Ok, it’s time. I’ve been meaning to re-evaluate this project for like 2 weeks.
I feel isolated, overwhelmed and this results in a feeling of treading water. I’ve been here before.
Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in stuff, and maintaining this blog - writing the posts, creating the daycards - is like the cherry on top, if the cherry on top was made of tungsten
I feel like I’m not really doing much designing. And what I see others doing and calling design interests me less and less - designing another UI for another app.
I think all of these things had been brewing under the surface for a while now, but they really bubbled up last week, when I read a few big-picture articles about design, especially some of Mike Monteiro’s. (Like this one that reframes designing as a service for the people who are going to be using the product, instead of a service for a client.)
All I can say at this point is smth smth design ethics. I feel my interest in creating nice looking UIs waning. Something older and deeper is on the rise… Could I bring my values into this and make it more than just a job?
This is all very fresh and kind of confused. Abstract even. But things have been stirred up that can’t be unstirred.
And so I gotta ask myself: how much of what I’ve been doing during the first 24 days of this challenge do I want to call designing?
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?
Implemented a Figma-design in my grocery list webapp
Read around the design ecosystem: microinteractions, DailyUI, Dan Saffer
Hm, not much to say, it seems. I’ve been sitting here thinking of stuff with my mouth agape for literal minutes. Can there ever be nothing to say or have I just classified everything that came in this time as not worth saying… (or too spicy for publication)? hm hm
The day has been moderately productive. I’m struck with a feeling of being in a slog tho, like, having been in a slog for weeks. Mb I need a win, something I can say is DONE? Yeah, that rings true. But how to accomplish that when every project is just another rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper?
I kind of feel suffocated by my worky-designy projects. I haven’t made any music for weeks and I miss it. When I’m finished working in the evening, I just wanna lie down and rest. There’s no screen-energy left in me. No doing-energy, at all, in fact.
I’ve been here before, as well: working on solo projos for weeks at a time, treating them like a 9-5 job, feeling more and more exhausted, like I’m treading water… until I finally collapse 😮💨 and unplug with a feeling of burnout, “ready to reassess” (and never come back to that project again). Mb I secretly don’t want to do these projects? Mb I’m investing the wrong kind of energy into them and exerting myself as a result?
Again, I don’t exactly know. But it does feel like I’m going deeper this time - into the discomfort, if nothing else. I wanna see what’s in there.
About the realization I mentioned yesterday (Day 20): I kind of realized that I don’t really enjoy fiddling with computers/technology at a certain level. And it feels freeing, like a weight off my shoulders. I feel like this in the moments when I accept some sort of limitation about myself: I don’t have to keep trying to see if I like\am\can do this thing - I know that I don’t\am not\can not.
Now I’m a little freer to do the things I might actually enjoy.
Designed card for day 4 This time it was a 1-pomodor-sprint. I wanna keep it loose like this
Research: looked into CSS frameworks Windi and Uno
Today was a low energy day due to sleep deprivation. That’s not totally a bad thing. I felt too tired to stress, too slow to rush like usual. It’s nice to have a day where I work in a chill way towards some realistic goals. In fact, I got as many todo-items checked off today as ever - mostly setting up my dev ennvironment, plugin by plugin. My girlfriend said you’re doing tiny important steps. 💚
For context: as I write this, the blog is still not online. Well, it technically is, but I haven’t announced it yet. It looks, well, not very good. It’s barely a webpage, but still - I’m almost ready to give it the old shoutout. I just wanna make it look coherent and a little prettier. I’ve got my designs in Figma, they just have to be implemented. So I was researching CSS frameworks/engines/preprocessors today.
Think I’m gonna go with Tailwind for now, just because the integration with Astro is easier as of the time of writing. I’m done with set up, researching frameworks, debugging plugins.
That’s kind of it. A part of me would have liked to have gone ahead and styled this blog, like I had intended to do today. Come to think of it, I kind of veered off of that goal. Not sure why I felt that this was the day to set up my IDE. But the great thing about being thoroughly sleep-deprived - I feel too tired to be disappointed.
Off to the depths of my comfort zone: eating a sandwich and watching Ross’s Game Dungeon
Read up on some of the basic semantic markup elements like <article>. Also <time>
Tidied up my Notion project page for this blog
It’s been a day. A day at the computer. A day of thousand little lessons. I must have changed course a dozen times today - realizing that what I want to do takes much more effort and care than I had thought (like converting dates in JavaScript).
In the end, I’m pretty happy with the result - the page looks presentable and all that’s left for this iteration is to change the favicon and maybe buy a domain.
But man, it’s been a long day. I got this strange feeling that comes when I spend the whole day inside, making things happen on a screen. I’ve been working on this thing in isolation for a few days now. I wanna get this baby out and let it go.
Feelin under the weather today. I might have pushed my body a little hard with the long days and uninterrupted staring at the screen. We are a pomodoro household, but I’ve been happily ignoring my timers, gritting my teeth and wanting this thing to be done today. Probably not the healthiest approach. Wish I could do it more low and slow, sometimes.
Adding things to my 100dod bucketlist. I don’t even know what design means to me. Have I mentioned that before? Part of this is going to be figuring this out. I hope it gets philosophical. I feel like I’ve got at least one post about the meaning of the word ‘design’ in me. uuu, also - affordances.
Not sure if I have anything to say. Feelin tired, maybe I didn’t sleep all too well.
I’m having a naughty kind of fun with my CV. Writing it in a ‘normal’, ”standard”, '''expected''' way kind of stresses me out. But I’ve found an antidote: Being honest. Like, advertising-that-I-am-a-mess-kind-of-honest. And then all of the pressure of presenting myself falls away, and I can start making something interesting.
Not sure if I’ll actually send any of these drafts, but they definitely help with getting me past the blockage. After I get my juices flowing, I can always trim down the crazy. Or at least how much I show of it :).
Wrapped into this is the question of what kind of work and work relationships… do I want… are possible… are desirable… are realistic… are healthy? etc. etc. I feel split between ‘I love you as a colleague, but don’t call me after 6’ and ‘y’all my peeps, let’s do thimgs together, why not also after work?’
