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Last summer, I ran away from home. 5 weeks, 7 countries, 6 currencies, 6 languages, 9 different beds, 4 planes, 7 buses, 9 trains, 5 ferries, 3 cars, and innumerable rides on the buses, trams, and metros of different cities later, I returned: blisters on my feet, forever altered.

My business weathered the experiment better than my feet. One of the things that most excites me about design is that, in theory, I can do it from anywhere in the world–all I really need is my Macbook, an internet connection, and the contents of my head. The idea of being free to come and go as I please–of being truly mobile–is intoxicating, especially when I’ve become such a travel junkie. Not only does travel make me stronger and more independent, but the exposure to new concepts and cultures is certain to shape me as a designer. How could it not be beneficial to my career–wandering through strange streets, finding new museums, constantly photographing the new visual landscape? (Note to the taxman: I will hereinafter be claiming all air tickets as business expenses, okay?)

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Before I decided to become a designer, I held a whole array of jobs over the years to make my rent. I wrote for an online magazine and acted as “webmaster” for a local IT company during high school. I was briefly a knife salesman, before I realized I can’t sell anything. I worked at a gas station on crack alley, serving coffee from the self-serve coffee counter to very confused customers. I was a maid for all of an hour (before I quit). I was a crossing guard, a security guard, and the world’s fastest (and surliest) Subway employee. However, by far the oddest employment I’ve ever had came after my transition to a “career”: I take my clothes off for money.

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For a girl who never wears a watch and doesn’t care much for numbers, I’m obsessed with time. When you bill an hourly rate, of course, this is only to be expected—after all, the time = money equation becomes far more self-evident when you know exactly what an hour is worth.

In theory, this focus on time should engender the ability to delegate. If it takes you two hours to do something that you could bill, say, $120 for, but you can pay someone $60 instead to do (regardless of how long it may take them, and assuming that they’ll do it just as well, if you happen to be a control freak like I am), it should make sense to start passing off tasks.

The problem is, when you have a precise idea of how much that extra hour you spent sleeping cost you, you suddenly start to believe that sleep is anthema to your business and well-being. Three years of running a business full time have taught me, finally, that this is just a blatant lie.
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In the interest of continuing my forays into self-directed and hand-generated projects, I’ve been taking a screenprinting class at the fantastic Roberts Street Social Centre the past few weeks. It’s been fantastic, and I’m so glad I took a class instead of learning it myself—while I do love teaching myself new skills, the setup would have been extensive and it may have been more difficult to find the motivation to “go” to class each week, whereas with a defined class time, I was forced to show up or lose my opportunity. With projects and to-do lists constantly piling up, I may otherwise have abandoned the endeavour for sleep.

The time-crunch, however, meant that I needed to accept imperfections. Now, anyone who knows me knows well that I’m a tiny bit persnickety: I’ll spend half an hour adjusting the kerning of a font until it feels just right, I’ll go back over a design that’s already been client-approved in order to “finesse” the whole thing, and I typically complain that Photoshop won’t zoom to a level any higher than 1600%.  While I really do believe that this is a valuable tendency in a designer (and, in fact, I suspect that most graphic designers are by nature a touch anal-retentive), it’s also a major hindrance in an industry that is so intensely deadline-driven.

Finished thank you cards, each one screenprinted by hand! I'm not happy with the heart design at all--the lines are simultaneously too thick AND too thin. I think I might prefer this redesigned with more of a skull/vine design in the bottom-right corner.

This is why often my self-driven projects are finished late: while client projects are often do-or-die, if the client is myself, I’m often content to let my expected deadline pass me by in favour of producing work that’s closer to “perfect” (it’s never actually perfect, of course.) This is why it took me three months longer than expected to launch my new website, and why my Valentines were barely even printed and ready to go by the fourteenth. Given that it’s easy to sour on your own work after obsessing over it too long, this delay is a dangerous thing. Wait too long, and the whole thing ends up needing to be scrapped and started all over again!

