It’s been awhile, more than an entire year since I last published something on this site. In fact the last two posts I published were my year end review for 2019 and my goal setting post at the start of 2020. While I skipped both of those posts this year, I thought I should at least fill you on where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing and what I’m thinking about for 2021.

I won’t do the usual grading of myself to see whether or not I accomplished what I set out to do last January. I’ll just fill you in on what I said I wanted to do and what I actually did. I also don’t have my usual set of goals for 2021. I did take time in December, particularly the week between the holidays, to think over what I did and didn’t accomplish last year and what I’d like to accomplish this year. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t yet sure about the latter and needed more time to think about it.

I’m sure you’ll agree that 2020 was a chaotic year. Instead of letting it drive me crazy, I played into the chaos and made a variety of changes that I’d been thinking about for some time. I figured if things were going to be on the chaotic side anyway, I might as well experience some chaos that I wanted to experience because I thought it might lead to something positive. Not all of those changes have had a chance to settle.

I also realized that while I’ve usually thought of this time of reflection and goal setting as the end of the process, it’s really a snapshot of an ever going process. The change in calendar seems a good arbitrary point to take that snapshot, but there’s no reason I can’t take a snapshot next week or sometime in the spring.

For the time being I decided to install a little bit of stability and work on a few things I either need or know I absolutely want to do, and to continue thinking about what I’d like to achieve this year and what direction I’d like to follow.

But first, 2020.

Stated Goals for 2020

In January of last year I listed 6 goals across 4 general categories. They were mostly focused on writing in general.

• Fiction
  • Finish another round of draft and analysis
  • Write/Publish more short stories
• Non-Fiction
  • Continue writing for new site (Newsletter/Notebook)
  • Make a decision about writing design/development books
• StevenBradley.me
  • Finish developing the site and launch it
• Vanseodesign.com
  • Make a decision about what to do with this site

The very quick review is that I did finish another draft and have started on the analysis and I did continue the writing I wanted to do for the new site and the newsletter associated with it.

However, I have not yet launch the site, I didn’t write the short stories I wanted to write and I’ve yet to make a decision about writing more design and development books or what to do with this site.

Like I said, I’ll skip the grades, though I think it’s fair to say that overall I failed to accomplish the goals I set at the start of 2020. Let me fill you in a little more about what I did and didn’t do and what I’m thinking for 2021.

Fiction

As 2019 was coming to an end, I was finishing a set of weekly calls with an editor I hired to talk over a draft I’d finished earlier in the year. I’d been wanting another perspective, one not my own, and I was hoping over the two months we talked, that I’d end up with a modified scene list for another draft, which I would then write much the way I’d written the previous one.

It didn’t go well. For a variety of reasons I came to the conclusion that I needed a different process to write this draft than the one I’d written the previous year. That draft was more of an exploratory draft where I let myself meander to discover the story. This draft I was trying to tighten the previous draft and have it follow a more direct and less meandering path from start to end.

It took time to work out the new process and I ultimately created one in which I didn’t write prose as you would typically expect, but I did work my way through the story from start to finish, thinking through it one scene at a time. It’s written more as a set of “beats” for what happens in each scene. You could read through it as is and know what happens, but it isn’t written in complete sentences and here and there you might have to piece a few things together.

Despite the lack of prose, the “draft” still over 215,000 words and those words are in good shape for analysis, which is where I hoped to be at the end of the year. Somehow I arrived at exactly the place I wanted to go, even if I took an unexpected route to get there.

I’ve been entering information from each scene into a timeline app I have that will let me quickly filter the scenes so I can focus on a specific act or subplot or that include a particular character and take them all in at a glance. I think it’ll take another week or two to have the entire story entered and then I’m guessing I’m in for a month or so of big picture analysis and all sorts of notes notes in preparation for writing another draft which I’d like to finish by the end of this year.

Unfortunately, I made no progress with short stories other than sharing one through my newsletter and that was a story I’d written the summer before. I never did make the habit for working on more this year. I read a lot of short stories at the start of the year with the idea that it would help generate ideas for stories of my own, but by spring I’d switched to a deeper analysis of a novel and I never made it back to short stories at all.

I recently emailed a connection I’ve made through a writing community who would also like to write more short stories, but struggles to make the time, the same as me. It was actually her idea initially and my recent exchange was to revive the idea. We just started what we expect to be a regular call to talk about our stories in progress and give each other feedback and most importantly keep each other accountable so we both continue to write stories.

The goal is a story a month, which we both think is realistic.

Non-fiction

One of my successes for the year was that I maintained writing for my newsletter. I sent an article each month to everyone who’s subscribed. I also worked on content for the new site, though I struggled for much of the year to figure out what I wanted to write. I knew I didn’t want to launch a set of “how to” writing articles. There are already too many sites that do that and I’d rather not write and rewrite the same exact thing that can be already be found many times over.

Over the summer I worked out that I want to share my creative process by creating what I want and sharing it and offering some thoughts about it. The idea is to create because I want to rather than because I have to post something at a certain time on a certain day. I want to share things in various stages of completion in the hopes that it displays the process of creation instead of only the final result.

I’m also writing a series that combines stories to share a bit of my personal history with some of the concepts that guide me through life. The idea is fill you in a little about me and what led me to launch a site about the creative process, specifically my creative process.

The series is still a work in progress and I’m focused now on finishing the first few posts so have something to publish when the site launches and enough in progress to know I can regularly publish more for a few months.

I didn’t make a decision about writing more design and development books. The chaos of the year had my thoughts elsewhere. I can’t say I’ve missed writing “how to” articles about design and development and had been leaning toward not writing books about either. That is, until recently when I received a couple of emails from readers of my Design Fundamentals book, both of whom enjoyed it and learned from it and had some very nice comments, which have made me wonder if I should think a little more before making a decision.

I’ve thought about repackaging the book with a new cover design and title. I might even
make the content more general since it’s more about composition overall than design specifically and should have value for photographers and artists as well as designers.

I also have an idea for another book about design concepts, something along the lines of how I develop a concept and then execute it. It makes for a nice companion book to Design Fundaments as that latter offers the how for the former.

This is all preliminary thinking at this stage, but it’s something I want to keep in mind and think about this year.

StevenBradley.me

I’m sure I sound like a broken record at this point, but the site really is close to being done. It exists solely on my laptop at the moment. It’s mostly writing the content that’s holding it up, though I do have a little work left on the site itself. I’ve procrastinated designing a home page which I’ll need to design and develop and there are some tweaks and fixes throughout the site that I need to work on.

I decided to move away from WordPress. While I think the recent changes with Gutenberg will prove good for WordPress and the people who use it, I don’t think the changes prove quite as well for me. What I originally liked about WordPress was the small core and ability to add functionality through plugins, but more and more of the core now seems to include functionality I neither need nor want and I feel like I’m being forced to work according to someone else’s idea of how I might work best instead of how I actually work best.

I’ve also felt limited at times by what I could create within the software as opposed to the greater flexibility of standalone HTML and CSS so I decided to give Grav CMS a try. I looked into a variety of static site generators and systems that didn’t require a database and in the end chose Grav. It offered a backend admin interface and seems to have a robust enough plugin community to meet my needs. I had to learn Twig and Yaml, but neither was difficult to understand, at least well enough to build the site.

It’s mostly a new way of doing things and I spent some time familiarizing myself with a new content management system for the first time in about 15 years. It took a little while, but now I can find my way around Grav and I’ve enjoyed using it so far, especially as it makes it easier to art direct the new site. There are probably some got’chas I’ve yet to encounter, but overall I’m happy with the change, at least locally since I’ve yet to upload the site to a server and make sure it still works.

My progress was slowed in part when I purchased an iPad Pro this summer. I’d been holding out trying one until it had a keyboard and trackpad, and the Magic Keyboard Apple released in the spring had both. I added the Pencil too. I bought the 11 inch model thinking I’d try to differentiate it from my laptop, but it became my default computer in less than a week.

Unfortunately, you’re limited in how much development work you can do on an iPad. Apple doesn’t allow you to run code directly on the device so setting up a real local development server is impossible. I did find an app called DraftCode, which is like MAMP lite for iOS. It has support for WordPress, but I couldn’t get Grav to work inside it.

Instead, I opted for an external keyboard and trackpad for my MacBook Air, which I’d bought before Apple gave up the garbage keyboard they used for a few years. One of the reasons changing to the iPad was so quick for me was because of how bad the keyboard on my Air is and how little I want to type on it anymore. I’m thinking an external keyboard and trackpad will fix that and I’ll prop the Air on a stand and use it that way when I need to code.

