Posts Tagged ‘books’

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.

Learning CalligraphyMy 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…)




Fernwood Publishing Website

Thursday, June 18th, 2009




New Year, New Projects, New Sarah

Monday, January 26th, 2009

I’ve had the cra­ziest last-little-while: per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally, oth­er­wise. I took my first vaca­tion in years and dis­ap­peared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suit­cases and back­packs and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing sim­ul­tan­eously, and just what I needed to return to my life & busi­ness with a clean brain & slate.

I have many stories and pho­to­graphs, which are forth­coming. For now, two new pro­jects: the hol­iday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rear­chi­tec­turing of Fern­wood Pub­lishing.




More thoughts on design!

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Because I’m sure that those of you who know me well don’t hear enough of my thoughts on design. This is a ques­tion­naire I filled out in response to a freel­ance job posting. It was quite an exhaustive pro­cess, actu­ally, and I only had a short time­frame in which to com­plete it, but I gave it my best shot. (I’ve edited out the “tech­nical” por­tion and the examples & attach­ments, as that sounded a little too much like a high school test for even me to be inter­ested in it!) (more…)




My One-Year-Old Monsters

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

It’s been offi­cially a year today. A year of no paycheques, no health bene­fits, no vaca­tion time. No nine a.m. starts, no staying indoors all day staring at a com­puter screen, no mon­strous amounts of unpaid over­time. (Okay, I lied, all of those things have happened, and worse.) I love that I can say that I’ve been run­ning my own busi­ness for a year and I’m still in love with it.

I’ve had the chance to work with a huge range of com­panies and people over the past year, pro­du­cing a range of dif­ferent pro­jects. I’ve done news­paper ads, illus­tra­tions, resumes, and a whole slew of web­sites, logos, busi­ness cards, and bro­chures. I’ve learned how to use Quick­books, I’ve stream­lined my pro­cesses, I’ve learned some AJAX tech­niques, I’ve rewritten my CMS code base, I’ve read about grids and typo­graphy and golden ratios. I’ve lost out on con­tracts, and I’ve taken on pro­jects that thrilled and chal­lenged me. I make an awful lot less money now than I used to, and I prob­ably work harder. But it’s just so much fun.

How­ever, my one-year-mark is a time for ser­ious con­sid­er­a­tion. What’s my goal here? Where am I going? How is my little busi­ness going to grow up? And, most import­antly, how can I keep doing what I love, stay sane, and make enough money to keep me in chocolate and red wine for the rest of my life?

I am coming to realize that:

  1. Del­egate, del­egate, del­egate. I am a creature of many tal­ents, but I am not any of the fol­lowing: Salesman. Accountant. Pro­grammer. Mech­anic. Stop thinking you can do everything, and start spending more of your time doing what you are good at and do enjoy.
  2. Nothing comes quickly. Pro­jects will take longer than you expected to reach com­ple­tion. A two-minute fix will turn into a two-hour ses­sion of slam­ming your head against the wall. Some­times you’ll put an inor­dinate amount of time into researching an estimate for a pro­ject you’re not awarded, only to be handed a bigger and better pro­ject a year down the line. A lot of what I do is investment.
  3. It is great to be a work­aholic, but make sure you get at least three seconds of fresh air every day.
  4. Stop taking things so per­son­ally. Not everyone can think you’re the next coming, and some days, you will just suck. This does not neces­sarily mean that you are a total failure in all areas of your life, and it is cer­tainly not cause for a mental breakdown.
  5. Nancy Reagan was right, sort of. Some­times, you should “just say no”. As a small-business owner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of jumping at any­thing that dangles a cheque in front of you, but that’s not really why you’re in this busi­ness, anyway, and it’s cer­tainly not the most important factor to consider.

These are my mon­sters. I’m hoping that, by this time next year, I’ll have mas­sacred at least half of them.




