tom's blobs

Day 20

A background of columns of repeated text: 100 Days of Design. The text is clear at the top and bottom and gets sort of smudged towards the middle. Over this, a big golden circle with bold text: Day 20. Over this, two wavy sort of blobs, touching the edges of the image. The one in the upper-right: blue. The one in the lower left: blackish and spilling out of the bottom of the image.

Worked on my CV
Talked to some ppls
Made some prototypes for off the dome

First of all, I got a tiny mountain of stuff done today, despite feeling low-ish. 💥 High five, 🐻 hug, and a little pat on the fanny for me! 🤦

My last post was like a week ago. I’ve changed the rules for this challenge - I don’t wanna be doing this on the weekends if I don’t want to.

But more interesting, I’ve had some kind of realization about design, what it means to me and what I want to be (not) doing with this challenge.

I’m a little wiser… or about to be. Everything is still pretty messy and fresh. I wrote some words, but it felt like I was skirting around the issue. What’s the issue, you ask?

Find out…

When I find out… ..

In the next… …

Episode :)

Day 19

A mess of words in different fonts and bars of color that partly frame, overlap and underline the text: "100 Days of Design", "19". The 19 is big and bold, taking up about half of the image. The word 'days' is set in two different fonts: 'DAY' is big and bold like the 19, the 's' is much smaller. The colored bars are a pinkish red, a canary yellow and a deep purple.

Learned a little more about fonts: how different fonts have different emotional effects, played this game and discussed with my partner, looked at these fonts made by womxn
Worked on my CV design: set the layout for a simple version, looked at the designs I’ve made so far, even liked some of them :), organized my ideas/cleaned up my Figma file

Day 18

A big messy pattern: red triangles flip-flopping in 3 horizontal lanes on a canary yellow background with smaller purple triangles between them. Some triangles are touching one another, but only at the tip. Framing the middle portion are colored bard in purple and black. A sinusoid wave seems to be running through the bigger triangles, partially cutting off their bottoms. This produces shapes that are rounded and trapezoid and gives the whole a slightly odd quality. The pattern is symmetrical left to right and sort of self-similar top to bottom. Text, in the middle, tucked into a purple bar and a protruding trapezoid: Day 18, 100 Days of Design.

Added pagination to this blog
Learned about slugs, SEO and Lighthouse benchmarking
Listened to some videos about permaculture design

Just a very steady day. I’m quite happy about the way I researched things - there was a good balance between being thorough and being done.

Not much more to say. Thinking about my weekly goals. Wanna send out an application tomorrow. Just to get things moving.

No Love for Chores

The text 'Day 17' repeated 3 times top to bottom, taking up the whole width and height of the image: the top in purple, the middle red, the bottom yellow. Each time the text is written with differently shaped letters. They seem a little off: in fact they are not written in a font but have been molded 'by hand' from simple lines with vector manipulation. They may be described as looking primitive, rough, simplistic, misshapen, futuristic or melted. In between the 3 lines of text there are 2 thick black bars with the text '100 Days of Design' running through them, repeated several times.

Researched a bunch of stuff around Material Design (implementation, use-cases, MD 2 vs 3)
Set up a Material Design framework within my Vue coding project

In my research I learned that MD 3 isn’t even baked into any of the Vue frameworks that are available. Looks like I’ll have to customize my the framework I’ve picked, or implement it from scratch.

Don’t know what to write. Feels like the same existential crisis I’ve been in since I did my coding bootcamp in 2020. What am I even doing? Setting up build-environments for hours at a time, failing to install npm packages, copying CSS-build-chains from example projects and crossing my fingers hoping they work. Man, after a day of doing such things, I definitely feel like I’ve taken a turn in the wrong direction.

It feels kind of soulless. I feel like there are things to unpack here, but I just spent a good 5 minutes staring at the wall and no coherent expression wants to come out.

I’m slightly proud I’ve made some solid progress on my weekly goals. And it feels good being on a streak, doing a few tiny steps every day. New challenges tomorrow.