That said, the site is close. I’m working on creating content for the launch and I’ll be getting back to the last of the design and development work within the next week or so. I’m hoping to have the site launched by the end of February, if possible, or as soon as possible after, if not.

VanseoDesign.com

Like the decision whether or not to write more design and development books, I never made the time think about what to do with this site. I could blame it all on the year that was, but something tells me the chaos of 2020 had nothing to do with it. I enjoyed not feeling the responsibility of having to write for the site and maintain it beyond clearing out spam comments.

That said, I did find myself wanting to write something here and there that would probably have been most appropriate to publish here. Given the time I’ve put into Grav, I figure you might enjoy reading a little about it. I did design a new site too and will want to share thoughts about it when I finally launch it. I can also imagine you might be interested in what I’ve thought of the iPad Pro and accessories and perhaps tablets in general.

I hope once the changes I implemented in recent months settle a bit, I’ll have more time to really think about this site and what to do with it. Ideas have popped into my head on and off, but I really need to dedicate some time to writing out all my thoughts and organizing them so I can make a decision.

What’s the Plan for 2021?

I don’t really have a plan yet for 2021 beyond letting some changes settle and working on a few things I know I need to finish as soon as possible. My thought is that I’ll give things a month or so to stabilize around the work I know I have to do and I’ll continue to reflect and rethink what I want to work on for the longer term.

In my most recent newsletter I wrote that stability would be my overarching theme for the year, but I can already see a need to be more efficient with my writing and I’ve been thinking about ways I can do that, which is the subject of the newsletter I’m working on now.

Reworking my overall writing process in terms of what and where I publish will be a goal throughout the year. I think the key is going to be flipping the way I think about what I schedule to write so that I’m writing more of what I want and less for a specific destination.

I’m still waiting on some information from others on a couple of projects to know if and when I should schedule them and I think I’ll have a better idea by the end of the month about what and when I’ll be working on.

Closing Thoughts

2020 was a chaotic year for a lot of people. My day to day existence didn’t change all that much, but I tried to go with the flow and use the chaos around me to make some changes in the way I do things.

I think it’s time now to stop making changes, or at least slow them down, so I can reform habits and routines and get back to being more productive. Hopefully the little bit of stability I created for myself to start the year, will be all the time I need to work out the rest of the 2021.

I can’t promise how often I’ll be here, since I don’t yet know myself, but I figured I should at least let you know that I haven’t gone away entirely and that I’m still thinking about this site.

I hope this year brings whatever you would like it to bring and I hope we talk again before another year is out.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

Join me as I share my creative process and journey as a writer.

This, being the first post of the year, is the one in which I set goals for the year ahead. Last week I reviewed the goals I set in last January’s version of this very post. I mentioned how one of my overall goals for the year quickly changed and I allowed myself a little time to sit back and see what work and projects I naturally gravitated toward when I had time for them again.

When I looked back at what I did and didn’t accomplish in 2019 it was clear that I jumped into writing projects that were fictional in nature or those relating to fiction in some way, but I hesitated and avoided most everything to do with design and development projects, writing and otherwise.

While I did make progress building a new site for myself and enjoyed the process, I could feel myself procrastinating often enough. It’s given me a lot to think about, more than I can work out in this post alone, but I’ll do my best to share where I am in my thinking.

First,, since I’ve been writing these goal setting posts for a long time, here are links to previous years, if you want to see how my goals have changed over time.

• My Goals for 2019—I Must Be Crazy To Think I Can Do This Much In One Year
• My Goals for 2018—Let’s Get Those Priorities In Order
• My Goals For 2017—It’s All About Creating Assets
• My Goals for 2016 — Reworking My Business Model
• My 2015 Goals—In the Middle Of A Transition
• My 2014 Goals — A Continuation Of Journey Started In 2013
• What I Want To Achieve In 2013
• My Goals for 2012
• The Year To Come: Looking Ahead To 2011
• Do You Have Goals For Your Business? (2010) Part II
• Looking Back At 2008 And Ahead To 2009 – Part II
• Looking Ahead In 2008

You can also find a similar list of review posts in my post from last week where I reviewed my goals from 2019.

General Thoughts

The last few years I’ve been coming up with overarching goals or themes for the year. Last year I chose efficiency and spontaneity. I followed the latter, but quickly changed the former to simplicity.

I struggled to come up with words for this year’s overarching theme. I want to share more of my fiction writing in order to get some feedback and thought either sharing or feedback could work, but I wasn’t sure how either applied to this site.

I played around with words related to change and transition and thought since I have some decisions to make about this site that words like decision or clarity would work, but I wasn’t sure how they applied to my fiction writing.

Eventually it hit me that the word and overarching goal for the year should be momentum. Last year some unexpected things took up more of my time than I was aware would happen. It was all good, but the unexpectedness kept me from getting to a few planned projects, particularly around this site.

I think where fiction is concerned I built a lot of momentum toward my long term goals and I see no reason to deviate from the direction I’m already going. If anything I want to build on the momentum. I want to get out of the way and keep going as I have been.

I also thought it would make for another test. I’ll continue into 2020 the way I went out of 2019. I know what I need to work on early in the year and I’ll see what I’m drawn to after and use what I learn to make a few decisions for 2021 and beyond.

Of course I’m still setting some specific goals to take advantage of the momentum from last year that I want to carry me through this one. Here they are.

• Fiction
  • Finish another round of draft and analysis
  • Write/Publish more short stories
• Non-Fiction
  • Continue writing for new site (Newsletter/Notebook)
  • Make a decision about writing design/development books
• StevenBradley.me
  • Finish developing the site and launch it.
• Vanseodesign.com
  • Make a decision about what to do with this site.

You’ll notice I’m setting fewer specific goals and most are either continuations of the same goal from last year or a similar goal to one I completed. You can also see I have some thinking to do and decisions to make.

Fiction

As with last year, the goals in this category are by far the most important to me and if I get nothing else done besides these, I’ll consider the year successful.

Write Another Draft and Continue the Editing Process

I worked with an editor this fall. I talked her through my draft and she’s offered feedback and suggestions. We’ve worked together to reshape the underlying story so I can write another draft that’s a little tighter than the previous one.

Last year’s draft was meant to be a bit meandering so I could discover a few things along the way. That meant I brought a lot back that didn’t belong and the draft needed to be shaped a little to get at the story inside.

I plan to spend the winter and maybe early spring writing the second draft after which it’ll be another round of analysis and shaping toward an eventual third draft. The last few years I’ve been converting the process I developed to write articles here into one that lets me write fiction. I’ve worked my way into the editing phase, with the publishing phase coming next.

Write and Publish Some Short Stories

Speaking of publishing, I’d like to work on a few short stories I’ve written the last couple of years and make them ready for publication. Where? I don’t know yet and it may end up being through the monthly newsletter I send out.

I’ll leave the goal a little vague in terms of specific numbers and where I publish, but the general idea is to incorporate more short story writing this year and to start sharing some of them.

Non-Fiction

My goals here are pretty much the same or very similar to those I listed under non-fiction last year.

Continue Writing for Newsletter and New Site

I’m pretty sure I’ll be good when it comes to the newsletter as I worked out a good rhythm for writing them last year. This year, and hopefully earlier than latter, I need to get a few months worth of content created for the site and then work out a rhythm to publish on the site regularly or semi-regularly.

Make a Decision About Writing Design/Development Books

So far I’ve been disappointed with the results of self-publishing through Amazon. I’ve admittedly done nothing to market the books I’ve published or promote myself in any way, but I was curious to see how they might sell without much intervention on my part. Not well it turns out.

That doesn’t mean it can’t work. Every month Amazon does send me a little money for the few books I’ve sold. It’s not too hard to think that with enough books and a little marketing effort on my part, I could set the wheel in motion to bring in a little money year over year. I also have ideas for at least a half dozen and more likely a dozen books I know I’m capable of writing.

I do have the beginnings of a series on SVG started and an idea for a book about developing design concepts. What I most need to do though is make a decision.

It’s a tough decision. The specific goal will be to decide if I think it’s worth the time and effort to write and publish books about design and development, though assuming the decision is to continue, I should probably try to write the next one.

Steven Bradley.me

My one goal here is to complete the goal from last year and finally launch the site. It’s really close and this will be one of the first things I plan to take on this year.

The majority of the time will be in creating the content for launch and building up the momentum so I can continue to publish regularly or semi-regularly throughout the year.

I won’t be able to have it all created in a week, so launch is still a couple of months away at best, but after writing the next draft of the novel, this will be my highest priority to start the year.