Burnout and Snowy Seasons

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

I did the cra­ziest thing this Sec­ular Hol­iday Season: I took time off work. I drank brandy with my Granddad and went pretty-dress-shopping with my little sister. I adopted an almost-semi-regular sleeping pat­tern. I drove a snow­mobile for the first time ever. I went to mid­night mass, also for the first time ever. I curled up with good books (not for the first time ever). I even went a few con­sec­utive days without checking my email.

It was fantastic.

The week before Christmas, of course, was utterly insane. Ever since I was little, I used to spend the month of December staying up late, gluing and building and painting, frantic­ally trying to get everyone’s hand­made presents fin­ished on time. A few years ago, I stopped this entirely. One year, I did all of my Christmas shop­ping at the liquor store (various pretty bottles full of sauce for my alcy family) and gro­cery store (Hershey’s Kisses for everyone I love). It really did make things easier.

I’m not even entirely sure how it happened, but this year, that beau­tiful idea flew right out the window. I had a week, and a to-do list of other things on which I ought to have been focusing, but somehow I found myself up all night again, trying to teach myself to solder and etch glass and quill paper, all with varying degrees of suc­cess. I was stressed out to the nth degree, my hands were black and covered in cuts, I was rationing my sleep and avoiding my work—but I think that it was really good for me, too. It’s been too long since I sat down and did some­thing with my hands, and I forget how nice it is to get away from this screen.

And I think, in the end of it all, I made pretty neat stuff. I made orna­ments (rel­at­ively suc­cessful), and ginger­bread (suc­cessful in terms of my baking ability, which is nil), and mono­grammed glasses. I spent hours making a styl­ized por­trait of my little-sister/best-friend (which I’ll be sure to post once I’ve fin­ished the final details, so maybe by NEXT Christmas). But by far, the most ambi­tious endeavour was a set of throwing stars for my boyfriend.

The target wasn’t hard:

Although I should have put cork on the top layer, and painted that. It’s com­posed primarily of banker’s box lids stuffed with copies of this awful free barhopper’s magazine that I stole from around town, and it’s going to fall apart pretty quickly.

The throwing stars them­selves were a little hit-and-miss. Only one is actu­ally soldered together, and it took three nights of sanding, sol­dering, and cursing to get that right—and as you can see, it still came out angled wrongly and tar­nished and covered in bits of extra solder. The rest are held together with various dif­ferent glues, elec­trical tape, and wires, and though they don’t look as stun­ningly beau­tiful as I’d been hoping for, they’re all razor-sharp and they stick into things you throw them at.

I’m back into the to-do listing and manic, sleep­less nights, but I still feel refreshed, and as though I’m attacking things with new vigour. Over half of my to-do list con­tains unbil­lable tasks, and I keep get­ting ideas for new pro­jects and pro­cesses. Maybe it’s just because the snow is melting out­side and birds are singing, but I feel like my burnout might be rekindling.

Happy New Gregorian Cal­endar everyone!

P.S. Hey, look! It’s a crazy Art Deco logo!




No, Your Other Left

Thursday, November 29th, 2007

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…)




Quickbooks Was Not Designed for Designers

Monday, February 19th, 2007

So busi­ness is good, I think. It’s still too early to tell, and there’s so much going on that I’m trying to stay on top of. Quick­books, in par­tic­ular, is eating up my time like some sort of mon­ster. I used to think I liked num­bers, but I think it’s time we broke up.

Lots of new work in the pipeline, along with some old pro­jects that are being wrapped up. I fin­ished a logo and web­site for the Nova Scotia Lib­eral Party Lead­er­ship (rather a mouthful) and am main­taining it as the cam­paign pro­gresses. A few new things should be crop­ping up soon, but I’m going to set pre­ced­ence by staying quiet about them until they’re finished.

Going from a part-time to a full-time busi­ness is as much of a chal­lenge as I expected, but I’m get­ting lots of sup­port from people, and I’m learning as I go. And being able to work at 4am, and take a noon­time nap? Yeah, it’s nice.




Client Love Notes

Sarah has a wonderful design sense with a well developed aesthetic. We required her to work with another artist on our project and she was gracious, flexible and helpful every step of the way. Thanks to her insights and expertise we were very satisfied with the results.

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