Wednesday 28 December 2016

Grading My 2016 Goals—Even A Curve Won’t Help This Year - Vanseo Design

Grading My 2016 Goals—Even A Curve Won’t Help This Year - Vanseo Design

Grading My 2016 Goals—Even A Curve Won’t Help This Year

Posted: 27 Dec 2016 05:30 AM PST

Happy Holidays. I hope you're enjoying the last week of the year and getting ready for the new one to come. Today is my last post in 2016 and as in year's past, I want to review the goals I set back in early January. I'll grade my success, or lack thereof, as I talk about what I accomplished from my list.

I've been setting and reviewing goals for quite a few years. If you're interested, here are my review posts from previous years.

Next week I'll share the goals I'm setting for 2017 and I'll offer links to earlier posts where I did the same.

As I've said in the past, I find the practice of setting goals helpful in creating a road map that points the way when I'm not sure what to work on after I finish a project sometime during the year. My plans often change during the next year, but I still find it valuable to spend some time thinking about the big picture.

The reviews keep me honest. They get me to see what I actually worked on and what I avoided, which leads me to ask myself some hard questions about what I really want from my business. My answers to these questions help me revise my goals for the following year.

With that said, how did I do with my 2016 goals?

My Goals for 2016

2016 has been another year of transition for me as I shift from a provider of web design and development services to someone who creates products for sale. It's been my overarching goal for a couple of years now.

When I set goals for this year I grouped them around different domains I own. I had goals for this site, goals for my forum, and goals for a new site I hoped to launch. I also added a few general goals that weren't specific to any of the sites.

Here are the groups and specific goals I set. There are eight total goals and I'll give myself a point for each one I successfully accomplished.

  • VanseoDesign.com
    • Create more products
    • Content audit
    • Site improvements
  • Small-Business-Forum.net
    • Relaunch forum
  • StevenBradley.me
    • Launch site
  • General
    • Continue productivity improvements
    • New writing rhythm and more efficient content creation
    • Guest writing and other media

Without running through the exercise I already know my grade will be much lower than usual. As I often say in these posts, the year brought unexpected changes and I spent most of 2016 focussed on one goal at the exclusion of others.

I also realized that several of my goals relied on completing one goal first. I didn't complete the prerequisite early in the year, which kept me from getting started on the others that relied on it.

VanseoDesign.com

I set three major goals for this site. The first I didn't work on at all. The second is the one I started early in the year and didn't look at again until a couple of weeks ago. I completed one part of the third goal, but nothing more.

Create More Products

Nope. Nada. Zilch. I didn't do this at all. I thought about it a lot, but that's hardly the same thing. The specific goal was to have one new book for sale. I didn't mention it, but I also wanted to rewrite a a section of my book about Design Fundamentals to publish a second version. I didn't do either.

I'll give myself credit for one thing. I've been writing more longer form series instead of individual posts. Most of what I've written here this past year could serve as the draft of a book, which feels like progress toward publishing books.

That said, I can't give myself credit for having written or published a book this year, which means I didn't complete this goal.

Content Audit

I started a content audit in late January. I thought about what information I wanted to collect, such as post title and URL, and I thought about my purpose in running the audit. I found a few WordPress plugins that made it easy to export the information I wanted and I set up a spreadsheet with that information along with additional columns for notes about the content.

My main goal with the audit was to collect the information to help me decide what could be turned into books, whether specific content meets some purpose, and how I might improve what's here to help in my business transition.

Once the spreadsheet was set up and filled with meta data about all the posts I've written, I stopped working on the audit. I forget why I stopped, but the longer I didn't get back to it, the easier it was to not get back to it. A couple of weeks ago as I started thinking about this and next week's posts, I dug out the spreadsheet and I've now added some of the notes I intended to make back in January.

Unfortunately this was the prerequisite for several other goals and the delay between starting and finishing kept me from working on some of the other things I wanted to do this year.

I could technically say I finished this, but I'll give myself 0.5 points, since what I finished was a lite version of what I set out to do and because I waited so long in the year to get back to it.

