Weeknotes 105
This week, I juggled some design work, betrayed my design roots with Canva, and got out of my comfort zone for a local networking event.
It’s FOSDEM this week and the team are giving a talk, so I had the chance to see how the branding work I’d done for ecosyste.ms held up in a new context. It’s hard to predict what kinds of things people do with slides so I kept it incredibly simple, but the deck came together in the end with a sprinkle of illustrations combined with the bold main colour palette. Alongside this I refreshed some one-pagers to be printed, in Canva (my first time doing something real in Canva, not so terrible).
I also started working on redesigning the first of a wide range of ecosyste.ms services - an API and directory of security advisories. It’s early but it’s going to be quite challenging to arrive at a design that can present the varying amounts of data in a clear way. I did a lot of reading and research into the data, and the meanings behind it, then started drawing up a hierarchy of sorts which will inform the first wireframes. It hasn’t quite clicked yet, which for me usually means I need to started putting boxes on a page and pushing them around.
I attended a local networking event on Thursday evening, aimed at small businesses in Shropshire. Events like this aren’t my strong point, I’ve never been the kind of person comfortable ‘working a room’ but I had a couple of nice chats with some other attendees and swapped business cards. I get the feeling success with these things comes with time, you don’t build relationships off of a single quick chat in the backroom of a pub - but over many, many chats in time. It was incredibly well attended, and I’m going to make an effort to attend more of these and meet the regulars.
Listening
Petey USA. I started to get recommend some of his music through tiktok, and really liked it, but my distrust of the algorithm kinda got in the way a bit. It wasn’t until I realised that Petey USA was the same Pete who drums for Young Jesus did I relent. Algorithm trickery or not, I really enjoy his authentic presentation and lyrical style and his two albums have been on rotation all week.
Watching
Prime Target. Apple TV’s latest offering is laughably bad, but almost so bad it’s good. It’s like a holiday novel you pick up at the airport and read in 90 minutes. Has the all time best quote too “computers are designed with numbers”, coupled with the main character, a phd maths whizz googling “prime numbers” it might not get any more time from me, but it offered a few good laughs while I did some drawing practise over a couple of nights.
Reading
Started ‘The God of the Woods’, a thriller about a camper going missing from a 1970s summer camp. So far pretty good, has a spooky edge to it but I don’t think it’s about to get supernatural. I need a good fiction book on the go while I’ve got a chunky non-fiction on my nightstand too, this is perfect.