VanseoDesign.com

That brings me to this site and my one goal for the site in 2020 is to figure out what I want to do with it. Right now, I have little to no idea.

This past year was telling. I mentioned last week how I didn’t miss working on this site all year. I think it’s mainly that my interests have changed enough that I don’t automatically do the research involved to write what I would typically publish here. Research once fun, is now work, and work I need some kind of reward for doing.

I don’t see myself ever writing here to a weekly schedule like I did for years. At the same time I’ve put a lot into this site over the years and it seems silly not to take advantage of whatever it is I’ve built. It’s not like I have no interest in design and development. It’s just a different interest that isn’t necessarily aligned with what this site’s been for the last decade.

That signals change is in order, but what kind of change isn’t clear to me yet. Maybe it means I post occasionally when I have something to say or maybe it means having an idea for a book and sharing a series or two in the hopes of building anticipation for the book when it’s available for purchase.

I have some general ideas that I need to think through and fill in with details. I’ve put a lot of work into this site over the last 14 years or so and want to see it continue to live. The question is what’s the best way to put what’s already here to use so it’s valuable for both you and me in a way I can maintain in the future.

Ultimately my goal with this site for 2020 is to figure out what to do with it in 2021 and beyond. I’ll block out some time to write down my thoughts and keep thinking until I’ve reached a decision.

Closing Thoughts

Again, my overarching goals this year are to continue with momentum from last year’s goals and to start sharing more of my fiction writing. I have a few goals from last year I still need to complete and some obvious next steps with most of the rest. The lone exception is this site, which needs me to make a few decisions more than anything.

As I ask every year, do you set and review your goals and if so do you find it helpful? I do. I don’t think it necessarily gets me to complete more of my goals each year, but it offers a big picture window of myself and what I really want as opposed to what I say I want.

Happy 2020 a week into the year. As always, I hope it’s a good year for both of us as well as everyone else on the planet.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

Join me as I share my creative process and journey as a writer.

I’ve been writing these and similar review and goal setting posts for a long time because I think it’s a helpful exercise to plan a direction and see how well you adhered to the plan. There’s a lot to learn both in what you accomplish and what you choose not to pursue.

As is my usual custom, this last post of the year will look back at 2019. I’ll remind you of the goals I set at the start of the year and review my success or lack thereof before giving myself a rather arbitrary grade.

Here are similar year end reviews from year’s past if you’re interested in seeing how I’ve done over the last decade or so.

• 2018 Goals Review—A Surprisingly Productive Year
• 2017 Goals Review—Looking Back On The Year That Was
• Grading My 2016 Goals—Even A Curve Won’t Help This Year
• Grading My 2015 Goals — I Passed Thanks To The Curve
• My 2014 Goals—Always Keep Your Hands Busy
• My 2013 Goals — An Unexpectedly Successful Year
• 2012 Was A Reasonably Successful Year
• Why 2011 Was A Complete Failure (And A Complete Success)
• The Year That Was: Looking Back At 2010
• Do You Have Goals For Your Business? Part I (2009)
• Looking Back At 2008 And Ahead To 2009 – Part I
• Looking Ahead In 2008 And Back At 2007

Next week, with the first post of the new year, I’ll look ahead to 2020 and share what I’d like to achieve before year’s end.

My Goals for 2019

When 2019 began I set two overarching goals for the year, efficiency and spontaneity. The former was because I was taking on a lot of projects and knew I would need to be more efficient to finish them all. The latter was because I felt I’d been trying to plan things too much in advance in my fiction writing that would be better figured out along the way.

I successfully achieved the latter goal. I wrote my way through the draft of a novel in which I made decisions about the story in the moment instead of planning everything in advance. I’ve applied the process to other writing, including some short stories I wrote this summer. However, before spring was over, I’d changed my goal of efficiency to simplicity.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really was trying to do too much. Instead of trying to be more efficient, I dropped everything except for what I needed to do in the moment and then watched to see which of the dropped projects I would gravitate to when time allowed. I thought it would be a good way to figure out what I was most and least interested in doing.

I’ll talk a little more about this next week. For now here’s a reminder of the specific goals I set at the start of the year.

• Writing Fiction
  • Finish the draft
  • Successfully complete the Story Grid editor course
  • Continue directed writing practice
• Writing Non-Fiction
  • Continue newsletter and incorporate writing for new site
  • Write and Publish new Design/Development books
  • Figure out how this site fits?
• Design/Development
  • Launch site on StevenBradley.me
• Business/Marketing
  • Expand my publishing empire
• Creativity/Productivity
  • Improve my use of Ulysses
  • Add more spontaneity to my writing

I set a lot of goals, more than usual and as expected I didn’t complete a lot of them. Read on for the details.

Writing Fiction

I set three fiction writing goals and I’m happy to say I completed all three exactly as I set out to do.

Finish the Draft

I started working on this particular draft in the fall of 2018, but I was struggling through it at the start of 2019. In late February I spent a week in Nashville for an editor’s course and upon returning I flew through the rest of the draft. I developed a process where I would get behind the computer each morning and write my way through a scene before thinking about what would happen in the next scene and then calling it a day.

The process involved me directing and then trusting my subconscious to work on story problems after I stopped working for the day. The process itself evolved out of the one I developed to help me write articles here.

I spent much of the summer analyzing the draft and this fall I’ve been talking weekly with an editor who’s helping me shape the story in preparation for the next draft. I was hoping I might get to the next draft before the year was out, but I didn’t quite make it. I’ll be starting it the first or second week of January instead.

Grade: 1.0

Successfully Complete the Story Grid Editor Course

The course is why I was in Nashville in February. It lasted a week and my brother joined me midweek so I stayed an extra day after. The course was intense and I learned a lot in a short amount of time. It was so densely packed with information, I’m still processing some of close to a year later.

One thing I learned was that I had three months to complete an assignment to earn certification. I spend two months reading and rereading three novels and writing an analysis on each based on the methodology we learned in the course.

I’m happy to say that not only did I learn a lot about story structure, but I also passed the course and can officially say I’m a certified Story Grid editor, whatever that may mean.

About the only downside to the experience was that the assignment took longer than I expected to complete, which meant less time to work on other things. It wasn’t much of a downside, but it did help convince me to change my goal of efficiency to one of simplicity.

Grade: 1.0

Continue Directed Writing Practice

Another completed goal, though one I really didn’t have to do too much to make happen. Success here happened quite naturally without any help from me.

The idea with this goal was for me to focus on both left brain and right brain activities in regards to writing. In 2018 I specifically chose exercises each morning to ensure I worked both sides of my brain.

This past year working on a draft exercised my right brain and analyzing the story exercised my left brain. When I was writing the draft I was also analyzing stories in preparation for the course and then analyzing stories for the assignment.

When I was analyzing the finished draft, I was also writing short stories for another course through the Story Grid community. This year my projects worked out to naturally do what directed writing practice is meant to do.

Grade: 1.0

Writing Non-Fiction

In addition to fiction writing goals I set three for writing non-fiction, though with far less success.

Continue Newsletter and Incorporate Writing for the New Site

I did keep up with the newsletter and have hopefully continued to improve the quality of writing. I consistently sent one on the first Tuesday of each month (exceptions for occasional Tuesday holidays). I think I developed a good rhythm and general format for writing the newsletters and I think it’s fair to call this part of the goal a success and give myself 0.5 as a partial grade.

When it came to writing for the new site, my hope was to have several months worth of content ready by now, but I have exactly none. I’ve done more thinking about the site and what I want it to be about. I have lots of notes for content, but I’m really only just now starting to create it.

I have decided on the general theme for the site, which will be the creative process. I’ll offer my thoughts about creativity and the general process of being creative. I’ll share my own process, ideally as it happens so I can share work in progress and let people see how a finished piece of something is developed over time. The topic will also give me opportunities to take side trips in how to build confidence and how to more objectively evaluate your work and similar.

But again, I haven’t actually created any of what will be on the site so it’s hard to call this part of the goal a success. I’m giving myself 0.25 for all the thought and notes and partially complete content and to make myself feel better for the things I didn’t do last year.

Grade: 0.75 (admittedly high)

Write and Publish new Design/Development books

If I had, you probably would have heard about it. The editor certification took longer than I anticipated and a couple of weeks after I finished, the community offered a new course that kept me busy for a few months.

I was effectively writing a short story every week this past summer and as glad as I was to have taken the course, it was already late September by the time I had an opportunity to work on any design or development books, which simply didn’t happen this year.