Site improvements

I always start the year by completing one goal, usually one that won't take much time. It feels good knowing I've accomplished at least one thing early in the year. This year the early goal was one of the site improvements I wanted to make. Here are the improvements I mentioned.

  • Rework the Book(s) section of this site
  • Remove the Work section
  • Fix the Archives page
  • Rework the forum
  • Improve navigation to post series

I removed the Work section right away. If memory serves, the section was gone by the end of the first week of 2016. It made no sense to promote services I no longer offered so I removed my portfolio, client testimonials, and assorted details across the site.

However, I didn't make any of the other site improvements. I wanted to work on the content audit before reworking the archives page and making changes to the navigation as I expected to remove some content and rearrange how some was organized. The Book section of the site is waiting for more books, which is my explanation for not working on it this year.

Midway through the year I made a decision to shut down the forum here on the site. I've never done much to promote it or even make you aware it exists. It's a barren place that only adds to the time it takes to load the site. Removing it shouldn't take long, but I want to allow some time to make sure I don't break anything when I turn the forum off. I know I've referenced the forum across the site and I tweaked code in one or two places that I'll need to rewrite. My guess is this will be the project I work on to start 2017.

I'll give myself 0.25 points for this goal. I know 1 out of 5 is 0.20, but the specific projects are meant as examples of what I might do and not everything I need to do to complete the goal.

Small-Business-Forum.net

This time last year I was talking to a couple of friends about building a larger site around the forum. Our plan was to write original articles to help attract a larger audience and work on different digital products we could sell through the site.

Not long into the year I made the decision to put this goal on hold. I think it was sometime in early February when I decided and later in the month or early in March when we discussed it.

We had been talking every other weekend about what we wanted to do and discussing concrete steps we then needed to take. We didn't get a lot done between calls though. I think we all wanted to, but we weren't able to give the forum the needed priority to do the work we needed to do.

I thought it best to put our plans on hold. I said we'd revisit things in the fall, but fall is now officially over and I've yet to bring it up again.

I did renew several potential domains we thought of using for the site and I have given some thought to the forum and what I'd like to do with it in the future. I'll talk about some of what I'm thinking next week.

As for a grade I have to give myself another 0, since the goal was to relaunch the forum with a larger site around it and that didn't happen.

StevenBradley.me

My goal for this domain was to launch a site, which will be a place where I write more about creativity, mainly writing. I also want it to be a place where I can share stories I've written as well as some of the photographs I make.

If you visited the site this time last year and visit it again now, you'll notice it's the same newsletter sign up form I had in place a year ago. There's no new site.

I did create a design and I developed a prototype. I want to make a couple of tweaks to the design, but it's essentially done. Once I make the tweaks, it shouldn't take long to finish developing the site. I also have outlines and notes for the necessary pages and ideas for regular content I'll write once the site is launched.

The thing is launching this site commits me to publishing an article every week or two and I didn't think I could realistically do that at any point this past year.

There is a positive side to this goal. The signup form is to receive the newsletter I send out once every three weeks. Aside from giving updates on my progress writing fiction and my journey as a writer in general, I've used the newsletters to work out the voice I'll write with on the new site. The site may not have launched, but when it does, I'll be much further along than when I'e launched sites in the past.

Despite the positive, I didn't launch a site. It's another 0 for this goal.

General Goals

I also listed three goals that weren't specifically tied to any of the sites above.

  • Continue Productivity Improvements
  • Find a New Writing Rhythm
  • Guest Writing and Other Media

Continue Productivity Improvements

I set this goal most every year. I'll admit one reason I add it is because I'm confident it's something I'll work on throughout the year. It's been an easy way to cross one goal off as completed. Having made that confession, this is the year I didn't complete this goal. Somewhere in the middle of the year I stopped managing my productivity entirely.

I found I didn't need to stay on top of my projects and tasks as I have in year's past. I worked more with a routine and some vaguely defined projects than I have in previous years. For example I didn't need to manage tasks for a project like write a series of posts about SVG filters to remain productive.

