These dog days are for the birds!

Well, appar­ently my busi­ness should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer hol­i­days, but it’s emu­lating a steam­ship more than any­thing else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hur­ricane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep bal­anced (rel­at­ively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Sat­urdays off, I bought a pretty vin­tage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swim­ming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glistened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Mon­tréal. It doesn’t really count as trav­eling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of won­derful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.

I’m glad I’ve finally figured out how to keep things bal­anced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an intern­ship, and I was so deep in work­aholi­cism I didn’t go out at all. Sum­mers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actu­ally have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been run­ning around doing sum­mery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibre­glass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a count­down, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)

I was so proud when I got this back­ground to work. It’s made of three dif­ferent pieces and a lot of prayer.

Even­tu­ally, I’ll update my web­site with some new pro­jects. There are lots of things I’ve done in the last little while that won’t make it to my port­folio, of course, and some larger pro­jects that are still very much in-progress, but here’s an idea of a few things I’ve pol­ished off recently:

• a mon­ster of a web­site, com­prising around 4,500 Mov­able Type entries: actrees.org
• a Word­Press web­site (and busi­ness cards) for appliedlogic.ca
• a logo, hangtag, busi­ness card, and web­site (almost fin­ished!) for nightmarenibbler.com
• steppinguphalifax.ca (more WordPress)
• another Word­Press web­site for an author: heartofthedreaming.com

Act­rees, in par­tic­ular, left me a lovely client testi­mo­nial for my giant list of client-love:

Trig­gers & Sparks revamped our web­site with a clean, fresh look that made nav­ig­a­tion much easier for users and revealed the wealth of con­tent we had cre­ated. We’ve received many com­pli­ments from our nation­wide net­work of mem­bers. (“Great job, love the look, easy nav­ig­a­tion on the new web­site!” “Far better format! Con­grat­u­la­tions!”)
With her tech­nical know-how and design vision, Sarah cre­ated a web­site that sur­passed expect­a­tions, all within budget. Our web­site is now the public face that we want rep­res­enting our organization.

I would rather not admit how long this web­site has been in pro­duc­tion for, but suf­fice to say, I am NOT a fan of Mov­able Type. How­ever, I am a fan of the client, which (mostly) over­rides any frus­tra­tion. And, sur­pris­ingly, I’m still rather pleased with the design.

Now, whenever I finally get some spare time, I might actu­ally get around to updating this website—it’s starting to suffer from “cobbler’s chil­dren” syn­drome again. Hon­estly, I love being busy, and I love the feeling that my busi­ness is doing well, but I’d like to feel like I’ve got things under con­trol again. Hope­fully, that’ll happen soon, without my needing to resort to Extreme Work­aholic Behaviour!

Tags: business, design, life, site updates