Before the editor certification homework and the course began, I did set up a project for a series of books about SVG. My plan was to use everything I’ve written here as a draft and work toward turning it all into a cohesive book or rather series of shorter and more focused books.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get back to it after the summer. Everything is still set up for writing the series in the future and during the year I gained interest in another book about design concepts that I’m currently thinking through.

Grade: 0.25 (again, admittedly high and arbitrary)

Figure Out How This Site Fits

As you may have noticed, I didn’t publish a lot on the site in 2019. I mentioned at the start of the year that I would need to take some time away from it, but I wasn’t sure how long. The time away never really ended.

I can’t say I missed working on the site. There was never anything pulling me to write something here and that was telling in this year of simplicity. After letting a bunch of things drop to see which ones called me back, this site wasn’t one of the things calling me back.

That said, I don’t plan on giving it up. I don’t expect to ever write to a weekly deadline like I’ve done in the past, but it’s not too hard to see myself writing when I have something to say or spending a little time exploring some interest and then sharing it over the course of a couple months of posts.

That’s more thought for next week though when I look ahead to 2020. The goal for 2019 was pretty much a failure. I’ll give myself a few points for having thought a lot about it, even if I’ve yet to come to any conclusion about to do.

Grade: 0.25 (the pattern of arbitrarily high grades continues)

Design/Development

My one goal here was to launch my new site on StevenBradley.me and since there’s no site (only a signup form to the newsletter), it’s hard to call this goal a success.

I did rework the design based on the one I had going and I put some time in this fall to develop it on Grav CMS, which meant a few days learning about Grav CMS. I still have a little work before I can call the development finished. I want to rework the layout with CSS Grids and I generally need to clean up the code.

Mostly what I need at this point is the content. As I mentioned above, I have worked out what the site will be about, but I’ve yet to actually create the content for it. It’ll be an early goal for next year as you might expect.

Grade: 0.5 (I really am close and did put time into this last year and might even have something to say about all the work in the coming year.)

Business/Marketing

My goal was the facetiously stated expand my publishing empire. I did exactly nothing toward this goal. The idea was to set up the books I’ve written for sale in marketplaces beyond Amazon, places like Apple Books and Barnes & Noble, and whoever else will let me sell books on their platform.

I already told you that I didn’t write any new books and I’m telling you now that I didn’t set up those already written anywhere beyond Amazon. I’ve been so focused on writing analyzing fiction that I didn’t think much about my obviously illusionary non-fiction publishing empire.

Grade: 0.0

Creativity/Productivity

I had two quick goals here, to improve my use of Ulysses as my writing platform of choice and to add more spontaneity to my writing, particularly my fiction.

Improve My Use of Ulysses

I experimented a little with organization and tagging in Ulysses, but I haven’t worked out a good system as of yet. I think it’s less to do with Ulysses the app and more to do with me not really being sure how to organize all my ideas and partially written pieces.

I have a feeling this is one of those things that will have to evolve organically for me for time.

Grade: 0.25 for the effort

Add More Spontaneity to My Writing

I’m glad I can close with an absolute yes. The draft I wrote last was written much more spontaneously than drafts I’ve written in the past as were the short stories I wrote this summer.

The focus on spontaneity has made me more productive as a writer as I can now trust that I can get through a piece of writing with less overall planning and I think it also helps in developing an individual style in that spontaneous writing requires more of me than tricks of the craft in the initial draft.

It’s also allowed me to experiment with a piece while I’m writing. I can play around with the style from beginning to end, for example, and settle on something during the rewrite. Being more spontaneous has given me permission to play around more while writing and see what I come back with.

Grade: 1.0

Overall Grade

If for some reason you were adding all my silly grades as you read your way through this post, you’ll know I’ve given myself an overall grade of 6.0 out of 10.0 (1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.75, 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.0, 0.25, 1.0). I admit it’s an arbitrary system and this year I was a generous grader in a few places mostly to make myself feel better about not getting as much done as I would have liked, but it’s my site so I get to make the rules.

Closing Thoughts

6.0 is actually not a bad grade and I wasn’t really all that generous. I did better than I expected when I started to work on this post and there’s a clear observation to be made.

When it came to writing fiction, I pretty much nailed it. Most of the 1.0 grades above relate to fiction. Where my grades were low, the goals were generally about non-fiction, design, and development. Both are telling, especially in a year where I let things fall away to see what would return.

I think the last couple of years I’ve made the transition from being a freelance designer/developer to being a writer, and now I have to figure out what to do with design and development in the future. I don’t think 2019 was an aberration, but there’s still a lot here, a lot that I think can serve a purpose. My thoughts about how are for next week when I look ahead to 2020.

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

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I’m in New York visiting family and as we do most year’s we spent yesterday walking around Manhattan and taking in the sights and museums and as I do most year’s I thought I would share a few pictures from the day.

Window Displays

Macy’s is only a block away from Penn Station and so it’s naturally our first stop. This year Macy’s had different displays along different sides of the building.

One side displayed some holiday looking characters. I caught the reflection of my brother in the mailbox of the second picture.

The other side had a neon theme and yes you could scratch Willow’s nose, though I opted not to.

Sak’s featured characters from Frozen, though not having seen either the first or second movie, I had no idea who they were.

New York Public Library

We stopped at the library this year to see an exhibit featuring pictures and letters, including some handwritten ones, from J.D. Salinger. As you probably know Salinger became a recluse after the success of The Catcher in the Rye and so no cameras were allowed inside the exhibit.

I did however get a picture outside the library and one of the tree inside.

Museum of Modern Art

Our main stop was MOMA. It just reopened after being closed a few months of renovation that added 40,000 square feet of new gallery space. I’ve always liked the building itself, which offers interesting views of other parts of the museum and the city itself.

Of course the main reason to be there is the art. Here’s a sampling of what we saw.

Central Park

This year we didn’t walk through Central Park, but we did walk alongside it for a time and I managed to snap a few pics, including a couple of horse drawn carriages riding up Central Park West.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’ll leave you with a couple of pictures from our walk. The first is a hippo statue, that I haven’t captured before as far as I can remember.

The second you might recognize as one of the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I think it’s one of the few times I didn’t cut off the top.

Once again Happy Thanksgiving to every in the U.S. and Happy Thursday to anyone not celebrating.

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You grow by pushing past your boundaries, by challenging your existing thought and ways of seeing, by being open to new possibilities and new ways of doing the same old thing. You need to see things from multiple points of view in order to develop empathy for those who will use your design.

Learning to see things from different angles and new perspectives gives you a deeper understanding of them. The ability to see the same thing from many sides is an invaluable skill for designers to possess as it allows you to create and test multiple possibilities on your way to your best solution.

This is especially true when designing a logo, something you want to last and have viewed as timeless. It generally takes a lot of different ideas to reach timeless.

I recently had the opportunity to read The Elements of Logo Design : Design Thinking, Branding, and Making Marks by Alex White and I think it does a great job showing the process of designing a logo in a way you won’t typically find in a how to logo book. It offers a different perspective.

I’ve read and enjoyed two of Professor White’s other books, The Elements of Graphic Design and Thinking in Type: The Practical Philosophy of Typography. One thing I’ve noticed in all three is that Professor White tends to offer a different take on subjects than what I’ve read in other books. He’ll sometimes skip things most other books mention on the topic, even though I can tell he would agree with what the others books have written. He has a different way of looking at the same thing.

In his own words, “Alex White is a designer, lecturer, professor, and author of books on graphic design and typographic practice, theory, and philosophy.” That’s quite a lot and you can click on the link at the start of this paragraph if you’d like to know more details.

What’s Inside?

The book is divided into seven chapters, the first few discuss general principles about graphic design and the last few look at how those principles are specifically applied to logo design.

1. Five Steps to Improve Your Design Process: Using Logic to Refine a Design Idea—I’m not sure I’d call them steps, but the five are: relationships, contrast and similarity, hierarchy, structure, and color. The chapter discusses what each is and how they’re used in graphic design.
2. Putting It Together: Achieving a Unified Design—Unity is the goal of all design and it comes about through a design process of refining intentional relationships between parts, the clearer the better. You build those relationships through your use of the other four steps.
3. Frozen Sound: Emphases and Pauses in Visual Language—This chapter is about typography, though instead of offering advice about the ideal line-height or which typefaces to pair with which, it compares letterforms to frozen sound and typography to frozen speech. It compares the visual treatment of type to music through the use of rhythm in both. Like I said, a different perspective.
4. How a Logo Fits into a Company’s Branding Strategy—This chapter considers a logo as company dress. It talks about logos in terms of their benefit for a given company and what kinds of logos work better for smaller and larger businesses. It’s all about what makes for a good logo from the perspective of the company.
5. How to Build a Logo: Type and Space
6. How to Build a Logo: Image and Space
7. How to Build a Logo: Type, Image, and Space

The last three chapters build on each other and everything else that came before them in the book. These chapters aren’t “how to” in the traditional sense as you might guess by now.

