Posts Tagged ‘balance’

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…)

After all the hectic-ness and flurry of activity that was the big web­site launch, I took a whole day off for the first time in ages. I curled up with a blanket and read a good hun­dred or so pages of The Master and Mar­garita (which I highly recom­mend), then went out to a Christmas party dressed as, depending on how you see it, either a very large, very talk­ative present, or a Vegas wait­ress on Christmas.

I felt so refreshed the next day that I very nearly made it a whole weekend off work! After all, what are Sundays for if not cat­naps and hot baths, and gen­eral relax­a­tion? How­ever, my photographically-inclined room­mate was applying for a job, and her tumblr web­site was doing a ter­rible job of show­casing her skills.

So we sat down together, spent about half an hour combing through pho­to­graphs of trees, and even­tu­ally pulled together this quick-and-dirty little web­site for her. It’s using the same image-display script I use for my own site, and there are still a few kinks I’ll need to work out, but it’s a good example of what can be pulled together in an evening if you’re motiv­ated enough.

Do check out her web­site—she does some lovely work, and she’s looking to do more!

In the last year, I have moved three times: one in October, when I moved out of my apart­ment in Lun­en­burg to share an apart­ment with my boy­friend; once in March, when I moved all my things from my studio in Lun­en­burg into afore­men­tioned apart­ment (which started to look really, really full), and then just last week, when I moved the majority of my things into storage and the “essen­tials” (bed, clothing, stereo, printer) into the base­ment of my good friend Melissa’s house.

Moving is great, in a sense. It gives you a chance to take stock of your life and throw out the things that aren’t important any­more (many of which never were in the first place). It gives you a clean slate, an oppor­tunity to redefine your life according to your own whims. (more…)

So according to the Gospel That Is the Internet, I have an ambi­dex­trous brain. (See: pretty bal­anced between the left and the right sides.) As with most self-evaluations, this came as a mon­ster of a rev­el­a­tion to me. Sud­denly, all my years of con­fu­sion and ambi­val­ence seem less like a per­sonal failure. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like I’ve been con­stantly fluc­tu­ating between two ends of a dicho­tomy, and it caused me a great deal of anxiety when I was a kid. (I still haven’t learned that I have better things to worry about than my self-identity.) I like math and art. I’m inher­ently chaotic, but always hyper-detail-oriented, and, every now and again, neur­ot­ic­ally organ­ized. I always assumed it had some­thing to do with my bipolar nature. I’m a woman of extremes, and don’t often do the Middle Ground. (more…)

I think I’m finally starting to see how everything bal­ances out. I spent a ridicu­lous amount of effort get­ting everything ready for my launch party, and ended up acci­dent­ally locking myself out of my studio at 7am in the pouring rain. I had one nasty cold, but everyone who came to the launch (and there weren’t many, given that I’m a moron and set it in the middle of a long weekend) came in the door with a bottle of wine and I ended my night happy, blissful, and with a studio that actu­ally looks like a studio now, and is full of colour and art and all those other things I like so much. On the other hand, the internet’s out, so I can’t seem to actu­ally make use of it.

This morning I took my beloved Etta (my Civic) in for her MVI and was told she’s no good any­more, and it’s time to buy a new car. But this after­noon? I offi­cially got my LGDC, which means I am now a pro­fes­sional portfolio-reviewed member of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada. Time for another party!

And in other news, I think I am becoming a better designer. Lots and lots of pro­jects are in the making, and I can’t wait to show them off.