- Good morning friends, welcome to a new vlog.
Let's start it off with
the what is now becoming a weekly plant update,
because I feel like every weekend I buy more plants.
I can't remember if from the last vlog
I showed you these two here
that I got from my past dance that I got from made.com
but anyway, they've been in the house for a while,
but I don't just potted them both properly last weekend.
The recent edition are some little succulents for underneath
our coffee table.
I just thought that would be cute
and that they would hopefully survive down here
so we shall see.
Also if I just come outside for a sec,
I potted my olive tree I think it's gonna be happy here.
I hope it's going to be happy here
and I also got some lavender and this part,
and then also this part here, but I ran out of soil.
So I couldn't plant them properly, by the way.
I can't remember if I showed these before,
but this is some herbs that I got
the basil I thought died completely,
but now it's leaves are coming back so that's exciting
I don't know why it's, I don't know.
It is Monday and it is only 26 degrees right now, Celsius,
Nancy, my editor can put on screen
what that is in Fahrenheit,
but yeah, the hot part of summer seems to be ending,
hopefully, which is nice
and this is like my ideal weather honestly,
I am going to do some writing right now
and I should give myself a bit of a change of environment.
I'm gonna go to what I'm calling my coffee shop
or what is actually just our dining room table
ever since we got this table,
it's been a nice place to sit and do some work at
our previous one was just a little bit too small
and always felt a bit cramped.
I'm gonna sit here and do some writing.
(upbeat music)
(speaking in foreign language)
(upbeat music)
Hi team, we have skipped foward to Friday.
It has been a super busy week and I just like,
honestly, throughout my work days lately
haven't even felt like
I can even have time to pick up the camera and Vlog
it's been that busy.
So it's Friday now
and I feel like I can breathe a little bit more,
which is very nice
(car engine roaring)
a bit of an update on things.
So I think it was in the last vlog actually
that I was showing you the comparison page
I was designing to compare, convert to link tree
so that, you know,
just tell people about how they can use our learning pages
for their LinkedIn bio.
Start of this week, I was meant to have it off
to Corey to build
and I was late on my deadline.
I hate being late on a deadline,
especially when I'd set for myself.
But yeah, this is what we have got
this is probably what took me so long,
honestly like just having to come up with demo content,
you know, thinking about, okay, what,
how would an author use this page?
So I've made a bunch of these LinkedIn bio pages
to create the illustrations
and then there's this carousel of examples,
but I'm really happy with how it's turned out in the end.
Like I think all the examples look good
and I'm happy with, you know, especially life
and this is a cool little demo illustration
gonna serve our purposes.
I was having to do that and also prepare
for a meeting with an ad agency that we're working with
on a big campaign coming up soon, which is very exciting
and it's like high stakes, lots of pressure
and so there was like, you know,
lots of stuff to prepare and still
all stuff to prepare for them.
As you might know, I have been the sole marketing designer
at ConvertKit for almost four years now I'm pretty sure
is how long I've been there.
We have worked with other designers before
for brand and marketing stuff
like when we rebranded the company,
we used an agency for that
and I worked with Holly Hue,
who you would have seen in the last vlog
on graphic design stuff.
You know, she handles a lot of imagery
and asset creation things for us,
but because most of the design work
and like the direction of the design work
has been coming from me,
I've never really had to create like a brand style
guidelines document or anything like that.
We have our brand page on our website
let me just open it up so I can show you
how minimal this is
and if you are a much more organized designer than me,
you're probably gonna be shocked about all this.
I don't know how bad it is
that I don't have one of these yet, but yeah,
we have this page on our site which has our brand assets
so it's like, hey, you can get our logo, this is our colors,
this is our fonts, some images, but like, that's it.
This page does not tell you how best to apply our brand
and that's kind of on purpose
because when like I'm not trying
to encourage anyone else to do design for our brand.
Like that's my job, that's what I handle
and that's what I'm across.
However, now we need this agency
to be able to design creative exits
and things for our campaign
and have them fit within our brand
and so I need you to document a lot of stuff.
So that's one of my projects for today
is to start putting together a brand and style guide
and I did a little bit of like,
I guess wire framing it yesterday
thinking through what would need to be included
this is my method of wire framing it.
So yeah, logos the fonts, but like where to you use them,
what do you use them for, colors, how we you use colors,
like I know you could take all of these colors
and do pretty different things with them
and so it's up to me to make it a bit clearer.