All three chapters discuss how designers only have type, space, and image to work with. The first of these three chapters talks about how to build intentional relationships with type and space and it does so mostly by looking at examples and showing you. The second chapter discusses how to do the same with images and space, and the third talks about unifying the relationships in all three.

My Take

I mentioned perspective at the start of this review. To give you an idea how this books sees things differently, here’s how the book opens in the two-page spread just before the first chapter.

Having “nothing wrong” with a design is a long way from having “something right” with it. If you can state what is right with your work, you have applied logical thought. If not, random prevails

If it’s random it’s wrong

I think that gives you an indication of the shift in perspective you might receive reading The Elements of Logo Design. It’s a subtle shift, but it leads to a book that shows examples of designs that have nothing wrong and it also shows examples of designs that have something and usually more than one thing right and why the latter are the better logos.

The book follows a format where the text is always about the images that accompany it. Text in the margin will state something like “good design is a balance of contrast and similarity” and then it will point to an accompanying image and note how both contrast and similarity are used in the design. You’ll find yourself scanning back and forth a lot between the text and the accompanying images if you want to get the most of the book.

I’ve found a funny thing happens when I read an Alex White design book, including this one. As I read I always enjoy what’s been written and I find the example images and graphics helpful. I also always find myself wondering at times how come he didn’t include X or why is a chapter about Y included in a book about Z. Then I get to the end of the book and realize that everything that needed to be in the book was in it and everything else was left out. And I always feel like my understanding of graphic design has improved tremendously.

You should also know this isn’t going to be like other design books that assume you know nothing about design and are for a complete beginner. I think Professor White assumes you know the basics. He’ll cover what he needs to so you can understand the rest of the book, but he isn’t going to spend time covering the details of a whole bunch of things you probably already know.

Because of that, you might not make this your first book on logo design, but I wouldn’t wait too long after you have read your first, to read this one. I think the perspective given is both good and interesting and I think it will help you build a context for what makes for a good logo and how to go about designing one.

As much as anything, this book will help you better understand and appreciate the logos you see all around you. I think the book gives you plenty of information to judge for yourself whether a particular logo is good or bad and perhaps more important, why it’s one or the other.

In the end I think the book isn’t so much a how to book as it is a way of seeing and understanding what makes for a good logo from the perspective of both the client and the designer.

Maybe it won’t be your very first book about logos or graphic design, but it’s definitely a book worth reading once you know a little of the language of graphic design in general and logos in particular. Then again that may simply be a perspective I’ve locked myself into since I have read other of Professor White’s books prior and find it hard to imagine The Elements of Logo Design any other way as a result. Perhaps I should read it again and gain a new perspective.

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I wasn’t looking forward to it all. I came up with a design a few years ago that I mostly liked. It wasn’t quite what I wanted and probably still isn’t, but I liked it well enough. I had an idea for the navigation that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped and it wouldn’t have worked so well with the WordPress admin bar so I thought I drop the idea (for now) and go with your standard navigation bar across the top.

For a few days I kept the old page template I developed open in a browser window and looked at it and avoided doing much else. When I reached the point where I couldn’t procrastinate any longer I created a blank .html file and a blank .scss file and opened familiar apps Coda and CodeKit and started to reproduce what I saw in the browser with new code and a few tweaks to the design along the way. When I had the one page template set, I began working on the next one until I had a template for all the different types of pages that would appear on the site.

To be honest, I’m still in that phase as I’m writing this and once I have all the templates ready I’ll still need to take my code and develop a WordPress theme based on it. Given the changes happening with WordPress I probably need a few days to brush up on theme development too. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that part of the process any more than I was the basic front-end development of the page templates, but the latter has turned out well so I’m hopeful the former will turn out well too.

My surprise at how much more I’ve enjoyed working on the site than expected has led me to think about why and so unlike the last couple of posts, I want to turn to the positive side.

I thought I’d fill you in a little more about what led me to build the site now, since I’d been avoiding building it for so long and then I’ll share why I think I’m having more fun than I thought I would. Finally I’ll share where I think my renewed interested might lead since I’m not planning on reopening my freelance business any time soon.

Why Now?

I had a design mostly complete and I had a basic page template developed quite some time ago and I’ve avoided finishing for several years. So how did I get to the point where I’m actively working on it again.

Last year I signed up for an online writing course over the summer, specifically the Level-Up Story Grid course and everyone who signed up was invited to attend a get together along with a one day review and meet up kind of thing in which we learned the editor certification course was being offered again. I placed my name on a waiting list so I knew when to sign up.

The course will give me an opportunity to become a certified editor, able to offer a specific service to a specific market interested in the Story Grid tools and methodology. It’ll give me an opportunity to make some money to replace some of what I used to earn through this site.

If I plan on offering editing services and if one helpful bit of advertising will be a link from the main Story Grid site to mine, I should probably have a site that lists the services and provides a place for me to write and prove I’m worth hiring.

At the start of the year I gave a quick review to the work I’d done previously and some thoughts I’d written down a few years ago. I rethought a few things about what I wanted to do. The editing services weren’t a thought a few years ago so I needed to incorporate it into the design. I reviewed content I’d rewritten and rewrote most of it.

Then I loaded up the old design in a browser and stalled for a few days until I couldn’t stall any more and had to start working. I decided to code the layout using CSS Grid and Flexbox as opposed to building another float driven layout.

Changes in Technology

I hadn’t realized how long it had been since I last worked on the site until I started working on it again and realized all the technology I could use now that I couldn’t use the last time around.

The last time I worked on any site was the last time I worked on the soon to be writing/creativity site. I’ve done minor work for my one remaining client and I’ve made changes here and there to this site, but it’s been longer than I realized since I developed one from scratch.

I knew I could use Flexbox, having finished a book on the subject not too long ago. A check of the Can I Use site and I felt comfortable using CSS Grid as well. Neither works in 100% of browsers, but both are close enough and this is my site so I can make decisions I wouldn’t necessarily make for a client’s site. I’m not too worried about the site not working exactly as I intend in every browser. I’ll build it from the least capable on up so it should work everywhere, even if it works better in some places as opposed to others.

As far as production work, CSS Grid and Flexbox are new to me and a big part of why I’m having fun. They’re new. They’re shiny. For a decade I used pretty much the same code from project to project to layout a site and I was bored.

Now I have to figure some things out again. It’s fun. I know both Flexbox and CSS Grid well enough to work with them, but I have to remind myself of many of the details and it leads me to search and find examples from others. Some help me understand and some inspire me and make me wonder what I could do with similar code that could enhance the site.

I’m adding a bit of Javascript as necessary to add a bit of functionality here and there, but I’m not worrying about working exclusively in Javascript or about libraries like React (even if I end up needing to more when I turn to WordPress).

I’m using the same tools I last used a few years ago even though the industry looks like it’s moving away from some of what I’ll continue to do. It’s probably not the way a modern front-end web developer should work, but whatever. Which brings me to…

No Clients, Woo Hoo!

I think the other major reason I’m having fun and feeling a renewed passion is that I’m doing this for myself and not for a client. Working for myself, I get to make all the decisions and set all the constraints, which is much more attuned to my preferred way of working.

That’s not to imply I didn’t like my clients or that my clients were bad people or anything ridiculous like that. The heading above is written in fun. Sure, I had the occasional client from hell over the years, but the vast majority were, and still are, good people who I like and I’ve done my best to help with their site and business.

The thing is, I don’t like working for other people and while having clients is much better than having a single boss, your clients all still mini-bosses. In the end it’s their right to make the final decision. I’ve always felt I do my best work when I get to make the decisions, when I set the constraints and decide how to solve the problem I’ve created.

I think I still do good work under the constraints of others, but my best work comes in part from being able formulate and refine the question, the problem I then have to solve. I’m more interested in the questions I get to ask than the ones others do and so I’m more interested in digging deeper for a solution and it usually adds up to better work.

Anyway…

I like being able to create the problem and make all the decisions in how to solve it. I can’t do that for a client (with an occasional exception), but I can do it for myself.

And working on my own site has advantages. I can make use of technologies that might not work for some people. It’s not something you do with a client site, but with my own, I can do what I want. I’ll give up 5% of browsers in use to be able to do what I want using whatever technology I want.