But with the screenprinting class, I had no option (other than flakiness, which I’m giving up as a lifestyle choice as much as possible). So I showed up for my second class with a design that wasn’t perfect, telling myself that it was just a learning project, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t right. I’m just learning! It’s okay to screw up!

The thing I started to realize as I got into the printing process is this: everything that looks like a fatal error to me is basically invisible to everyone else.  (Not a major revelation, but something I ought to constantly keep in mind, because I never seem to remember it.) The fundamental flaws in the initial design weren’t nearly as glaring or as apparent to others as they were to me.

Then, as I proceeded with the printing process, I realized that I hadn’t been as precise with the first colour “plate” (the red accents) as I would have liked. (In screenprinting, each colour is printed independently of the others, much like a traditional CMYK plate-printing process that I learned about in school, but never actually had a chance to witness.) Accordingly, when I printed the black “plate” on top of the red, the registration often didn’t line up perfectly, and there was an overlap.

Then something funny happened. I could, in theory, have used an acetate sheet to register and measure the placement of every single print to ensure a perfect output on every single print. I thought about it, briefly, and then threw caution utterly to the wind, and just started printing willy-nilly. Prints came out with white where red should be, and red where white should be, and instead of breaking down into tears or tantrums, I carefully put them on the drying rack with the others. Not only was I not upset, but I actually discovered that I rather liked these mis-fit mis-prints! Whoever knew?

And really, where I’m so gung-ho on the handmade process anyway, it’s about time I learned not only to accept, but to embrace my mistakes. (Are you listening, brain? I’m talking to you.) Mistakes are often the most interesting part of a piece of work, and they so often generate new ideas and concepts that might otherwise forever remain undiscovered (gravity, nylon, penicillin, chocolate-covered bacon). And especially when something is handmade, part of its appeal lies in its imperfections: signs of the inherently flawed human touch. So often the aesthetics of error (cracks in pavement, burned-out buildings, rips in a sheet of paper) are more interesting, alive, and vibrant than the sterility of pixel-perfection.

Can you spot the errors? I bet I can find more than you can!

Now, if only I can apply that sort of thinking to everything else I do, I might finally be able get some sleep!

This year has marked my first venture into “selling stuff”, instead of just “selling myself”. It’s been a little hit-and-miss: my Valentines seemed popular (they were listed on Ooh! Shiny! and in the Etsy blog, and I’ve heard loads of positive feedback), which was immensely exciting, but they didn’t sell like mad. (They didn’t really even sell like slightly-unusual.)

First lesson learned: just because you make something that people like, doesn’t mean that people will actually buy it.

This weekend, at a friend’s suggestion, I booked a booth at a local farmer’s market. For only $60, it seemed like a wildly clever business idea. How could I possibly NOT make a fortune?

Well, not only did I not make a fortune, but I actually didn’t sell a single card, unless you count the one that I traded a bookseller for a tattered copy of The Slang of Sin. There were quite a few people who came by and told me how much they liked them, and one person even asked how much they cost (they were next to a sign that listed prices, but that seems irrelevant).

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The past month, I’ve slept an average of three hours a night, and have worked an average of 90 hours a week.

My Valentine cards took more time to produce & prepare than I’d expected, although I’ve heard so much very encouraging feedback that’s it’s been quite delightful, especially as it’s my first-ever foray into making & selling my own work. (If you’re interested in a card, they’re available on Etsy, or in Halifax at Duly Noted Stationary on Quinpool and Love, Me Boutique on Birmingham. I’ll also be selling them in person this weekend at the Harbourside Market in Dartmouth.)

I’ve been also working on a whole boatload of projects, in between all the inking and painting and panicking. I’ve got a few websites in the works, a logo, and a printed booklet with a short turnaround time, along with all the usual Wicker Emporium work. I’ve been meeting with all sorts of people to discuss new projects, and am working on finishing up some projects that have been dragging their heels for too long.

