What Am I Doing? (Mar 2009)

Freelance

Things are going well with my freelance project. We’re pretty much wrapping up with the foundation of the site, with a few more adjustments and fixes. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to present it here with some process work.

GTD

I finally had some time to revamp my GTD system, and it seems to be working better than before. I basically digitized my projects list and actions so that they’re easier to look through (and therefore, less intimidating for me to review and organize). There are still parts of the system that I need to streamline, but things are definitely more efficient already.

Twitter

I recently started using a public Twitter account. My username is ivanwlam, and you’re welcome to follow me if you want. So far, some of the “famous” people I’ve followed include David Allen (the GTD Guy), Ze Frank, swissmiss, Armin and Bryony at Under Consideration, and TED.

Cut&Paste

Me. Me. Me. The fact that I forgot to mention that I went to watch my friend Sam Sellers talentedly compete at the SF stop of the Cut&Paste Competition Tour is unacceptable. Long story short, Sam did a great job and was robbed of his first prize. I love the piece he did for the first round, which was (and will be again) my Facebook profile photo.

Motivation

Something happened in the past week that retriggered and intensified my motivation to advance my career and my life as soon as possible. I can’t go into the details, but I now have a stronger desire to be independent and self-sufficient and to take control of my own life. So hopefully, in the coming months, I will have more exciting things to report.

Really Simple Designer Web Comic

Within the past month, I ended one blog and started another. Really Simple Designer Web Comic was an experiment to create a daily web comic starring Point, Line, and Plane. Every start of the day, I take about half an hour coming up with a concept and quickly draw a comic for the next day on my Wacom tablet. The idea of this project was to become more comfortable with my tablet, and I definitely am now. I ended it after two months because it was taking too much time of my day and the creative juices just weren’t flowing as fluidly as I’d like.

One Per Day

One Per Day is a much simpler project. Every day, I post about the day before, using only one word or phrase as the title of the post, and only one sentence describing the day. This keeps my post lengths short and to the point. It’s sort of a practice for me to pack as much content and meaning into one word and one sentence as I could, instead of dragging on and on about an incident (which I tend to do quite often… like right now).

The idea for One Per Day originated from a revisit to Ze Frank’s The Show, which indirectly kept a record of Ze’s personal life and experiences behind the scenes during its running. I have tried to keep a record of my life ever since I could write and had self-awareness. I used to write by hand with special notebooks and special pencils, and then switched to LiveJournals for a while, then to design blogs with monthly reviews (like this one).

But all these posts were taking too much time of my life to sustain, as I write really long posts, usually about now-apparently trivial things, and I wouldn’t want to return to them if I wanted to recall events of my life at the time.

One Per Day reaches a compromise between wanting to document every experience of my life and cutting down the number of words that I would have to read later on. One year from now, the individual events that happen every day will mean very little to me. In the end, a day is just a day, even on special occasions. What’s more important is the overall mood.

I just started blogging on One Per Day on WordPress (my new friend, perhaps my fortune cookie best friend?), and I haven’t gotten to redesigning it. But the presentation is going to be more streamlined and intuitive. Subscribe to the feed, and stay tuned.

Quotes I Go By Lately

“A day is a day. Every event, however trivial, will, by definition, influence and change the rest of my life.”

“Keep it simple (and easy), stupid.”

Flush.

What Am I Doing? (Mar 08)

A slight, temporary change of direction this past month. I had been working on my web site still, though at a slower rate than before. I took on a small, short freelance project recoding a website that is easier to manage and a lot more standards-compliant. But mainly, my time has been split into two parts: one for my website, and one for a part-time job.

Long story short, and in a way that I’ve been describing to my friends and such, I am now working part-time at Peet’s Coffee and Tea as a barista while I’m finishing my portfolio and web site.

I’m still training at Peet’s, so I don’t really considered myself a barista, yet. Nonetheless, this move was a result of a readjustment of priorities, the most urgent of which is financially based.

The Strategy

But I didn’t take this job just because it’s available. I’ve thought about this for a long time and have developed a flexible strategy that will work to my advantage in my career as a designer. By working here, I will be able to, first and foremost, have a front-row look at a retail environment and corporate branding strategies, which will give me some background in retail customer experience.

I’m sure a lot of established designers today had part-time retail jobs in high school and college or in the early years of their career, and that experience most likely gave them a slight edge at understanding how it all works.

Because sometimes, I feel that a lot of designers produce things based on what they think looks cool and lack sufficient research in what the client and customers need and want, or that they receive the research from the marketing department and base their designs on words on paper and not direct, personal experience.

For example, I had only worked at Peet’s for a couple shifts, but I’ve already noticed the amount of branding that the company implements onto the sales floor, ranging from the packaging to the interior design to the employee dress code. The company also has a few service-based qualities that are consistently reasserted, especially in the training material.

Room for Improvement

At the same time, I constantly think about the certain methods and ways of saying something that can be improved to increase productivity as well as customer satisfaction and enthusiasm. Occasionally, I tried to picture how and why Peet’s design team chooses a particular approach in their branding and promotion strategies and thought about little things from a retail employee point of view that they could change or add to make both the employees and customers happier.

There are also other reasons for working at Peet’s that will help me in my career in design, but I won’t list them here. But all in all, I am enjoying the experience and will take as many lessons as I could from this and apply them to my future design jobs.

Sayings of the Moment

• “Just do it.” (no affiliation with any athletic company)
• “You fail if you don’t try.” –“Get Up,” Superch!ck (from my high school days)
• “Having guts always works out for me.” –Stefan Sagmeister

Flush.