nothing short of insanity, convincingly blending live action and traditional animation takes it a step further, and then there's the "Bumping the Lamp"[0] scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The film as a whole refuses to keep the camera static to make things easy for the animators, which was unusual enough by itself, but then they went above and beyond — they casually bumped a pendant lamp and let it flail about. Every time it slows down, it gets bumped again. And they shaded and cast shadows for the damned rabbit for every single frame of that sequence. Madness. 0. [this video]