(electronic hip hop music)
- Hi, friends.
Welcome to a new working from home vlog,
but I'm not in my own home.
I'm in my sister's at the moment.
I'm in Wellington because she is getting married
next week, and I'm maid of honor, and so, yeah,
I'm spending my work week working from her home office.
So, because I'm in New Zealand, it's Monday,
but for my teammates in the US,
or the ones in Europe even, it is still Sunday.
So, yeah, time zones are weird and especially difficult
when you're working from this side of the world.
But it means it's a really quiet day,
and there's nothing, no excuses for getting my work done.
Unfortunately, today is a day where I'd really like
some of the excuses, because I'm really struggling
with a project that I'll show you in a second.
First, I'm just about to make some coffee.
(electronic hip hop music)
Okay, got my coffee, ready to get to work.
My current challenge is rebranding our conference website.
We run a conference each year for online creatives.
It's called Craft and Commerce, and the conference brand
kind of tied in with our company brand.
It used the same color palette.
But last year, after the conference,
we rebranded the company,
so that means that currently,
the conference website doesn't match our main brand.
So that's not a great fit,
and that's something I need to work on.
As you can see, if my camera will focus,
the old brand is kind of blue with purple.
This matched our brand.
But our new ConvertKit brand, let me just go to a page
and show you, the new brand uses this red as the main color,
and it's like, this playful illustration style
is being used throughout, with, yeah,
just different colors as the block backgrounds.
As you can see, this really doesn't fit with this, does it?
I'm finding it really difficult, to be honest.
I've been playing around with a bunch of different things.
Here's my long art board of different experiments,
and right now, I'm just trying to lay out
a full page in this new style idea that I have,
just to see if it's gonna work.
We don't really have the capacity to redo the whole website,
so basically, what I'm doing
is reskinning the template, essentially.
So things will be in kind of the same place,
just we'll change the CSS
to match this new design that I came up with.
I'm finding it really difficult to crack this and get it
looking right and get it feeling how I want it to.
When I'm feeling this creative block,
struggling to push through and get to the result
that I'm after, my brain is just super excited
for any sort of distraction, because what I'm doing is hard,
so things like checking Twitter,
that's a lot easier for my brain to cope with.
So I've gotta do a lot of things
to avoid that distraction in times like these.
Number one is working with headphones on,
even though I am the only one in the house right now.
I could easily play my music out loud if I wanted to.
But yep, working with headphones
helps me get in more of the zone.
I've also been using,
let me pull it up on my phone and show you.
This is an app called Forest,
and it's basically a Pomodoro timer that when you finish
a solid work block, you grow a little tree,
and if you set the timer and then pick up your phone
and exit out of the app and do something else with it,
the tree dies, and then it stays there
in your forest as a dead tree to remind you
of how poorly you did focusing that one time.
So yeah, I find it to be quite a good motivator,
'cause I don't wanna kill this digital tree.
Something else I really need
when I'm having trouble focusing is good music.
So right now, I'm playing my top songs of 2018 playlist,
and yep, it's keeping me in my seat
and getting through this.
All right, let's get back to work.
(electronic hip hop music)
Right, Tuesday, I've come into town
to work today with Holly.
How did we meet, Holly?
- At Zero. - At Zero?
Yeah, Holly was an intern at Zero when I worked there,
and we've just been friends ever since.
And she lives in Wellington, so we've come for a little
coffee shop work session, and we're gonna go out for dinner.
(electronic hip hop music)
Hey Holly, wanna go for a swim?
- No. (both laughing)
- It was so much fun hanging out with Holly yesterday
and doing some cafe working.
You know, we talked about some ConvertKit projects as well,
because Holly does some design work for us,
like contract projects, so that was pretty cool.
I'm feeling a lot better about my conference project
that I was talking about a couple of days ago.
I shared it with my manager Derrick yesterday
in our one-on-one, and I don't know,
I think that I've just been stuck in my own head with it.
And so, sharing this stuff, he was like,
Charli, all of this is looking great,
and I was like, well, I don't believe you.
There's still a lot of refinements to do, blah, blah, blah.
But yeah, overall, it's not terrible what I've been doing.
So even though I've been struggling, yeah,
I think I really just needed to share it
and get some outside feedback.
So I've got some more feedback coming in from the team
that's helping me refine it and figure out what I wanna do.
I think I'm still really struggling with the logo itself,
like trying to update that, but I've been getting
some good direction on the website.
So there's four different versions that I did,
this one, this one, this one, which is really
just a different color way of this one,
and then this one, you know, just different ways
of applying our brand to the conference template.
So far, people have been selecting this one here
as the favorite, so we'll see if that trend continues.
I think it's my favorite too.
Anyway, what I like to do
when I'm really struggling with a project
is take a break from it and move onto something else.
So, today, I'm going to be working
on some templates for our webinar team to use,
and that should give my brain a bit of a reset
before I come back to all this conference stuff.
(jazzy electronic music)
Yesterday while I was hanging out with Holly,
we were talking about prints,
and she let me take a look at the prints
that she has for sale, and I bought one from her.
I'm just going to attempt
to unroll it and show you. (Charli laughs)
(paper rustles)
Okay, here's the print.
It says, she designed a life she loved.
I love this phrase.
It's a pretty popular one to do in prints,
but I love Holly's lettering that she's done for it,
I think it's really cool,
and also, that it's a really cool shape.
