Electronics is a precise endeavor but there is a lot of room for artistry. There are many ways to build a device.
Jim Williams was one of the masters and EDN magazine has a nice writeup:
Jim Williams: The light side and classic electronics art sculptures
Jim Williams had the unique ability to integrate his different talents in science, art, inventing and engineering and to bring forth easily understandable tutorials, app notes and tech phone conversations with customers that enabled better designs to emanate from the field of electronics designers (I know because I was one who benefited from Williams' help back in the early 1980s as a young designer---I was designing a three op amp instrumentation amplifier with three chopper amplifiers---a daunting task at the time with the switching noise and spikes in the capacitive switching circuits inside the amp---he talked me through it and got it working for me! I think it was the LTC1052).
A wonderful read even if you don't 'do' electronics or geek stuff. Pages three and four have some fun pictures of Jim's projects.
Williams was also a cartoonist and when his son was born, worked from home. He took the evening shift and would be feeding his son every couple hours. During that period, whenever he would design a new circuit, he would annotate how many bottles of milk he had to feed Michael -- the more complex the circuit, the more bottles would be drawn on the schematic.
Williams was one of my two contemporary gurus, the other being Bob Pease. In one of life's strange coincidences, Williams passed away (stroke) in 2011 and Bob lost his life driving home from the memorial service.
They had another thing in common too -- something I can empathize with. From EE Times. Yes, my workbench is cluttered but I know where everything is!