For most of the year I worked on the same few projects for weeks or even months at a time. I didn't need to manage tasks. I needed to set aside enough time each week to work and I needed an occasional reminder and a periodic review of what I wanted to complete and when I wanted to complete it. That didn't require day to day management of tasks. Much of the year I could simply wake up and work on the same thing I worked on the day before and at roughly the same times.

Here or there I did have more to do, but I found it easiest to make a list at the start of the week or month and work off the list until everything was done, instead of using a productivity app.

I'm not entirely sure how to grade this goal. Technically I didn't improve my productivity system. If anything, I abandoned it. However, because I didn't need the system this year, I may have discovered a better system for the kind of work I'll be doing in the years ahead.

Find a New Writing Rhythm

This became my main focus all year. My goal behind this goal was to figure out how to incorporate writing fiction into my routine and then how to make writing fiction my priority.

While I've been writing for a long time, writing fiction is different than writing non-fiction. It took some time till I could find a new routine. For the most part I now write fiction in the morning and I write non-fiction in the afternoon.

When I started, I was lucky if even a half hour of the fiction writing time was productive, but now I can write fiction for several hours a day over several smaller blocks of time.

It took a little while before I could get my writing projects in sync so I could do some research for a series while writing the a draft of a story and later in the month write a draft for the series while editing a newsletter and working on the structure of another story.

With this site specifically I was able to get farther ahead of schedule. I've been running 3–4 months ahead most of the year. Whenever you've been reading one series, I've been working on the next one or sometimes that one after the next one. Being ahead like this allows me to work on a series for a couple of months and then take a month off to work on other projects.

This is the one goal that I absolutely accomplished and deserve a full point for having completed.

Guest Writing and Other Media

I had good intentions with this one. I thought guest posting would help bring in some of the revenue that would no longer come from clients. Early in the year I could tell I'd be able to get by financially in 2016 without needing the revenue and I didn't seek out opportunities to write for other sites. I even turned a few opportunities down.

I have agreed to work on what I hope will be a series of short screencasts. I've worked out the demo and the general outline for the series. I need to flesh it out a bit and I actually need to record the videos, which is something I've not really done before and expect will require a lot of practice and more than a few files that will be deleted and seen by no one other than me.

But as is the theme this year, I didn't complete this goal and it's another 0 points added to my grade.

Closing Thoughts

I can't claim to have achieved many of my 2016 goals. I deserve a full point for the new writing rhythm and I think I deserve 0.25 points for the site improvements. I also think the 0.5 points for the content audit is fair.

Finally I'll give myself another 0.25 points for everything else. It seems unfair to deduct a full point for the productivity improvements as the nature of my work changed and I think I should get some credit for having maintained the newsletter for the new site, even if the site itself isn't live.

That means I earned 2.0 of a possible 8.0 points, which is certainly a rather poor grade for the year. Oddly enough, I not feeling bad about it. The point of this isn't really a passing or failing grade after all. The point is in the exercise and not so much the result.

Next week will be my first post for 2017 and I'll share my goals for the year. I may not have accomplished all I set out to do in 2016, but the lack of success has led me to rethink a few assumptions I had and it's leading me to a few new thoughts about the direction I want to take my business.

I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and I hope you have a Happy New Year in a few days. I'll talk more about the new year and my goals for 2017 next week.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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

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Wednesday 14 December 2016

How You Can Gain Confidence And Trust Your Ideas - Vanseo Design

How You Can Gain Confidence And Trust Your Ideas - Vanseo Design

How You Can Gain Confidence And Trust Your Ideas

Posted: 13 Dec 2016 05:30 AM PST

One of the reasons we ask others where they get ideas or where they find inspiration is because we don't have the confidence to trust in our own ideas or our own sources of inspiration. We often grant authority to others because we don't have the confidence to grant it to ourselves and to trust our own judgement.

