- Good morning, everybody.
Welcome to a new Vlog.
Actually, you know what?
It's not morning.
It is 12:08 PM
and so I'm starting this one a little bit later than usual,
but I have been up and about
and working and everything this morning.
I just, I don't know, forgot to blog I guess,
but I've been enjoying making these every week
and so yeah, I wanted to pick up my camera and chat to you.
Just like have a little check in.
I have been spending my work time, this morning,
making what I consider to be an MVP page for our website.
Here's the thing, as an in house marketing designer,
something you have to come to terms with
is that not everything can be absolutely beautiful
and perfectly considered all of the time.
It's just the truth, unfortunately.
There's just, I don't know, when you're on a small team
there's not time to do everything
to the absolute best of your abilities
and give everything the full design process or whatever.
So first off this morning,
I've just made this very quick page,
which has a form on it to report spam content
or abusive content on a landing page or something like that.
Yeah, it's, just using a standard default WordPress template
with our standard styling, but it's going to be fine.
You know, it's not the most beautiful page
anyone's ever seen, but it serves the need.
It's the MVP of getting this form out there
and then another one that I've been working on
is this one here, which has a page all about deliverability.
We wanted one place
to link to all of our deliverability resources,
which in case you don't know what that is.
Oh shoot.
Now I'm going to have to try and explain it to you
in a nice, concise way.
Basically deliverability is about emails landing in inboxes,
and there's lots of like ways you can write your content
and set up your email list, et cetera,
in order to improve your chances of it not ending up in spam
and for it to not be sent to the right place.
So yeah, this is a page just with lots of resources.
It's a lot of links, very text heavy at the moment,
but someone on our team, Melissa,
is starting a new podcast about deliverability.
So that'll go in there and there'll be some rich media.
So I think that'd be good,
but yeah, this page, not the prettiest,
not the best experience,
but I've tried to improve it where possible
by having these little jump links.
So you can get to the point on the page
you were trying to get to, you know, like,
whatever the reason was you came to this page.
So that's one little thing that I can do to help.
There's just not time right now
to fully design and develop a custom solution for this page.
As long as the content is all on here and findable,
and then they can call it out in the podcast
as the place to go to find deliverability content.
That is what we need and this is fine.
I don't know.
I just wanted to show you that,
because I feel like so often my Vlogs,
I'm talking about the fun projects, right.
The ones that I am able to take my time,
my proper time worth to go through the full design process,
things I end up with being really proud of,
but the honest truth is there's sometimes stuff you do
that you're not super proud of
and that there is no way that's a page
that's going in my portfolio,
you know, but that's the kind of work I do too.
So, and also and having an attitude towards these things
where I can be okay with getting an MVP version out,
actually allows me more time to work on the fun projects.
- So, I don't know.
I just wanted to share it.
Wow, my arms are sore.
What else have I got going on today?
I have a couple of meetings this afternoon
and then I have my Spanish class,
which I did my homework for yesterday like a good person
and not waiting until like a few hours before,
like I usually do.
So that was good.
Today I'm actually gonna be spending a lot of my work time,
writing a plan of some ideas for
how to promote a new feature we're launching at ConvertKit.
So that's what I think I'm gonna do next.
I think I might sit outside actually,
because it's beautiful and sunny.
It's very hot here today as you can tell
by the fact that I'm wearing a tank top.
I think that's what I'm going to do next.
First of all, before we get into that though,
I wanna say thank you to everyone
for your nice comments about the homepage,
which has finally launched, that you saw in the last Vlog.
Very exciting, very exciting indeed.
We've been getting lots of good feedback on it
and yeah, I'm just so happy to have it out there.
All right, let's go sit outside for a little bit
and do some writing.
(upbeat music)
Well, I'm already gonna have to go inside,
because my iPad is getting too hot.
We need to get an umbrella or something for our here,
but we live on a high floor.