Outside of that, I just took my first screen printing class last night, and it was rather delightful. Given that my print work is all digital offset printing, I’ve never had an opportunity to apply any of delightful things I learned in school, like trapping and registration and colour plates, all of which now I have a practical use for. I’m getting more and more excited about doing more work by hand, and am hoping the print process will lead to all sorts of exciting new developments and discoveries.

In short, while sleep would be nice, I’m happy to be mad-busy and thrilled about my work again.

So if you’ve been anywhere within a ten-mile radius of me anytime in the last week and a half, you’re probably well aware of The Big Card Project. I took it upon myself to design a set of six macabre Valentines, thinking it’d be a a fun little project that’d get me away from the computer, make me feel more creative, and force me to relax a touch.

Thumbnail sketches. This is how things started. I hate showing people my sketchbook because things invariably look like they were drawn by a blind five-year-old. Basically, I'm just trying to get the composition right.

Of course, I forgot to factor in the fact that I’m a crazy workaholic perfectionist with an insomniac streak a mile wide whenever I get really passionate about a project. My little lark of a project kept me up late, made an utter warzone of my apartment, and still took far longer than I’d anticipated.

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When I put out a hiring notice a little while ago, I was flooded with resumes. Now, like any business owner, I’m both hardworking and lazy, so I quickly developed a shorthand to help me sift through all the applicants. In short: if I could find a good reason to throw your resume out, it was gone.

In this charming economic climate, if you’re looking for a new job, it may be time to take a good hard look at your own resume, and ensure that you’re not committing any of these cardinal sins.

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When I was working on my new design for this website, I spent a lot of time evaluating my options for image display, as it’s one of the most vital elements of the site. I had very specific requirements for what I wanted, both in terms of the look & feel of the galleries, and the ease of implementation. I spent forever looking through all sorts of Wordpress plugins, hacks, and standalone solutions, and eventually settled (grudgingly) on a Flash-based option: WP-Simpleviewer, based on the SimpleViewer plugin.

Of course, after spending forever (I stopped counting somewhere along the line) spent making it work precisely (and pixel-perfectly) to my liking, it’s now broken. Every single image in my portfolio is now displaying with jagged images. Cue panic! It was fine last time I checked! What on earth happened? I still have no idea, and I hate to think how long it may have been broken before I noticed. (Note to self: keep an eye on these things, alright? Sheesh. My contact form plugin had also deactivated itself without my noticing somewhere along the line. Not good.)

So I’m ditching the SimpleViewer. (I am guessing that much of my weekend will be spent tweaking and implementing the change, so things are going to look terrible between now and then.) I found an alternative that I think will be better, and simpler in the long run, although of course it does mean that I need to go through every portfolio post and upload new galleries: Gallifrey, based on Galleriffic. (If you’re nerd-chic and/or British enough, you’ll recognize this as The Doctor’s home planet, which rather delights me as I’ve just started falling in love with all things Tardis-related.) It works with Wordpress’ built-in gallery functions, is super-customizable, and will even finally allow me to implement my triple-bordered image display that I wanted initially for this site. Simpleviewer, you were fantastic, but it’s time for us to part ways.

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January marks the three-year-anniversary of the day I told my employer to “take this job and shove it” (in all seriousness, HB Studios was a fantastic place to work, but Office Space was what gave me my moment of epiphany required to take the leap). Three years seems like forever ago, and I’ve learned so much since then, but it’s always good to look back and figure out what I could be doing better.

So, where my major issue has always been burnout (both of the creative sort and the plain old good lord, am I ever exhausted! variety), I’m looking to add more work-play balance to my life. Over the past year, I’ve become better at adding play to my life, and, just in the end of December, I found myself unexpectedly doing things I’ve always meant to do while running my business, but have somehow managed to evade quite consistently: eating and sleeping on a daily basis, working less than sixteen hours a day, and playing with creative projects that take me away from The Machine.

My poor kitchen table. It is utterly COVERED in ink stains now.

What I’m excited about for the new year, not surprisingly, are also the things that I’m passionate about in my life. (more…)