The CV Shuffle

The text 'Day 16' in big bold letters in front of a rectangular blackish shape, whose angles and ornamental protrusions make me think of a chest, podium or altar. Running through the letters are vertical stripes in a pinkish red, violet purple and canary yellow. Below, in thin letters of a standard reading size, the text '100 Days of Design', as if part of the dark shape.

Read about type (as in typeface): learned about how to choose the right type for the occasion, the OpenFont standard, types of numerals, and some basic vocabulary like cap height and tracking
Worked hard on my CV design: continued with the simplified grayscale version, tried out some different ways to group information, and added content to the Values-section. Made some screenshots of interesting CVs for inspiration

I emphasize that I worked hard, because it felt like that: spending lot of energy to little effect, fiddling with details without being clear about the message that I want to convey. This was hard work, not smart work.

Working on a CV tends to bring out some deep-seated conflicts within me. This happens almost every time I do a redesign. I come back to some fundamental questions:

Do I focus on getting a job ASAP or getting better at designing? - Should I go with a template or invest some time in learning how to do a layout?
Should I follow “established conventions” or do things my way - like maybe be radically honest from the get-go?

And the kicker:

Should I even be investing all this effort into achieving a goal which I’m not even that excited about (working at some company, possibly full-time)

The answer is probably no. But something in me is stuck and doesn’t see an alternative. Hm hm hm.

Redesigning My CV

Hyper-insecurity. A vibe of “my whole life has been a failure and I am nothing.” Skipping the ’Work Experience-section, because (feeling like) there’s no work experience worth talking about. Trying to fill in the resulting white space with something. Looking at the whole and only seeing a mess. Deciding to embrace the mess and be honest: mention depression in a section called My Story! Coming back the next day and feeling like that’s the most ridiculous and unnecessarily exhibitionistic thing in the world. Doubting the whole be-radically-honest-plan. Maybe I should rewrite everything? Maybe I should put depression in like the footer of the cover letter?

Feel ooof.

Running Behind In Small Steps

Three red and yellow dancing flame-like shapes on a black background extending upwards towards a purple circle with the text '100 Days of Design, Day 15'.

Read through more of the Material Design guidelines
Worked on my CV design

Today was one of those low-energy small-steps days: feeling sleepy and flat, so let’s just make a tiny progress in a project or two. Then I can go back to napping, again :)

So that’s what I did. Practiced some skim-reading, that was interesting. Learning that Material Design, and website-design in general, has many more things to teach me. But I felt today, that it’s time to build and implement again. I will learn as I go.

Feeling like I’m running behind. Backlog’s building up. Ideas that seemed fresh a week ago already becoming stale, buried by the flow of things. And a hunger for more creating, (more energy, more time).

Goals this week

Pick and set up an MD component framework within my grocery-list-Vue-app
Get my CV to ‘good enough’ and send out an application
Add pagination to this blog

Design First, Think Later

Light background. A big bold dark grey text in the center: 'Day 13'. Underneath it, comparatively tiny, a text saying '100 Days of Design', thin and underlined. A squarish double frame around all of this: the inner layer a bar of solid blue color, thick enough to be a listed character; the outer layer a gradient pattern of greys, made up of about 10 tones, repeated on each side. If you would start in a corner and go around the edge of the image it would go lightest in the corner, darker, darkest when you reach the middle of a side, lighter, lightest in the next corner, darker... and so on with each side. The overall effect reminds me of some neon-light-effects and the thick square-patterned glass I have seen on the entrance doors of old Polish apartment blocks from the Soviet-era.

Read through the accessibility guidelines of Material Design 3.0
Listened to a couple of videos and TED talks about design

One of the talks was basically urging designers to have a conscience - or at least consider the long-term consequences of their designs.

Reminded me of one of life’s most flustering clusterfucks:

“We are doing things. That’s good. But are these the right things?”

“Is our well-being the paramount factor in our decisions? What if we can’t agree on how to operationalize well-being?”

“We are growing. Great. … Growing to do what - more of the same things?”