I'd be very worried about the wind picking it up
and it flying off the balcony,
Well, let's come back inside and get this writing done.
(upbeat music)
- All right, I just had to film some videos
that are gonna go up
on the YouTube Creators Twitter account this week.
Well, it'd probably be last week,
by the time you've seen this Vlog.
I know, they'll already be out there.
They asked if I wanted to
do a social media takeover this week, which was cool,
but as it turned out, it's not so much a takeover,
just as I film a couple of videos
and then they upload them to their Twitter account,
but I don't know, it's still cool
to get to share some advice with creators that way
and who knows, hopefully it'll send a few new people
over to my channel.
I don't know.
In doing this thing though, I've just like, I don't know.
Whenever I work with a big company
it just reminds me how grateful I am
to work at a small company.
There's so many rules.
Like I replied to some tweets on a poll that they've put out
because they did a poll at the start of the week
to ask what their audience would like to hear from me,
what they'd like to hear me talk about
and they send me an email and we're like,
please, can you not reply to comments
that we don't want it to look like
you're speaking on behalf of YouTube
and I was like, wow okay, I thought it was a conversation.
Never mind.
Yeah, I don't know.
There's just, I feel like big companies
really get in the weeds with all those rules and things
and they end up kind of losing a bit of personality
honestly, because of it, you know, they're just like,
I don't know, trying so hard
to avoid any sort of error or mistake.
They ended up taking all the human out of their brand.
So that's, that's a little bit of a shame.
I don't know, but if anyone's watching this Vlog,
because you saw me
over on the YouTube Creator's Twitter channel,
then great, hi, welcome.
Now it's like 2:00.
Oh, and it's so hot in here.
Perhaps close the door
to get the sound better for those videos.
Sorry that you get crappy sounds for these Vlogs,
but you know, gotta live my life.
I'm gonna have lunch now, because like I said, 2:00
and then I've got some meetings this afternoon,
right before Spanish class
and it's going to be like last Wednesday,
which was my last Vlog when it was just like meeting,
meeting, meeting Spanish, and then I was exhausted.
So I'm gonna try and like keep my energy up for it,
by having a good lunch and probably another coffee.
So, let's go do that.
(upbeat music)
Hello everyone, Good morning.
You might've had a tell because I'm wearing the same outfit
as I did yesterday just work from home life.
That's that's what happens,
but I forgot to Vlog again yesterday evening
after all for meetings and things.
Well, you know what, it's probably not that I forgot.
It's just that I was exhausted after them.
Really takes down of you being on Zoom
for like three to four hours straight, you know.
So I think what I've learned,
'cause this happened last week too,
is that I should have blog on Wednesdays,
because on Wednesdays I'm always gonna have this problem.
Anyway, it is currently 9:30.
I went for a nice long walk this morning
listening to Office Ladies podcast
like I like to do at this time of the week.
Now I'm just getting some
side project stuff done before work.
This is what I like to do.
Most days I have this big running list in my bullet journal,
if I just pick it up here,
of all the things that I want to get done this week,
for my side hustles.
Just like, yeah, this is a longer list than most actually
and I've not worked my way through much of it yet.
So I think there's going to be a busy weekend, but yeah,
I like to have this stuff here
and then just try
and tick one or two things off each morning,
you know, so that I'm keeping, moving things along
and making sure that I'm investing time
in my side hustles.
For me, honestly, side projects
and spending a bit of time on them
in the mornings before work
is kind of like an act of self care.
I'm putting time into projects that I really care about
and they're my passion.
So that's why I know whenever people ask, like how I,
how I find the time for it,
I'm like, well, I'm like,
it's easy to find the time for it
because it's the thing that I really want to be doing,
which isn't very helpful advice, but it's the truth.
Anyway, I am about to work on making a thumbnail
for my Wireframing video,
which is uploaded by now,
because I'm going to upload it straight up to this.
