Posts Tagged ‘life’

It’s super-important.

Ser­i­ously, though, I’ve spent the last five weeks with my dom­inant arm in a giant cast. (Although after week two, I regained the use of my elbow and some fin­gers and by week three was able to use an extra couple of fin­gers on my right hand while typing, which has helped. My draw­ings, how­ever, still look like they were done by a five-year-old, and I sign credit card receipts with a squiggle and/or lip­stick kisses.) Mean­while, the work has by no means slowed down, even though my working speed has, and it’s still chal­len­ging to do simple things like make a sand­wich for lunch or empty the garbage.

Accord­ingly, I’ve been working rather long hours and have been becoming intensely stressed out. (Throw in the fact that I’ve quit smoking in sup­port of Bone Healing Power and the fact that I’m some­times still in a good deal of pain–breaking your bones stinks!) Luckily, I have the greatest cli­ents and friends in the world who help me out and under­stand when things take a little longer than they ought, or I’d have gone entirely insane by now.

I am not going here, although I rather wish I were. It’s basic­ally my stress-free island para­dise. Unfor­tu­nately, Croatia is a long drive from here.

So, in the interests of pre­serving that afore­men­tioned sanity, I’m run­ning away to a secret undis­closed island loc­a­tion this weekend, where I’m hoping I won’t be able to get cell-phone ser­vice, and I won’t have any way of leaving until a nice fish­erman comes to get me. My laptop, shock­ingly enough, is staying home (it’s very rarely far from me) and I’m excited by the pro­spect of no elec­tri­city, no emails, and no pos­sible way for me to try to get any work done. I’ve noticed that as I get busier, it’s harder for me to actu­ally take a full day off, in spite of how important it is for my mental well-being.

If you border on the edge of work­aholi­cism, I recom­mend get­ting tough with your­self and for­cing your­self into isol­a­tion. So long as you can return refreshed, and not dreading a massive pile of new emails, it’ll make you so much more pro­ductive in the long run. And so on that note: ciao, amigos!

Thanks mostly to a potent mix of stu­pidity, tequila, and my own inter­min­able love of over-enthusiastic wrest­ling matches, I’ve man­aged to break a bone. (I did tempt fate that night by saying I’d never broken one before, so I sup­pose I shouldn’t have been sur­prised by the out­come, really.)

Not being one to ever do any­thing the half-assed way, I of course man­aged a really nasty, painful break in my right wrist. After seven hours in the ER, three dif­ferent sets of x-rays, and numerous doc­tors drop­ping by to poke me about, stick needles in me, and ask me quite ser­i­ously if I’d been assaulted, they sent me home in a cast that runs from my fin­ger­tips to my bicep, with a handful of paink­illers and no assur­ances that I wouldn’t need to be back for sur­gery in a week.

The ensuing week has been a bit of a mess, but it’s taught me all sorts of valu­able les­sons already.

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For the past few months, I’ve been plan­ning and plot­ting and get­ting myself excited about the pro­spect of another big trip. Those who know me are well aware of my fond­ness for travel, and I haven’t gone any­where inter­esting (Ottawa doesn’t count) for some time. I had big plans (South America, Death Valley, Mexico) that never mater­i­al­ized, for one reason or another, and I was sure that this was the one I’d be able to do.

As it turns out, it’s not. Due to a variety of factors, I’m staying home. While this was a little crushing at first to realize (I was so excited!), I am choosing instead to approach it as an oppor­tunity to enjoy the nice Hal­ifax weather that’s been hap­pening lately (must be a cosmic fluke and/or the uni­verse con­spiring to send me thou­sands of tiny little signs that I should abandon my plans of aban­don­ment) and to spend more time doing fun pro­jects, which I almost invari­ably wouldn’t be doing if I were on the road.

For starters, I’m finally going to invest the time and floor­space into set­ting up a proper work­space for myself, rather than just loun­ging on the couch all the time–I do miss having cre­ative space (why oh why did I sell my drafting table at a yard sale for $15?) and things stuck all over my walls, and some­times the entire upstairs of my apart­ment looks like it’s been hit by a cyc­lone that car­ries nothing but paper scraps, bottles of ink, and empty cans of energy drinks.

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Two years ago, I made an incred­ibly rash decision. I was standing in front of a row of boxes, a little worse for wear due to an excess of cel­eb­ra­tion the prior evening. A sick feeling settled over me, and I decided to run with the impulse.