Welcome to the Playground

Since I don’t feel the need to concern myself with the site working perfectly everywhere it made me think I could do what I want and not worry about pleasing everyone.

I can experiment more. I can push the envelope a little here and there and have some fun seeing what I might create. I still remember the first and second versions of the CSS House. I also remember the original CSS Zen Garden. I thought it was amazing what you could do with CSS alone and I’ve watched the language grow more and more capable since that time. I always wonder at the kind of things we can build with code alone and without the use of a single image.

I’ve held the idea to have fun with code and see what I might create for a long time. It’s something I considered adding here at one point when I redesigned the site, but never found the time to incorporate. The new writing site seems like a good platform for a playground sort of section as it’s whole raison d’être is to explore creativity, specifically my creativity, mainly about writing, but also other interests in the future, like photography and design, and who knows what else.

The new site will focus on writing and will ideally help me sell some editing services, but I want it to be something more as well. I want it to be a place where I can share all sorts of things and I think some HTML and CSS experiments in a browser might be included in the sharing.

It’s still more of an idea than anything specific, but an idea that continues to interest me and one I’ve thought about on and off for a long time.

Closing Thoughts

The last time I redesigned this site, I collected my notes and whatever thoughts I’d written and I wrote a series filling you in on how I went from point A, the idea, to point B, the finished site.

I’ll likely do the same with the new writing site. It won’t be right away since I still need to finish the site and launch it and I’ll need some time after to collect my thoughts from scattered files I’ve created throughout the process. Hopefully time will also grant me some perspective about the overall process.

Since I’m still working on the site, I haven’t begun working on a series about it so I don’t know how the series will evolve, but I’ll likely begin with the idea and show the evolution of the idea, first through thinking and writing about it, and later designing and developing it into a finished site. Hopefully for the better, but you never know.

I enjoy the peak inside another designer’s thought process and I’m happy to share my thought process as well. I’m not sure when, likely sometime later in the year once I’ve had time to gather my thoughts and figure out what I want to say. And, of course, I still need to finish and launch the site.

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I revisited a couple of reasons why I decided to stop taking on clients a few years ago, namely some lessons I extrapolated from an article by Ben Thompson about the smiling curve, and some thoughts about responsive and flat design pushing the industry toward away from the part I enjoyed most.

There were two more reasons and I left both for this week so today I want to talk about the growing complexity of front-end development and the ever improving state of site builders and why both took away some of the enjoyment I found in designing and building websites.

The Growing Complexity of Web Development

As I mentioned last week, I think developers are having a greater influence on the industry at the moment for valid reasons and they’re doing what you would expect developers to do.

Developers like to develop. They like code and development tools and they’re bringing more of those things to the design and development of websites. Instead of writing HTML and CSS directly, now we’re told to write both inside Javascript.

Code is also getting more modular as is development in general. We have frameworks and libraries and we value efficiency and productivity over unique aesthetics and creativity. All things which developers have known for years make development easier and more maintainable and all sorts of other good things developers know how to do.

The downside of this change is that it’s becoming more difficult for someone new (particular on the design side) to enter the field. The barrier for entry is increasing as the requirements are growing more complex. I talked about this a few months ago and don’t want to repeat myself too much, so I’ll point you to that article.

I think in the end it will all be fine. It isn’t the worst thing for the barrier to entry to increase. It’ll keep some people out of the industry who might have built businesses and contributed something back, but those people will be ok and do the same things in other industries.

For the most part, a more challenging barrier will keep out those who were just passing through, people looking to make a quick buck and people who’s interest in web design and development was marginal at best. I suspect there will be plenty of tools for designers to design without the need to learn any code at all and those interested will find a way to learn what they want to know.

Bear in mind this barrier is for professional work only. There’s nothing stopping someone from learning HTML and CSS and building sites for themselves regardless of whether or not they want to learn Javascript or work with command line tools or anything else beyond the basics they aren’t interested in learning.

This same kind of conversation about web development becoming too complex and complicated has been going on for as long as people have been developing websites. What makes it complicated or simple may have changed, but it’s still the same conversation. It’s all just a natural part of the evolution and maturation of any industry.

However, for me personally, it means front end development was becoming more like back end development, which made the work less enjoyable. Again, that’s for me personally.

Site Builders

Speaking of the industry maturing, allow me go back to the scale side of the smiling curve and talk about site builders, including the newest entry, the Gutenberg editor in WordPress. Ok Gutenberg isn’t a full site developer, but it’s a sign of WordPress moving in that direction.

And even if WordPress isn’t becoming a site builder (it is) other site builder services like Squarespace and Wix already exist and make it pretty easy for anyone to build a site. Now, it may not be a beautiful site. It may not be all that organized or as easy to use as it could be, but it’s pretty easy to get a site up and running and it’s only going to get easier and better in the future.

One year early in my transition I planned on taking fewer clients so naturally I received a couple of calls at the start of the year asking about my services. One of the people didn’t come across as someone who would be pleasant to work with so I turned him away quickly. The other person I did want to help and I pointed him to one of the site builders. Based on what he wanted and how much he could afford to spend it was hard to honestly recommend my services over WordPress.com or Squarespace or wherever I ended up pointing him.

It was hard to honestly recommend myself at my prices when I knew the person on the other end of the phone could spend a few nights setting up a site on their own that would be more than good enough for what they wanted. And it would cost a lot less upfront that it would to hire me.

I could learn to work with these site builders. I’m sure most of my clients would still prefer me to do the work to set up the site so long as I don’t charge too much. But for me it’s not enjoyable. I don’t like building websites through a web interface. I prefer to write code.

That said, these changes are good for most people and I’m not arguing against the evolution. I’m just pointing out that while this might be good for most people, it won’t necessarily be good for some and I’m likely included in that group of some. Down the line I think even more people will be included as the site builders become so easy, few people, if any, won’t choose to do the work themselves.

Closing Thoughts

Everything I’ve mentioned, both this week and last, led me to think I was going to see fewer clients no matter what I did and that there would probably be fewer clients for most and so fewer freelance web designers and developers and given my passion for the work was drifting, it made sense to me to do something else, something I enjoyed more.

And again, I mean the kind of freelancer I was, someone who did everything and served micro-businesses of one to five people. I don’t think this will necessarily occur for larger agencies or in-house design teams who sit closer to the end points of the smiling curve, at least for now.

Despite what might seem like me being against all these changes, I’m not against them at all. I think these changes will ultimately prove good for most people. Unfortunately, I don’t think me the freelancer was one of those people. The changes will be good for the market, in part because they help to eliminate the expense of having to hire someone like me.

The barrier for entry to the field is growing steeper, which will keep non-technical designers away, but again this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A greater barrier to entry will force beginners to learn a little more to get started and it will lead those with marginal interests toward other things.

However, as I said last week, whether I wanted to or not, need has pushed me to design and develop a new site for myself. Once I started I realized how long it had been and I noticed a few differences in what I could do now that I couldn’t then.

Oddly enough it’s been more fun to work on the site than I thought. Since I’ve gone on and on about all the bad things I see in regards to web design and development, I thought I should also talk about the other side so that’s what I’ll do next week. I’ll talk about some of my renewed passion. It’s not anything that will get me to transition back to a life offering freelance web services, but it has left a few ideas germinating for what I might do with the new site.

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In large part it’s because a site will require another commitment to writing that I haven’t been sure I had time for, but it’s not the only reason.

The month or so I’ve been following a conversation via some CSS-Tricks linked articles and thoughts from Chris Coyier about the current complexity of front-end development requirements (see the Resources section below). The conversation reminded me that some of my hesitancy and procrastination in building the new site is due to this growing complexity among other changes in the industry.

Need has pushed me to develop the site whether I want to or not so at the start of the year, I opened the files from my previous attempt to build the site and, unsurprisingly, hesitated for a few days to do much else. At some point I realized I the procrastination had to stop and I needed to dive in and start working.

And then a funny thing happened. As I was working I realized I was enjoying myself more than I expected and I felt a little of the passion I used to have for web design and development work. I had fun experimenting with code to see what would happen and I’ve enjoyed learning a few new things.

I thought I’d offer a short series to share why my excited for building websites faded and why it’s coming back. I’ll begin with some of the things that led to my loss of desire for designing and developing sites and then I’ll share why I think some of the passion has been coming back as I’ve been working on the site again, though it’s coming back in a different way than before.

Why I Stopped Taking on Clients

There were a number of reasons why I decided I no longer wanted to be a freelancer web designer and developer and instead wanted to focus on writing full time. The biggest reason was simply that I enjoyed writing more and received more requests to write for others than to design or develop for them.