I'm thinking that it might look cool hung up above my iMac
on the other wall in my office, I don't know.
But I need to post this to myself
back in London essentially because I definitely
don't have the luggage space to take this home.
Yeah, I'm just gonna send myself some mail,
so it can head there before me and be waiting
when I get back. (Charli laughs)
Welcome to Thursday.
My hair, if you might notice, (Charli laughs)
is a bit darker than the last clip.
If you don't know, if you haven't been watching my channel
for a while, I often have quite colorful hair,
and when it fades, it goes all sorts
of very interesting colors, one of which is that
the ends of my hair are slightly teal green tinged.
It's like being stained
from all the dyes that I've been using.
Anyway, with Samme's wedding coming up next week,
decided that it wouldn't be good to have slightly green hair
for the wedding photos, you know, that's gonna keep forever.
So before I left London, I had put
a light brown on top of my hair and covered it up,
but it was already starting to fade, and you could see
a green-y tone in some lights, so I wanted to get rid of it.
This is a little bit darker than I wanted, but, hey.
Anyway, this is not why I turned
the camera on, getting distracted.
I wasn't gonna vlog today.
I was gonna vlog tomorrow instead to finish off the vlog,
but I have just had a little breakthrough with my
conference site stuff, and I wanted to show you basically.
This is the crazy thing about how design works sometimes,
is you can like, brute force it, you can try all these
different things, and one day, it will just click,
and you never know when it's gonna come.
There's obviously things you can do to try help it,
but yeah, I don't know, it is sometimes very scary
to work in a job where things can be left
up to, I don't wanna say chance,
but left up to inspiration, maybe, I don't know.
Like, it's hard to be creative on cue, essentially,
and when you try to force it, it doesn't always help.
Anyway, let me show you.
So I think I showed you this before.
This was one of the logos that I had
in one of the sort of page layouts that I had.
People weren't a huge fan of this logo, and I agree.
It looks a little bit childish.
Someone said it reminds them of Crayola, fair enough.
This was kind of the second favorite
of the logo alternates that I'd done.
Quite different, but still has the same vibe to it,
and I was quite liking this.
You see I've put a texture in the shape here,
these brush pen lines behind the dates.
That felt like it was working well.
But yeah, it still didn't feel quite right,
and also I had feedback that people
still preferred the original logo,
and I was trying to get something more similar
to the original, which looked like,
let me go over to it, which looks like this.
So something similar to this, but with less paint splatters.
And so, eventually, I don't know why
I didn't think of this from the very start,
I had been trying to redraw these letters and stuff.
I just thought, you know what, I wonder what it
would look like if I take all the paint splatters out
and take this plus out, and this is what it looks like.
It looks pretty all right.
It's still got the brushy character to it,
but it's less intense with splatters and stuff,
so it's possible to put this in red without it
looking like blood. (Charli laughs)
And this is what it looks like in the page.
And I'm pretty happy with how this is looking like.
This is feeling right, maybe because this is a very slight
change to our current logo, so I'm used to our current logo,
and that's why it feels right.
Either way, I'm gonna tidy up this page a bit and send it
through to the team for their feedback, 'cause this was
the favorite design of the websites that I did too.
So happy to have finally got to a place
where I'm liking what I'm designing for this thing,
'cause for a very long time, it's felt like,
I don't know, I'm not doing anything good,
which is obviously not a fun state to be in.
So, I'm gonna keep working on this, and then sleep on it
overnight and come back to it tomorrow
and hope that I still like it.
I'll keep you updated.
(jazzy electronic music)
Well, I forgot to end the vlog, as per usual.
It wouldn't be a Charli Marie TV vlog
if I didn't forget to end it during the actual week
and had to film an ending clip
a couple of weeks later when I got around to editing.
I am back at my parents' place now,
working from my dad's home office.
Check out the sweet Apple TV that he has on his desk.
It's not usually there; he just got it out to show me,
because we used to play with these as kids.
Anyway, the conference site is going good.
We have a front-end developer working with us now
on the ConvertKit marking team, which is super exciting,
because it means that now I don't need
to figure out how to code all those curvy lines
and things I was designing myself.
I'll just show you a quick overview, but I really
should wait I guess until the full thing is released.
This is what the overview page is looking like now.
Basically, pretty similar to what I showed you last,
just these lines have been smoothed out a lot.
They're looking a lot better, and yeah, I've just refined
all the little details and things like that.
Still using the texture on these Illustrator elements,
which I think is gonna look really cool.
Like I already said, it's a couple of weeks
after that week in Wellington that you just saw,
so Samme's wedding has happened.
I'll leave that up to her, to share
all the pictures and the videos and things for that,
but here is like, a quick little sneak peek.
(jazzy electronic music with ambient vocals)
(women laughing)
It was a lot of fun.
It's been a great trip to New Zealand,
and in just four days now,
I am heading off to California for our team retreat.
I will be vlogging that as per usual for the ConvertKit
YouTube channel, so if you're interested in what happens
on a team retreat, keep an eye on that, and I'll leave
the link to the vlog from the last one down below.
Anyway, thanks for watching this first vlog of 2019.
I will try and do a better job of vlogging this year.
And I always say that, but yeah, I honestly do
wanna try to release at least one vlog per month, per month.
That is my goal for the year.
So, thanks for watching this one.
Give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it.
Hope you had a good week,
and I will see you in the next video, bye.
(jazzy electronic music)