So if you haven't seen that yet,
I finally made an updated video
about my wire framing process using the iPad Pro.
I had this old wire framing video.
Let me see how many views it's got,
because it's really old,
but it still gets comments to this day
and I'm like, I need to make an updated version of it.
Okay, 280,000 views.
It's four years old.
So this is kind of like an updated version of it.
I think I might actually steal the title
and stuff from this one and try and.
I don't know, it'll be a thing for me to try
and overtake my old video in the search rankings on YouTube,
just because I feel like my more updated process
is probably a better one to show people.
Wow, I'm rambling.
I can't even remember how I got onto this topic.
That's right, I'm gonna make a thumbnail.
I use Procreate to make my thumbnails.
I'm trying to keep my channel really focused on design,
but I obviously do things more than just design in my life.
I kind of want to make a video about
how I use Procreate to make my thumbnails
and like, I don't know,
I just get what I use Procreate for
and how I personally use it.
I don't know.
Is that something you'd be interested in?
Please let me know in a comment or something like that.
Yeah. Let me know if that's a thing that I should do.
(upbeat music)
Okay people.
I feel like it's probably about time
that I start to wrap up this Vlog,
because now we're halfway into Thursday.
I wanted to show you quickly though, a quick overview,
here we go, of this file that I'm handing over to Cory
to start building the training page.
I'm fairly sure I showed this in a Vlog at some point,
me wire framing this and working on it.
See how we've got all the different break points laid out.
I don't always do this many,
but there were some quirks with this one that,
yeah, needed to work through and explain
and there's some edge cases
that I've tried to think through here
and leave comments about.
So this is, yeah, just to look at
what Cory end up getting,
along with a GitHub, you know, write up.
So this is where I try to,
I leave a link to the Figma file, the Dropbox
and with the exports of any assets
that he's gonna need to upload to the page
and then like a little explanation about it.
I don't know.
We're still figuring out our process together,
but every project we do gets better and better.
So that's exciting.
Also today I set up
and prepared some more user testing calls,
which I'm excited about.
This was the thing I did.
Well, you know what?
I don't think I've done any this year.
It was last year that I was,
it was a big focus for me getting into doing testing,
running tests, getting on calls with creators,
hearing what they think about our marketing site,
but yeah, just haven't been in a position to do it.
Wanted to make sure we got the new homepage out,
new pricing page up before I got back into doing that again.
So now those are out.
It's time for me to start doing some testing.
So that's exciting.
Got those set up.
Got a couple of calls booked for tomorrow.
I'll let you know how they go next week.
I want to just say, cause I don't feel like
I've talked about it in this Vlog yet.
I can't remember because now it's halfway through Thursday.
So I can't remember what I talked about yesterday,
but a huge thank you to everyone
who has supported my digital product,
my font that I launched earlier this week.
I'm so excited to have it out there to the world.
If you didn't see me talk about it yet,
then it's called Grayscale.
Here is an image of it on screen right now.
I made it myself from scratch.
It was a lot of work, but also really fun
and I think I'm definitely going to make more.
So yeah, this is my first font and you should go buy it.
If you like the look of it.
It's $12 for a standard license,
which you let's use it for personal use
and then $26 if you want it for commercial use
and that one also has a bonus pack
of the vectors I made in it too.
So yes, very fun, very exciting
and a huge thank you to everyone who has bought it so far.
It means so much to me to know that
other people are liking it
and wanting to have it in their font collection.
So yay, yay for fonts.
All right.
Thank you for watching this Vlog.
I feel like it's been a real mixed bag this Vlog,
I'm just sort of like chatting about
whatever random thing was on my mind
and it was a different thing
every time I pick up the camera.
So I have no clue what I'm going to end up titling this,
but you'll already know that by the time you're watching it.
Anyway, yeah, hope you've had a good week
and I hope you're having a good weekend as well
and I will see you next week for the next Vlog.
- Bye.
(upbeat music)