However, there were a few other things that all seemed to happen around the same time and made me want move away from front-end development work.

A few years ago I thought the industry started to change and I suspected the part of the market in which I competed was going to be affected adversely and probably go away. Let me make clear I had and have no data backing any of this up. What I had was more a sense from what I observed in my own business and what I was hearing about from others both offline and online. Hardly proof of anything I realize, but still it made me think maybe I it was time for a change.

I was also losing my passion for the work itself. Web development is an industry that naturally changes and quickly at times due to its reliance on technology that can quickly change.

In the end there were four main reasons why I was ready to make the change, at least when it came to the desire to move away from the design and development work I was doing.

• The Smiling Curve
• Responsive and flat design
• The growing complexity of web development
• Improvements in site builders

Let me walk through each of these and offer a little more explanation.

The Smiling Curve

I started 2015 with a series or articles here that talked about why I was making the transition from designer/developer to writer. I made a business case for the change over the course of four articles.

• The Shrinking Market For Freelance Web Design Services
• The Lesson Of The Smiling Curve—How To Add Value To Your Freelance Design Business
• Adding Value To Your Freelance Business Through Scale
• Adding Value To Your Freelance Business Through Scarcity

The idea for the series came from something written by Ben Thompson who analyzes the business strategies of tech and media companies at his site Stratechery. He introduced me to the concept of the smiling curve, which is about the middle dropping out of an industry and the profits moving to the endpoints. The curve looks like a smile, hence the name smiling curve.

As profit moves from the center to edges it moves towards companies and individuals who can take advantage of scale at one end and scarcity at the other.

I extrapolated the example to my kind of freelance business and surmised that scale meant learning how to work with services like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress.com and that scarcity meant having the aesthetic or programming chops to stand out and do things no one but you could do. You and your particular skills would be what’s scarce.

I figured freelancers like myself (those serving micro-businesses of one to five people) would either need to show off their aesthetic skills (while also being able to deliver user-friendly, functional designs) or learn how to work with the site builder services.

I had no interest in the latter and didn’t feel I had the ability to become good enough at the former, certainly not fast enough to maintain and attract clients. I didn’t think my business had a future at either end of the curve, which suggested another line of work.

Responsive and Flat Design

When it comes to the “standing out through your aesthetic brilliance” end of the smiling curve, I have to take a detour and talk about responsive and flat design. Both were common topics of conversation within web design and development circles at the time of my decision.

The most common topics were whether or not responsive and/or flat design were ruining the web by removing design aesthetics and leading to boring copies of boring designs. To me it was part of a cycle of back and forth between aesthetics and functionality that continues to occur.

With so many new and different sized screens in existence, responsive design (or something very much like it) was inevitable. It’s now a new standard for what’s minimum and viable in websites. Your site needs to work across devices first. The aesthetics can come later so the thinking goes.

Similarly flat design stripped away a lot of aesthetic details in favor of something more minimalist that make use of design fundamentals instead of ornamentation. The shift is a fairly common one through design history and new technology initially leads to skeuomorphic representation of the old in the new to help people adjust until such a time as it’s no longer necessary and is replaced by something less skeuomorphic.

Both lessen the immediate importance of design aesthetics, that thing I said where we can profit through the scarcity of our skills. They also elevate the development side of websites. Developers may not have felt like they had the skills to come up with enticing illustrations and the like, but they could certainly organize information in a grid and add background colors to rectangles and similar.

The shift back to design fundamentals opened up who could design a site. Graphic design fundamentals aren’t hard to grasp and even with a few guidelines your designs can look professional.

I suspected then that for a time the industry was going to be solving more development problems instead of design problems in part because those were the more pressing problems of the moment and in part because more reliance on developers meant developers would have greater influence over the design side of things. Nothing wrong with that, but since I’m more interested in the design side, it was another push for me to transition away.

It’s very likely that in time things will reverse. In time people with limited design skills will wonder why their sites don’t stand out or are difficult to use or can’t deliver a consistent message and all the other things quality design can do, but I think for the foreseeable future there’s still going to be a greater need to solve development problems.

Resources

Here are some of the articles that led me to think about all of this again.

• Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack
• Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript
• Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS
• HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points
• Where Do You Learn HTML & CSS in 2019?
• CSS doesn’t suck
• The Great Divide
• Should Everyone Learn Javascript Deeply?
• Javascript VS. HTML & CSS

Closing Thoughts

Let me stop here and pick this up again next week. There are two more reasons for why I moved away from a freelance design and development business that are probably having a greater impact now than a few years ago, namely the growing complexity of requirements for entry into the field and the continued improvements of site builders.

I’ll close the series the week after by talking about the positive side and how I’m regaining some passion as I’ve at last been working on a site again.

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The explanation includes some general productivity thoughts about how I’ve decided what I need to work on and why that might leave this site empty of new content for a time. This way if you aren’t too interested in the specifics of my situation, there should still be something here for you to take away.

One of the things I’ve said over the years in regards to using productivity systems for creative work is that for me the key to getting more done is matching the energy/focus level necessary to work on a task or project with how much energy/focus I typically have at the same times each day. No other criteria for the work I need to do has ever mattered much. For me it’s always about mental energy and focus and thinking long term about the projects I want to complete.

My Situation

Before I get to the solution, I should fill you in more on my current situation. I’ve committed myself to a lot of writing this year and I also need to work on a couple of non-writing projects as well.

Through much of the fall I tried to work several projects at the same time and found it wasn’t working well. I was putting in a lot of time, but I wasn’t getting as much accomplished as I thought I could. I needed to find a way to get more done this year, hence “efficiency” as the overall theme for all my goals in 2019.

I’ve talked about how most of my work involves tasks with fuzzy edges. Make notes for article X doesn’t have a definite end point. I’m done making notes when I have enough to write the draft. Sometimes that can be as little as an hour and other times it might take a week.

The way I’ve been able to be most productive is to set up habits and routines based on my typical flows of energy and focus. I build the routine around the work I need to complete over the next two months and go. Every day I work to bring projects one step closer to completion.

Working this way doesn’t always make it easy to shift gears a little and introduce something new into the existing routine. I find it hard to make the extra time in my day once I’m settled into habits. Sometimes the only way I can work a new project in is to break apart my whole routine, throw it into chaos for a few days, and work my way back to a new routine with a different set of priorities and focus.

One of the reasons I write goal setting and review posts at the end and start of the year is that it gets me thinking about my existing routines and how they need to change to move closer to my goals for the coming year.

The posts are only one part of it. I usually take time off throughout the year end holidays. This year I sandwiched a very light three days of work between a pair of four-day weekends. The entire week breaks my routine and it gives me time to think about what the next one should look like.

How I Organized and Prioritized My Work

One of the first things I did was to make a list of all the projects I want to complete in 2019 along with ongoing projects like writing for this site and for the newsletter for my soon to be site. I didn’t include one-off tasks, but I did include one project to account for them all that will serve as backfill in my weekly schedule.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I divide my day in half and I work on fiction writing between breakfast and dinner and I work on non-fiction writing and other projects between lunch and dinner.

My fiction routine is fine for the most part. It doesn’t require a huge shakeup, more a few tweaks that I think will allow me an extra writing session before calling it a day. It’s my non-fiction routine in the afternoon that needs the shakeup.

I looked over all my projects and divided them in two ways. First by domain, one being this domain (vanseodesign.com) and the other being the soon to be site (stevenbradley.me). This is how I’ve typically divided my work the last few years, albeit with different domains.

I also tagged the projects in terms of continuous (ongoing) and discrete (fixed end point) projects. Here’s what I came up with.

• StevenBradley.me
• Design/Develop site (discrete)
• Content for Notebook (continuous)
• Newsletter (continuous)

• VanseoDesign.com
• Content for Notebook (continuous)
• Writing Design/Development Books (multiple discrete)
• Marketing/Selling books (continuous)

I found the latter categorization, the tags for continuous and discrete, to be more useful as they play more to my energy and focus levels throughout the day.

Typically after lunch, I find it difficult to get back to work. I feel a little sluggish and I’m most productive when I can ease into the work for 15 or 20 minutes. I’ve found if I choose busy work or anything that doesn’t require a lot of mental energy and focus, I can quickly be working again and I realize I’ve been doing that to a certain extent by choosing parts of continuous projects to work on.

They aren’t necessarily easier tasks, but they’re easier for me to start working on them when I lack focus. The work leads to a build up of my focus and energy, which I can then put to use. I reworked the list and organized the projects around their continuous or discrete nature.

