And it is personal. The thing is this: I’m very flexible, which is usually an advantage for a freelancer. I just go with the flow of whatever my clients request of me. That doesn’t involve too much seizing of the day, however, and I have often been left frustrated at unaccomplished personal projects. So I am in the business of putting a little more day-seizing into my schedule. This is how I will do it:

The plan

Blogging forces me to take a wider view of what I am doing and where I am heading. It lifts me up out of my strange little world of tea and cats and dead moths caught by said cats until I can see them thar hills in the distance. I can also see and be inspired by and share stuff that others have been doing.

Therefore I aim to blog two or three times a week. Sometimes this might be as simple as sharing a photo I’ve taken or a logo I’ve seen; other times I’ll discuss projects I’ve worked on and there’ll be the occasional thinky pondery one too. I’ll publicise the blogs on Twitter and Google+. I’ll also use the latter as a channel to share interesting finds and discover more things I can pass on to you here.

I’ll still use Twitter in both a personal and professional capacity: I view it as a way for potential clients to get to know who I am and what I stand for – and it seems to be working. I’ve gained more new clients from using it in the last six months than from all other sources combined. Plus, I enjoy it, and it costs me around £2,500 less than advertising with Yellow Pages, which has gained me precisely 0 (zero) clients. Thus, I am all about cutting out the waste and focusing on what really works, for me at least:

Good:

• Social media (maybe even Facebook again, gasp)
• blogging
• being flexible & creative with time use (9-5 often dull, with apologies to Ms Parton)
• burning off adrenaline & also thinking at the gym

Bad:

• Routine (a lot of it, anyway. BORING.)
• Doing whatever pops into my head as a priority. Planning good/repetition bad etc
• Trying to fathom the logic and reason behind anything HMRC says and getting stressed by said illogic and unreason (enter shiny new accountant stage left)
• Old forms of advertising and marketing

Thus, I place my pants outside of my tights and become a bit bloody super, instead of all sort of dithery and uh, what next? etc.

Kapow!

A groundhog

A few months ago I updated my website. Now I’m considering doing it again. Say what?

The last update was an emergency thing (sort of. No-one’s house was burning down or anything). I wanted to add a contact form and other bits and pieces to the site, and the theme I had used originally was dragged down by ancient PHP-coding which flat-out refused to allow me to add a simple little plugin. So readers couldn’t subscribe to my newsletter or download my little guide to working with designers. Pah.

A quick update to the theme, retaining a lot of my original design, and after a weekend of bleary-eyed coding I came up with this site.

Which is okay. But not perfect.

The whole point about good design is that it engages people. It takes dry text and brings it to life. It shows rather than tells. It needs to show the world who you are.

So it’s vital to regularly review how you present yourself to the world. And although I’m not in love with this site, I couldn’t work out in which direction I wanted to travel. Until I saw this documentary on Parkour, and it all became clear. And now I hold an image in my head – a concept, rather – and I know how to move forward.

I knew this site was too wordy. I know that at present, I tell rather than show. Which is a bit silly, for a designer. But I know that a lot of people find design a bit scary, and get put off by the uber-minimalist image-led focus of many designers’ sites. So I wanted to talk to people and tell them about me, about what I do, and about the way I work. But I think I’ve got the balance wrong.

This site doesn’t suit me any more. I’ve grown leaner, fitter, stronger – and it hangs heavy around me.

My new site will be agile. Curious. Engaging. It will present my vision to the world (oh, it sounds hella precocious, I know, but I promise it won’t be so bad!). At the moment I’m all, “this is my business, you should hire me”. I want to be, “this is the energy and attitude I bring to the world – you want some?”

But, as doctors make the worst patients, graphic designers are their own worst clients. It’ll take time. I am blessed with a very busy period at the moment, but hope to have the new site launched for my birthday at the end of May.

Ah – the possibilities! One could drown in them.

(And the title of this blog, in case you were wondering, translates to “Here, hare, here”, obviously…)

A little plugin called Blogger Importer doesn’t appear to be working, so at present I can’t import my old posts. If you’d like to see them, they’re still here.

WordPress is great for several reasons – it’s w3 compatible and very search-engine friendly. Disparity of appearance between various browsers is limited, and this and the fact it’s prettified using Cascading Style Sheets mean that, provided they know their CSS, designers have maximum control over how a site looks.

This is the first site I’ve designed using WP, but I have a few more in the pipeline – watch this space.