Posts Tagged ‘process’

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…)

I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

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.

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!

It seems like it’s been forever since I actu­ally added new pieces to my portfolio—as it is, it’s get­ting over­stuffed. (See the web­site thumb­nail pull-down. Must fix that.) Leaving it all to do in bulk like this makes it a bit of a painful process.

So, in answer to the burning “so what exactly have you been doing all this time, Sarah?” ques­tion, I have the fol­lowing: a logo for Bill Smith, novascotialobstercouncil.com, atlanticgatewayalliance.com, lunenburgframing.ca, an online quilt store, a volun­teer pro­ject for a Sene­g­alese non-profit, a busi­ness card and a bro­chure for Smuggler’s Cove Inn, and, just in case you’re inter­ested, a look at my own branding efforts. As usual, there’s a boat­load of other stuff in the works.

Con­fused by CMYK, RGB, and the like? Got a plethora of logo formats and no idea which to use? Read on for some quick tips about how to get the most out of your colour. (more…)

A quick intro­duc­tion to the two major types of file formats you’re likely to run across, and what to use when. (more…)

I’ve finally settled into Lun­en­burg and am in the pro­cess of repainting my whole apart­ment, which is growing in scope expo­nen­tially every time I find more paint chips in a hard­ware store. I’ve just fin­ished the Ideal­bikes web­site, and I’m cur­rently breaking the ice with two new cli­ents, both based in Lun­en­burg. New web­site should be coming soon, com­plete with a better design and more stuff to look at!

I’m begin­ning to learn my life would be far easier if I were cap­able of just let­ting things alone already.

Instead, I redesign, I redesign, I redesign, and I’m never happy with what I’ve come up with after having spent forty hours staring at it at 400% mag­ni­fic­a­tion, trying to get divs to line up pixel-perfect.

I’m in the pro­cess of adding a little bit of explan­atory text to each entry, having finally suc­cumbed to the wiles of expos­i­tion in the “do I or don’t I?” conun­drum, and as a result, I’m adding some pieces that might have seemed a little off-kilter without proper narrative.

The winter blues have their claws firmly entrenched, and I’ve fin­ished my Doesto­evsky (which was my “beat the winter blues book”, the rationale being that Rus­sians are colder and more depressed than I am), so I’m busy trying to main­tain a feeling of productivity.