Trust Yourself

The last couple of weeks I've been talking about inspiration and ideas and how to observe and notice what's around you. I want to conclude this short series with some thoughts about gaining confidence so you don't have to ask others if your ideas are good. I want to help you gain the confidence to know your ideas are good without having to ask anyone else.

Knowledge Leads to Confidence

Most of us lack confidence when we're dealing with something we know little about. I assume you've never performed brain surgery on anyone and if someone asked you to, you'd lack the confidence to try. At least I hope you would, unless you happen to be a brain surgeon, in which case I'd ask why you're reading this post about confidence on a site about design.

I don't speak Chinese. I don't know the meaning of any Chinese characters. If you hand me something written in Chinese I won't have any confidence in my ability to read it or derive any sort of meaning from it.

However, were I to learn some common characters and gain a basic understanding of the language, my confidence would grow. I wouldn't understand all the words on the page, but I'd have the confidence to try to work out their meaning based on the few words and characters I had learned and then use those few words and characters to figure out some others from the context of what I know.

Design has a long and rich history and tradition. There are fundamental principles of design that date back thousands of years and there are plenty of general guidelines you can follow.

One step toward becoming a more confident designer is to learn the basics, the fundamentals of design. The knowledge you gain will help grow your confidence. If you understand the what and why of the basics, you'll be more equipped to see design in the real world and to recognize good from bad. You'll learn which designs are considered better and why and the understanding will help you figure out where to draw inspiration.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Understanding is great, but when you apply what you've learned it leads to a much deeper understanding. It's one thing to understand that two colors are complementary to each other and another thing to use both together in a harmonious way.

You learn to make better decisions by making decisions and analyzing their results. You might not succeed entirely in your first attempt, but in trying you'll identify where you did have some success, which will give you more confidence to do the same again. You'll also learn where you struggled, which will give you a direction for what to learn next.

It's easy to know that a grid can help you organize information visually and quite another to figure out how to organize your information inside a specific grid or choose which grid to use in the first place.

Ultimately you gain confidence by succeeding, but you have to try before you can succeed. Every small success will lead to a confidence boost. But again you have to try before you can succeed so a big part of gaining confidence is simply to try.

Questions and Answers

Last week I said you should ask questions about the designs you see and then do your best to answer them before asking anyone else. I mentioned this as a way to train yourself to see the world through the lens of design. What I didn't mention is a big part of this is Q&A is to help you increase your confidence as a designer.

It's good to know others who you can ask when you need to, but when someone else gives you an answer that's their success and not yours. Every time you think of a question about design it's a small success for you. Every time you answer one of those questions, it's another success for you.

The more you look at designs and raise and answer questions, the more time you spend thinking about design and the more your confidence as a designer grows. When it's time for your next project and you have to decide on a color scheme or a grid to use, you'll have already answered the same questions multiple times. You'll realize your current project is similar to another one you've already seen and thought about.

You'll understand you're choosing imagery to communicate elegance or warmth or whatever it is you're trying to communicate. You'll have plenty of examples to show you how because you will already have asked and answered the same questions about what kind of images work well to communicate elegance or warmth or whatever.

When you only ask others, you remain at their mercy. When you ask yourself and especially when you answer your own questions, you gain confidence in being able to answer the next question.

Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

One thing you have to be careful about is sticking to what you already know and not expanding beyond your comfort zone. It's easy to stay inside a small area of comfort because you feel confident in the immediate surroundings. They'll be familiar and feel safe. The thing is the larger the area you feel comfortable in, the more you can do, the more you know, and the more confident you'll be in general.

You have to break out of your comfort zone at times in order to grow past your limits. Sometimes you have to force yourself to do this regardless of how scary it might be. Change things up just to change them up. Push yourself into the new and unknown. Sure, it can be scary, but you'll figure things out and each time you do, you'll be more confident you can do it again.

Start with small changes. Push ever so slightly past your limits. Then do it again and again. Little by little you'll expand your boundaries and as you do your confidence will grow.

