The update and the future
I‘ve gone through a number of transitions in my life in the past year or so – including moving from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City, entering a new relationship, and moving back into freelance life. As always, I’m trying to strive for minimalism, including actively simplifying what I own (fairly important in a small Brooklyn apartment!) and removing effluvia, both digital and real world items. Part of that digital debris is the drafts folder in my blog; during my time at PwC I wrote a number of blog entries within the internal company Intranet and have wanted to share them, but haven’t cleansed them for public consumption. I hope to start to publish more of them. Even though I don’t have a huge audience, I still want to write and improve my craft – there will always be a need to communicate via text for a designer as well as via visuals.
In the interests of accountability, here are a few of the professional related goals from my Career Plan that I wanted to share. I’ve been thinking about these a great deal since becoming a freelancer, and in particular from reading as much about productivity, goal setting and mission as much as anything design related. These are in no particular order, and are subject to revision just to make them more ‘SMART’ wherever possible. This isn’t the full list, but it’s a few clear objective goals I can start to implement every day.
Start blogging actively.
That means a commitment of at least one quality post per week, which shouldn’t be hard to do since my interests always have me buzzing mentally, and I like analyzing and sharing them. The trick is to curb the habit of sending long emails or discussing things on Facebook, Twitter, and forums, and instead trying to keep my contributions in the proper forum – which for more in depth work means my blog. For now, it means going through all the draft posts (less than 20 of them) and publishing them. There’s a certain permanence to publishing that I’ve always found daunting, but I can always revisit a post. Indeed, revisiting posts is an interesting way to check progress on something, and with blogging it’s not like a bus that’s left the station; I can call this particular bus back if it’s missed a passenger. Plus the annoyance at seeing posts not fully explored, but not yet leaving the nest is something incredibly frustrating to me. A draft in a folder is both a promise and a curse – until it transforms into something more, it will always be half done, and not fully realized. There is something both disheartening and thrilling about pressing the ‘Publish’ button, but getting over the fear of committing to something written as ‘Never Changing’ isn’t going to change unless you actually try to publish every once in a while. For me, writing is difficult partly because there’s no sense of official completion – what does an ‘85% done on this entry’ feel like compared to 100%? But the only way to get over something is to try it – and blogging actively will help me with it. When I was a kid I dreamed of being a writer; while I’ve parked that in the ‘don’t need to do that now because I love designing with pictures and words more’ column, I like to at least revisit the neighborhood.
Also part of this as a side project is to be less about the criticism of design flaws and more about how to be solution driven. While there’s a long standing tradition of noting what’s broken, we don’t often not what works, or in the case of things still broken, how to improve them. For me, it will be less screen captures of what I don’t like about certain sites (like LinkedIn and Meetup, two of my usual targets of frustration) and what I feel they can improve on them. This will probably be more visual in nature, but where necessary with a good written critique as well. It’s part of my focus on positivity – something I’ll explore in a future post.
Finish refining my site.
I am almost done updating my new theme from Pexato, and while there are some content and design related things I need to address, it’s getting to the point of solid Web site presence, and my to-do list of stuff I want to do (which I keep in Dreamweaver – handy tip, that) is growing shorter. While I eventually will have my own custom designed theme, that’s a longer term goal that I can tackle in the future. The great thing about software like this is that you can always keep active with it; the worst thing about software like this is there’s no shortage of stuff to learn about it. I’ve learned a lesson that too many Firefox extensions does not a coherent browsing experience make; I suspect the same thing is true for WordPress, and I’d like to keep possible plugin conflicts to a minimum. Sometimes iterative design isn’t the best way to tackle a problem, but when it comes to refining something it like a Web site, you can’t have perfect on the first go. Like writing, the idea that there’s no permanent completion for a Web site can be daunting, but there’s also some freedom in innovation coming down a pipeline. Innovation helps to fix what doesn’t work, and tweaking things to fix them is a great way to work on keeping innovation alive.
Refine and solidify my personal brand.
Speaking of refining Web sites, I’ve going to finish up on my career plan, which includes a big section on completely my current personal brand. Along with the branding work, there’s also the other facets that all of us need to incorporate – improving our skill sets and keep learning, stay hungry, stay yearning, stay busy, and all the rest of them. I have a number of useful tools that I’m using – the wiki is one, and having a HTML file I use to keep track of the more tech related aspects while I’m working on my site is another. I’ll have more about branding to say in the future, judging by the categories of my drafts.
Outreach and giving back to my communities.
Developing a career is too difficult to do internally and by one’s self – you have to commit to attend events, network, contact and connect again with people after you meet them. I’ve been focusing on attending non-design related events in New York – the Brooklyn Futurist meetup is one such meetup that overlaps with my interests. I think it’s important to spend time with non-designers wherever possible both professionally and personally. I love meeting and hanging out with designers, but find time away from design and tech helps refresh my love of my core interests – as well as expose me to interesting ideas I might not have otherwise come across. Wherever possible, going to Barcamps and events where the focus is on creating rather than networking and selling is where I need to be. Eventually one day maybe I’ll present, but at this point, being an information sponge and connector is one way that I’m trying to best keep up with my craft.
Another part of the giving back is the ability to mentor and provide support to those starting out in my field. If I had heard about usability (and user experience design) in high school instead of at the end of university, my life might have taken a different speed or tenor. I’m sure I’ll find the appropriate group that’s doing good work in the area, but I’m not sure which is the best focus for mentorship for myself. I do know it’s something that has been itching at me for a while – before the women in technology issue started getting so much press the past couple of years ago. I hope as well to blog a bit more about the issues of gender in business, design and technology – and how corporate culture plays a role in gender, success and the kinds of work we do and success we have in it.
If you have other ideas of what someone should do to work on their professional goals, let me know. I’m always interested in what other folks do to keep growing.
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