• Continuous
• Content for SB.me Notebook
• Newsletter
• Marketing/Selling books

• Discrete
• Design/Develop SB.me site
• Writing Design/Development Books
• Content for Vanseo Notebook

You might wonder why I’ve changed writing content for this site to discrete when I tagged it continuous above. The continuous tag was in thinking that I publish here on a regular basis, but I realized I’ve written the content in more discrete chunks the last few years. I’ll work on a series for a couple or three months and then switch to something else for a few months before working on the next series.

It’s also a little harder for me to jump into what I write for this site as it typically requires a little more energy and focus than I have in the after lunch hour so it doesn’t work as well for what I’m trying to accomplish.

In general the continuous projects work better as coming back from lunch work and I can save the discrete projects for the end of the day. I schedule a shorter time for the continuous projects and use them to build focus for the discrete projects which will usually get more of my time.

Sounds great, however…

My Current Productivity Conundrum

It’s difficult for me to focus on more than one of the discrete projects for any length of time. When I’ve tried to work several on the same day or switch between two from day to day, I don’t get as much done as I should and neither project turns out as well as I’d like.

I can work multiple discrete projects at times depending on the projects and their specific tasks, but I’ve learned not to schedule work that way for too long.

The best way for me to work on the discrete projects is to work them one at time until finished, take a few days off to refresh, and then dive into the next one until it is eventually finished.

That suggests my task to get more done is to prioritize my discrete projects and schedule the one with the highest priority after whatever ongoing project has my attention that week.

Therein lies the rub.

Here are the three discrete projects again:

• Design/Develop SB.me site
• Writing Design/Development Books
• Content for Vanseo Notebook

They’re in order of my current priority. Launching the new site has to take precedence since I’m trying to have it mostly ready by the end of February or mid March when I should have or be soon to have the rest of the information I’ll need. I have to finish the editor certification before I’ll have all that info.

The books need to take priority over writing for the site as the books help pay the bills and the site doesn’t. Once the new StevenBradley.me site is launched, I should be able to bounce back and forth between the books and this site the way I have the last few years, but until the new site is done, I may have to sacrifice time writing here. It’s possible it’ll be a few months before I can find the time to write for this site the way I have been the last few years.

I have toyed around with trying to come up with different kinds of posts that I could write in a more continuous effort. I don’t think the in-depth how to posts fit that bill, but maybe if I mix in more content like this post you’re reading (posts that don’t require much additional research), I can still keep things going without much of a gap.

I may also switch the priority of writing books and writing here as once I can bounce back and forth between the two, it really doesn’t matter all that much which one comes first.

Another idea is that as I’m working on a book, I can be more conscious of topics that can be turned into a post quickly, having already done the research. For example, I’ll be working on several books about SVG next and I’m sure there are things that have improved since I last wrote about the subject and details I couldn’t quite figure out at the time, but likely will when I dig into the books. It would be a way to put the same effort to multiple purposes.

In any event, know I’m working to come up with new routines that will allow me to write as much of what I want to write as I can this year, but it could mean ignoring this site for a time in order to work in projects like the launch of another site that I have to make time for.

Closing Thoughts

I hope that explains why I might have to disappear for a time, though I’d prefer not to disappear at all. It’s likely it’ll have to relatively soon too. As I write this, I have nothing else anywhere close to being ready to publish so this could be the last one for a time, though again, hopefully not or not for too long.

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A potential downside of setting a context so early is that you may not have enough information to form a good one and the longer you hold onto any given context without questioning it, the more deeply ingrained your opinions become and the more difficult it can be to change your perspective.

The book About Design: Insights and Provocations for Graphic Design Enthusiasts by Gordon Salchow can help with both. It will help you form an opinion about design and establish a context in which to see the details and if you already hold a strong point of view, it will challenge it.

A few months ago I was given an advanced reader copy of the book and I finally found time to read it. I enjoyed it from cover to cover and wanted to share a few thoughts with you.

First, since like me, you may not know who Gordon Salchow is, he was Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning until 2010, a program he helped found fifty years ago.

If you’ve spent any time in a graphic design program in the United States over the last few decades, there’s a good chance his ideas about teaching design influenced the way you were taught.

In other words the book was written by someone who knows design and design education very well.

What’s Inside the Book

Like I said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading About Designfrom cover to cover. Despite being packed with information, it’s a relatively quick read, the kind of book you can get through in an afternoon.

The book is organized into five chapters, each with a few subsections. Here’s the table of contents (subsections in parenthesis) along with a quick thought or two from me about each chapter.

1. Prelude (Forward by Michael Beirut, Acknowledgements, Preface)—You might be tempted to skip this chapter, but don’t. Even the acknowledgements were a pleasure to read and filled with information.
2. Form (Point, Line, Shape, Space, Color)—I’d like to think I know a little something about these topics having written a book about them myself, but this chapter has me rethinking the form and function of all these graphic design elements. Salchow talks about them in a different way than they’re usually discussed.
3. Aesthetics (Preamble, Harmony, Creativity, Methodology, Composition)—This chapter somehow boils down all the guidelines for good design into about 50 pages. It’s strange in that I can’t say if you read this chapter (along with the previous one), you’ll come away with all the tools you need to be a graphic designer and yet it’s all in there.
4. Education (Overview, Suggestions)—The majority of this chapter is the first section, which presents Salchow’s keynote address given for a symposium at the University of the Arts (formerly the Philadelphia College of Art). The keynote is presented word for word and is filled with insights about graphic design and graphic design education along with the usual humorous stories keynotes like these tend to offer.
5. Miscellany (Function, Afterword by Katherine McCoy, Author, Index)—Another chapter you might be tempted to skip, but, once agin, don’t. The first section contains closing thoughts by the author and the afterword is as worthy of reading as the forward. Ok, I admit I didn’t read the index, though it is something useful that I don’t always find in design books.

Here are a few thoughts from the publisher’s site and I’ll offer my take after.

The book is a treatise on the development and practice of the graphic design discipline. About Design offers an enlightening and opinionated, albeit concise, excursion concerning many facets of the field of design.

Some of the particular chapter topics deal with:

• Defining the elements of visual form
• An analysis of the concepts of aesthetics and creativity
• Establishing some usable guidelines for effective designing
• Outlining many factors that are involved with design education, including a sketch of its history
• Miscellaneous related subjects, such as considerations of what makes something exceptional

My Take

First, I think About Design: Insights and Provocations for Graphic Design Enthusiasts is a good title for the book. It’s an accurate a description of what’s inside and once again I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, from Michael Beirut’s forward to Katherine McCoy’s afterward, and all parts between.

I was conscious that I would write this review as I was reading and one of the questions I kept asking myself was who is this book for? Is it for someone wanting to learn design? Is it for someone who already has considerable understanding of the basics and wants more? Is it for someone else, a design educator, perhaps?

This isn’t a book you’ll read and walk away with specific tools to help you design better. It’s not going to teach you how to create a grid or show you how to figure out which typefaces are best to use for a given concept.

In the chapter about form, you wouldn’t necessarily walk away from the section about space with specific knowledge to help you work with space in your next design and yet most everything you need to work with space in any design is right there in the seven pages devoted to the topic.

The book often reads like a stream of observations about a variety of design topics from working with forms and space to getting the most from design education.

I think About Design is a book for anyone interested in design, whether as a passing hobby or through the eyes of a 20+ year professional.

If you’re first beginning your design education, the book will help set a proper context for specific study later. You probably won’t come away knowing how to work with color or how to ensure harmony in your composition, but you’ll be set on the right path for using knowledge about both as you acquire it.

If you’re a seasoned pro, you might reset your own context for how you approach design. You’ll definitely have thoughts for how to approach it differently. The book has given me quite a few things to think about. It will challenge some of the way you currently look at design.

If you’re an interested hobbyist, the book will also help you build a context and it will give you plenty of ideas to consider. There’s a lot in the book to think about in terms what is design and what it means to design.

Oddly enough, for a book about graphic design it features only a handful of graphic images, though those present are well done and the pages of the book itself are occasionally designed to help illustrate a point. There’s much inside what appears to be a small book.

Ultimately About Design: Insights and Provocations for Graphic Design Enthusiasts offers an opinion, a philosophy, and a point of view about graphic design from someone who taught design for 55 years and who helped establish one of the better graphic design programs in the country and helped influence many others.

Depending on your existing knowledge about graphic design the book will help you begin to form your own point of view about design or it will get you to challenge the one you currently hold by showing you design in a different way.

About Design: Insights and Provocations for Graphic Design Enthusiasts costs $19.99 and you can buy it directly from the publisher or from from Amazon.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

Join me as I share my creative process and journey as a writer.