It's why I re-evaluate the feeds I subscribe to from time to time. It removes older tired ideas and replaces them with new sources for inspiration. It's why I ask myself questions about design and try my hardest to answer them without seeking any help. It allows me to rethink accepted answers and see if I can come up with new ways of seeing things or new ways to answer the same old questions. It's why when I realize I'm not good at something, I force myself to do it more. It gives me a chance to practice and get better.

You can't grow if you stay in the same place all the time. Growth requires change. It requires pushing past existing limits. It means you should question what you know to be true so you can understand why it's true or no longer true or why there's a better truth out there you've yet to encounter.

Closing Thoughts

We live in a world where you can find the answer to any question in a matter of seconds by hopping on Twitter or Facebook or wherever and asking if anyone knows. While there's nothing wrong with asking for help every now and again, you'll gain a lot more confidence in yourself if you first try to figure out the answers to your questons on your own.

Learn from others and then apply what you've learned. When you get stuck or aren't sure what the best way to do something is, try to work it out before asking someone else to show you. The time and effort you put into solving the problem will grow your confidence like nothing else.

You have to try before you can have success and success is what ultimately leads to confidence. Learn as much as you can about design and put what you learn into practice. Try to work things out before asking for help and whenever you feel like you know your stuff try something new that you don't understand and go through the process again.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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Tuesday 6 December 2016

Observation Is The Key To Finding Inspiration - Vanseo Design

Observation Is The Key To Finding Inspiration - Vanseo Design

Observation Is The Key To Finding Inspiration

Posted: 06 Dec 2016 05:30 AM PST

The real trick to finding inspiration is realizing you don't have to go out looking for it. It's all around you and it's ready to share itself with you. The thing is most of us don't know how to see it.

Binoculars

Last week I talked about finding inspiration and generating new ideas. I talked about how to gather inspiration from a variety of sources and how you want to collect ideas and things that inspire you. I also mentioned that it's better to always be taking in inspiration than waiting until you need it.

Today I want to address that last point in greater detail. I want to talk about seeing what's already in front of you as a potential source of ideas and inspiration.

Noticing Instead of Seeking

When designing a new website, I've been inspired by other websites, magazines, software, nature, conversations, television, books, furniture, posters, office supplies, and a variety of seemingly random things. Inspiration really can be found anywhere as long as you know how to look.

Everything around you, everything you come in contact with, was either designed by a human being or it grew organically in nature according to the laws of physics. Those laws are, in a sense, the design of the universe. Plants grow toward the light. Animals adapt their color to better hide from a predator or stalk prey. These are among the basic rules for how nature works.

There's a bookcase to my right. It's mostly filled with books as you might guess, but in addition to the books there are a number of other things all with examples of typography. I see type on the boxes of a couple of board games, on some hats, a can of cleaner for my laptop screen, a candle, a stapler, and the packaging for a few random items that happen to live on one of the shelves.

You might open some of the books looking for typographic inspiration, but would you even think to look at those other items? Again it's not about having to seek out inspiration. There are lots of things around you right now that can inspire you. The challenge is to notice them.

We come in contact with inspiring design every day, but we don't recognize it for what it is so we pass it by. Simply noticing design is part of the equation. Learning to see the world as a designer (or writer or photographer, etc.) is another part.

Learn to See The World Through the Lens of Design

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
—Mark Twain

You've probably seen the quote above (or one similar to it) before. The idea is we see the world through a context of our own creation. If you ask a designer what's wrong with your website, she'll point out a few things that could be improved in the design. Ask a copywriter the same question and he'll point out where the copy could be better. Ask a developer and the site loads to slow. A business consultant will tell you the site is fine and your business model needs improving.

Each of us sees the world through a different lens. If you want inspiration for designs then you need to train yourself to see the world through the lens of design.

20 years ago when I walked up and down a street filled with different shops, I might look into the windows to see what each store had inside and decide if I wanted to go in for a longer look. I failed to notice a lot of things, though.

