Archives for the "Personal" category
April 1st 2010
I’ve just finished the biggest slog on our current main project, namely the ExpressionEngine CMS development for the redesign of Yogacampus.com. Before that I worked on the user profiling, research & specification and the information architecture, so I’ve been pretty much go go go since we started this project in the new year.
We ran this project a little differently than we’ve done in the past though, so the visual design and front-end development has yet to be finished. It’s worked really well so far actually: we skipped wireframes and went from page descriptions to developing a dynamic ‘prototype’ while we worked on a brand refresh at the same time.
But ever since the pressure came off from meeting my deadline I’ve found myself unfocused, impatient and irritable. I now have a much freer schedule which seems like a great opportunity get on with some of those ‘odd job’ or ‘rainy day’ tasks that are cluttering up my Omnifocus. Or I could be sorting through boxes of our stuff that needs to be shifted into storage in a month when we head off on our North American Adventure. But I am struggling to do any of these things. I’m certainly lacking enthusiasm even when I do get stuff done.
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February 10th 2010
Following on from my look back at 2009 I wanted to share my plans for 2010. This might seem a bit late to talk about plans for the not-so-new year, but there are some big changes afoot, and I needed a little time to get my own head around them before sharing the news.
Leaving the big smoke
This view is actually one of the good things about our current home & office.
My partner North and I run our own business. It is just the two of us and we work from home. We rarely meet clients in person and when we do, we go to them or meet in town. We like living in Hackney, but we don’t feel like we’re taking advantage of what London has to offer any more.
We’d been thinking we might move out of London in a few years time but then a noisy neighbour moved in next door and ‘broke the camels back’. Having to put up with his loud bassy music for a few hours every afternoon made us sensitive to the rest of the noise surrounding us: the busy road; the live music at the pub opposite; the kids hanging out on the corner with their car stereos cranked up; the list goes on.
So this year we’ve decided to test out the theory that, as self-employed designers of the WWW, we can work from anywhere.
Our test is two-fold.
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Posted by Emily in
Personal
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January 11th 2010
I spent the latter part of 2009 thinking what a stinker of a year it had been. Mistakes I’d made to do with estimating the timing on some jobs meant that the summer months were an incredibly stressful time. But in thinking about writing this blog post (and reading yours) I’ve realised there were lots of good things that happened last year too. Let’s start with the positive.
The Good
ExpressionEngine: workshop, development and meetups
It’s been a big year for me and ExpressionEngine, the CMS platform which I started using in 2008 and on which I have now developed over 10 websites. Here are some of the reasons why:
- I attended Jamie Pittock’s ExpressionEngine workshop at FOWD where I learnt a whole bunch of useful tips and had some major light bulb moments. But I was also reassured that, on the whole, I had been approaching EE development the right way.
- We launched 5 websites developed in ExpressionEngine. Three of these were designed by us, the other 2 were development-only projects involving other designers/agencies.
- I started the London ExpressionEngine meetup. We had our first meetup in September when there were about 9 of us. The attendance more than doubled at our 2nd meetup in November. So far it has been a really nice bunch of people – they’re friendly, easy-going and keen to share their knowledge.
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January 6th 2010
Photo by Judepics on Flickr So I don’t expect you to have noticed, since you wouldn’t have been here (because there hasn’t been anything much to see) that I haven’t been blogging a whole lot. Despite having a long list of story ‘titles’ and ideas for posts, I seem to be unable to bring myself to actually get any posts written and published.
What’s been stopping me? Well, there is Client Work of course, this is a big one. The last 6 months of 2009 were very intense – it is good to be busy of course, but unfortunately it wasn’t all the good kind of busy (a subject I plan to write about later). And even when it is all good busy, I still think it is important to take sometime out from client work.
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Posted by Emily in
Personal
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December 3rd 2009
I seem to have too much to say about Darrell’s post about reclaiming the morning over on Web Worker Daily so I’m posting it here. My morning ritual is very similar to Darrell’s, though I learnt this the hard way.
There were times in the past where I’d be worrying about an email and so go to my desk to check on it first thing, and 2 hours later I’d look up and realise I was still in my pajamas and hadn’t even had a coffee. Worse, was when a client would ring while I was still in that state! This taught me to stick to the following ritual.
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Posted by Emily in
Personal •
Productivity