Two hours later, I was a blonde. (Actu­ally, this isn’t true. It took more like the entire weekend and six boxes of bleach to get there, which ulti­mately des­troyed my hair and left me with no option but cut­ting it all off, even­tu­ally, but that’s another story.) For me, it was a massive change, as I’ve always been prone to identify myself by my hair­colour. People often know me as the girl with lots of bright red hair (admit­tedly, I’m still working on get­ting the “lots” part back), and all the varied pre­con­cep­tions and ste­reo­types people have about red­heads tend to apply to me, too. (Whether that’s an issue of nature or nur­ture, I’m not quite sure, but let’s assume it’s irrelevant.)

So going blonde was def­in­itely an impulsive choice, and part of my desire to do so was to play with my own sense of self. It was fun for a while (mostly because I’d show up places to see friends, and they’d look quite shocked), but even­tu­ally I went back to some­thing akin to my nat­ural colour (after testing out almost every other colour com­bin­a­tion avail­able to me. Ser­i­ously, it’s no wonder my hair ended up des­troyed).  The exper­i­ment led me to realize just how much of who we are—both how we see ourselves, and how others see ourselves—is encap­su­lated in our appear­ance. As much as we may try insist on silly maxims like “don’t judge a book by its cover” and “it’s what’s on the inside the counts”, what’s on the out­side is almost invari­ably a reflec­tion of what’s on the inside.

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Things I’ve learned lately: appar­ently, the internet likes breasts. Who knew?

When I posted my Get­ting Naked entry a few weeks ago, my web­site traffic spiked impressively.

Look! It sort of forms a boob shape, too!

I’ll admit, I was a touch nervous about pub­li­cizing my extra­cur­ricular activ­ities, for a second, for fear of neg­ative back­lash. North Amer­icans in par­tic­ular can be par­tic­u­larly prudish about nudity in all its forms, artistic or oth­er­wise, and where this is, in theory, a Busi­ness Web­site, it did cross my mind that some may con­sider it unpro­fes­sional to dis­cuss such things.

These days, the line between A Busi­ness and That Busi­ness’ Owner is becoming blur­rier and blur­rier. More and more people are freel­an­cing or run­ning sole pro­pri­et­or­ships, and the ubi­quit­ous­ness of Face­book, Twitter, and Google means that, whether we like it or not, we are all bec0ming more and more pub­licly access­ible. I see there being two ways of approaching this, whether you’re a busi­ness owner, career-minded pro­fes­sional, or vag­a­bond with an iPhone.

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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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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.

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…)

Everyone (or at least, every designer) loves a good “logos gone wrong” selec­tion. Most of them are just unin­ten­tion­ally dirty or besmirched by awk­ward kerning, but they’re always a good reminder of why you should always show your work to others before final­izing, just in case there’s a visual you might be missing. (And turn it upside down, too, just to make sure.)

So, to follow up on last week’s post about design in transit sys­tems, I thought I’d post a little tidbit I came across in Dubrovnik.

I’d just landed in town, ready for a new lan­guage, new cur­rency, and new adven­tures. I’d had about four hours of sleep, stretched out on a bench in the neon-lighted bar of the ferry from Italy to Croatia, and I was wan­dering about, trying to orient myself, with a back­pack the approx­imate size and weight of a bear strapped to my back. I head toward what looks like it might be a cash machine and I come across this delightful sign:

Don’t play with guns, alright, kids?

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Everyone who knows me at all knows I’m a fan of a good typeface (and a nice bottle of wine, and a pretty pair of shoes). Less common know­ledge is my fond­ness for public transit.

Sure, it’s often dirty, loud, crowded, and out­moded. Often­times it’s a good way to run into people you’d rather avoid. But it’s an excel­lent measure of the vitality of a city—its public transit system is the lifeblood of its “common” people, and a reflec­tion of how it treats them. Of course, the city in which I live has one of the most miser­able public transit sys­tems I’ve come across. I sold my little Honda Civic just before I left for five weeks in eastern Europe last summer, and I’ve been strug­gling to get by without it ever since. (Winter’s going to be fun.)

A year ago I found cheap air­fare to Mexico, and have since been taking off on a reg­ular basis, trav­eling about and becoming a bit of a digital nomad (which is another story entirely). I’ve been lucky to do a decent bit of trav­eling since then, and I’ve taken buses, trains, sub­ways, fer­ries, and trams in various cities across nine dif­ferent coun­tries, most of which spoke lan­guages unin­tel­li­gible to me. Given the lan­guage bar­rier, the fact that I was almost always solo, and the fact that I can get lost in a three-foot-square glass bubble, I started paying a lot of atten­tion to way­faring signage.

Malostranská sta­tion in Praha

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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!