I wouldn't have noticed the sign over the front door displaying the company logo. I might have read the words to know what store I was walking into, but I wouldn't have given the sign more than a glance. I wouldn't have noticed the colors, let alone how well they did or didn't work together. I wouldn't have noticed if the letters were serif or sans-serif or if they were hand lettered.

I also wouldn't have noticed how the products were organized in the window or ask myself what the display said about the philosophy of the store owner. If I walked inside, I wouldn't have paid attention to how everything was arranged and where the register was in relation to the different items on display.

I was looking at all those things through the lens of a consumer and not the lens of a designer. After starting a freelance web design business I did start to notice these things and I started to train myself to see the world as a designer might see it.

Your job as a designer is ultimately to solve problems and there are plenty of examples everywhere with solutions to different problems. There are solutions you can think about and decide for yourself if they do indeed solve the problem and if so how well.

Paying attention to my surroundings this way has led me to notice many more examples of good and bad design and the good examples can often serve as inspiration. I grab my phone, take a picture and send it off to my storehouse of inspiring things.

Today when I walk down a row of shops I pay more attention to things like the sign above the door and I ask myself what does it suggest about what's inside. When I then walk inside one of the stores I ask myself if the inside matches the message that was communicated by that sign over the door.

Ask and Answer Questions About Design

Paying attention is a first step, but there's more to seeing the world through the lens of design (or anything else). I find Q&A sessions with yourself are a good way to train yourself to think critically and see the world like a designer.

Ask yourself questions about design and then do your best to answer your own questions. Always ask yourself before asking anyway else.

For example if you come across a site and like the color scheme, don't just file away the color scheme for future use. Ask yourself why you like it. Why does it inspire you? Is it a specific color that's being used? Is it because the colors are all dark? All light? Is it because the colors contrast well or maybe because they complement one another.

Don't ask someone else. Raise your own questions and think about the answers. Maybe you won't know why you like a particular color scheme, but try to figure it out anyway. The time you spend raising questions and trying to answer them is time spent thinking about design and seeing the world through the lens of design.

The Q&A with yourself pushes you to think like a designer and consequently see the world as a designer. It doesn't matter if you come up with the right answer or not. The answer is actually irrelevant for this process. It's the effort spent thinking about the questions and trying to answer them that's important.

Look at something designed and try to guess why the designer made the specific choices she made. Do you agree with the solution? Can you think of a better one? Can you think of a reason (a small budget perhaps) why the designer didn't offer a better solution?

Look at a design and reverse engineer the problem. Think about the information the designer might have had before working out a solution. What conditions and constraints might have been in place to prevent the optimal solution?

In addition to using your own judgement in asking and answering these questions, spend some time learning design fundamentals so you can recognize them in the work of others. It's one thing to look at a web page and decide you like it and another to look at the same page and understand how the layout fits with design theory.

Knowing the theory will help you better understand the decisions the designer made. Did the designer apply fundamentals to the layout? Why or why not? How do you know? If they did apply the theory how did they do it? What specific technique did they use?

Always be asking yourself these kind of questions even with things that don't seem like they were designed. The next time you pass your favorite tree think about why it's your favorite. Is it the shape of the trunk? The direction the limbs grow? The color of the leaves? What is it that leads you to like that tree? Can you use that in a future design.

Closing Thoughts

I think your ability to notice, observe, and to ask and answer questions is the key to finding inspiration that can help you with your work.

People frequently ask authors where they get ideas and the universal replay is that ideas are everywhere and once you learn how to see them your problem won't be where to get ideas, but how to find the time to write stories for all the ideas you have. The same is true for design.

The more you think about every day things through the context of design, the more you're thinking about design solutions and design problems, and the better you'll be able to come up with your own solutions to the problems you're tasked with solving.

When you train yourself to see the world as a designer, you'll discover you can find inspiration in most anything and you'll open up wider and more varied sources of inspiration. Train yourself to pay more attention to your day-to-day surroundings and ask and answer design related questions about what you see. The more you do this, the less you'll wonder where to draw inspiration for your next project.

Download a free sample from my book Design Fundamentals.

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

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