What we know we use for what, yeah,
just lots of stuff that needs to be explained
and I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing
that I'm gonna hopefully uncover as the day goes on.
So that's fun, kind of trying to pull
it all out of my brain and get it down onto paper,
into something that other people can follow.
This is something that actually the doest team
in the episode of Inside marketing design that featured them
they talked about having to document
so that, you know, both designers,
cause they're a marketing design team have two,
can you know, keep things aligned together
and understand the systems each other are setting up
and the reasons for doing something, not just like,
oh, I'll just copy this.
You know, speaking of inside marketing design,
I've had kind of frustrating thing happened this week
in that I had to delete the episode that I posted this week,
which is a real shame that the company
that the designer worked for, who I featured in the episode,
just wasn't happy with the way some things were said.
I dunno, it was like, I'm gonna be honest
it all sounded pretty nitpicky
and a little bit ego-driven to me.
But you know, personally,
I thought the designer did a fantastic job,
showed the company in a great light,
you learned a lot from the episode,
at least I did while editing it
and if you got to see it before it was deleted,
hopefully you do too.
But yeah, that's just a shame that companies
aren't like encouraging of their employees
to speak on behalf of the company,
especially when, like I said,
they do show it in such a good light.
In my episode, it's like companies
don't get editorial rights over them or anything like that
they're not ads for the company, right?
It's a chat with the designer about the processes and things
and I always share the questions beforehand
so that they can run anything by, you know,
stakeholders and stuff to check
if there's anything that shouldn't be covered
and they said, everything will be fine
and it didn't turn out that way, which is a real shame
and I feel really bad for the designer that I interviewed,
because, like I said, I thought they did a great job.
I want everyone to be happy with the episodes that are up,
you know, I could have kept it up.
It would have been like my right too, but yeah
wanted everyone to be happy about the situation
and so the best thing to do was to delete it.
It's a shame about all that lost work
but you know, this is the best result for everyone.
Lots of lessons learned for me, for sure for next time,
like more things that I need to ensure I check.
Yeah, anyway, I just like acted on that this morning
after like trying to come to a solution
where I would like edit some things out,
but yeah, just wasn't gonna work
anyway that was a big, long chat
so time to get into the workday,
I haven't opened up slack yet.
So let's do that again
and see how many notification I've got overnight.
Oh, there's like four, great
I'm gonna be able to get straight into work then
this is good.
(upbeat music)
Just ended my workday by sitting outside
since it's really nice weather out here
and it's shady in the afternoon.
So the computer doesn't get too hot or anything like that
and I've been sitting here with a beer.
So that has been very nice it's been a productive day
the page that I showed you at the start of,
well start today in the vlog,
Corey is already pretty much built it
I just gave him some feedback on the build
so that's really exciting.
The bet is moving so fast let me show you
where I got up to with the brand style guide, okay.
So I've sort of got a system working for the pages
where I'm gonna like do some explaining at the side
and then have the content on the right hand side.
There's still a lot to go still
I don't know if I got super far with this.
My favorite part though, is this,
this is me trying to explain the confetti scale
that on our more event based pages.
So like I said, down here,
conference, event booths, online workshop, signup pages
that's when we use lots more like pops of color
and organic shapes and things like that
and then the scale light goes down for blog imagery.
It's less the homepage and feature pages it's a lot less,
it's mainly just like the blob shapes
and then like inside the app itself,
there's nothing like that.
So this is me trying to illustrate that
Cause the point is
that someone needs to be able to
create things that fit our design style
and if you just give them all of the like,
you know, crazy cool shapes and things,
they might use them all over the place
when that's not really like the vibe that would go for.
Yeah there's still lots more pages to go.
I laid out all of our like motto graphics in here
these are some new ones, this one's by Holly,
this one's by Tinlun who is a great follower on Instagram,
if you don't follow him already
but yeah, they look super cool
yeah, it's coming together, but there's a lot more to do.
Now I'm going to sign off for the day though
usually just like to pop a little note in slack
and just tell my team that I'm finishing my day,
'cause it's still like their afternoon at the moment
and yeah, we're gonna order some takeaways for dinner,
which is what we often do on Friday nights
it's like, you know, treat dinner night for us.
Have you enjoyed watching this vlog
that I find interesting or just like you know
like to hanging out with me for the week,
I'll see you again next week for new vlog, bye.
(upbeat music)