(upbeat music)
- Buenos dias everyone, welcome to a new vlog.
I'm starting this one on the riverbed in Valencia
on my walk this morning.
It's just gone seven o'clock.
I woke up really early today and I thought,
"I'm going to get out now and go for a nice long walk
"while I listen to Office Ladies."
I don't know if you've been listening to that podcast
if you're a fan of the TV show The Office,
but it is so good, so you should definitely give it
a listen if you haven't already.
In case, to catch you up.
Adults in Spain at the moment are allowed to exercise
between 6:00 a.m and 10:00 a.m,
and then 8:00 to 11:00 in the evening.
You're allowed to go out and be out around your house
for no particular reason.
But there's also limited places where you're supposed to go,
so you can't just wander around the town sorta thing,
at the moment.
So one of the places that I can go is the riverbed
because it's like a huge park that runs through the city,
and basically when I get to it,
I can either turn left and go this way
which is sort of more parky.
Or I can go right
and go visit the City of Arts and Sciences buildings.
So I've just been alternating per day
so that it's not too similar.
And we are getting near a road.
Oh my God, there's a cat over there.
(cat meowing)
(giggling)
Oh my gosh, and there's another cat up here.
(cat meowing)
I know I probably shouldn't pat it but I'm very tempted.
Anyway, yes, just kicking off my Wednesday
with a nice long walk and apparently some cats sightings.
All right, back from my walk.
I was out there for about an hour,
so a nice long walk.
But yes, that was good. My feet are a bit sore now.
In this vlog, I'm very excited
because I'm gonna get to show you
what our homepage is looking like live on our website.
Well, not live yet,
but probably live by the time this vlog goes out.
I don't know, don't hold me to that.
But yesterday I got to review the build of it,
so Corey sent me a link to it on our staging server
for me to look at how it's going.
I did a video actually about my dev QA review,
design review, whatever you want to call it, process.
I leave a link to that on a card
if you want to see my process for going through a build
and checking that it matches up with my design,
giving feedback to the developer.
Yeah, it is looking really cool.
It was so exciting to open it up
and see the animation that I'd made,
that you saw me making in a previous blog,
on the website.
Looking how I thought it would
when it was all coming together,
'cause previously I'd seen my static design
and I'd seen my animation
but I hadn't seen them together yet, so that was,
yeah, very exciting
and I think it's going to be a really cool homepage.
In this vlog, I'm actually going to be working
with that animation again to make some product ads.
I don't know, I think it can be repurposed
and Danny, our copywriter,
has written some scripts for me,
so I'm essentially going to go through and add some captions
to the animation to try and turn it into a short,
little video ad.
This isn't something I usually would do at work
and maybe I don't even need to be doing it
because we do have a video producer
who can handle this part,
but he's not full time yet.
I don't know, but I want to,
so I'm gonna go ahead do it and yeah,
see what I can get done today
and hopefully we can just have that as a quick win.
I hate that word, but it's kinda relevant sometimes.
And get some product ads out there.
So yeah, I will be showing you my process
for doing that today.
I have actually filmed a video all about
how I made the animation,
which I'm gonna put on screen here,
so that if you didn't see that past vlog,
you know what I'm talking about
when I say the animation.
Yeah, this thing.
I did a video all about how I made it,
so stay tuned, that is coming,
in case anyone is interested in that.
Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful sunny day.
I have Spanish class tonight at six o'clock,
which means that I need to fit in most of my work
in the first half of today.
Normally, I don't know, I usually end up working
till seven or eight o'clock
but on days when I have Spanish class,
I have to make sure I fit my work in before that,
because I don't wanna work after class,
that's just too late.
I did that on Monday,
I was working until like 9:00 or 9:30 PM
and it just completely ruined my sleep.
To be thinking about work that late at night,
yeah, I just couldn't sleep
because I was having too many ideas
and my brain just wouldn't turn off
so I really need to make sure I finish work
at least before eight o'clock,
yeah before eight o'clock at the latest, I would say.
Anyway, enough of that ramble,
let's get on with the work day.
(upbeat music)
Right, I thought I'd show you an update
on where I've been getting to with this animation
because I've just hit a design problem,
I guess is the right word to describe it,
and I think I've got a solution for it,
so I thought maybe I could work it out on camera with you.
First, let's go back to the start of the video.
Sorry if you can hear cars by the way,
because I have the door open over here,
letting lots of nice, fresh air in.
Okay, so it's using this animation
and as it goes along, I'm not gonna play it fully,
but it's got the text at the bottom that Danny wrote,
to explain each part
and I think it's nice and simple
and it won't be too much to read.
My problem came at the end
so I'm like, "Okay, I wanna have the logo onscreen,
"and also this block of text
"and it just doesn't look right."
To start with, I had the text up by the logo and it just,
do you know what I mean? It just looks wrong,
it's just not good design.
I think the problem is my hierarchy here.
I think that the logo and text
are both taking up an even amount of space
and so it's hard to see,
I don't know.
One needs to be made vastly more important.
So I think what I'm gonna do is have the logo smaller,
because I work at a company
where we don't care about the logo
being the biggest thing on the screen all of the time,
and maybe highlight this word love,
I think could be nice,
kind of like how I did,
"What are you creating today?"
At the start.
So I'm about to go and try that.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so here's what we have now.
I think that it's working so much better.
So I decided to put the text in the space
where the animation was happening before
because previously,
this was the most important thing on screen,
showing you how the product works
and at the end, we wanna close on this line,
so this is what ends up in that space,
rather than have it down here
where it was acting as captions before.
Then the logo fits under the bottom
and this is so much more balanced.
Yeah, really happy with how this is turning out.
Now I'm gonna do another version with some different copy.
(upbeat music)
All right, had lunch, took the trash out,
other riveting stuff like that.
I don't know, it's really weird that,
I don't know, to be in this new phase
of the lockdown here in Spain,
where a lot more stuff is starting to open up.
So I can see bars outside on the street,
because we live in the city, in Valencia,
bars, restaurants,
and there's people sitting outside, at tables eating,
which is just, I don't know, a weird sight
after so many months of that not being a thing.
I don't know, I think it'll be a while
before I personally feel comfortable doing that.
But yeah, just all round, feels very active out there,
when I took the trash down just before.
There's a lot of people milling about,
a lot of them wearing masks, but not all of them,
and yeah, just stuff happening, life going back to normal,
which feels too soon, I don't know,
but is it ever gonna feel right?
Who knows.
Anyway, I'm about to get into my work session
for the afternoon.
This afternoon I've got a few meetings.
One, I'm gonna get on a call
with the creative director at Figma
and just have a chat about,
learn about her role, how she runs the team,
that sort of thing.
I like to get on calls with other people in the industry
and learn how they're doing things
and what I could apply to my own process,
so I'm very grateful that they're willing to do that.
Then I've got a call with my manager
and then I've got a call with some newbies.
We have a few new engineers start lately
and being a remote team,
obviously when you start at a company,
you don't turn up and everyone's there
to have lunch with them and greet you et cetera.
So what we like to do is arrange a bunch of onboarding calls
for new people who join the team.
They're part get to know you calls
and part each person who,
like an existing team member on a call with a new one,
is assigned to teach them
about how we use a certain piece of software.
So they get to know a little bit about a tool
that we use in the company
but also just get to meet more people on the team
at the same time.
So yeah, I really love doing that.
We're a small team
so I still wanna try and get to know everyone.
I don't know, it's getting difficult now to be honest.
I think we're 54 people maybe now, maybe more, I don't know.
But yeah, it's a lot, that's a lot of people to know.
So I'm putting in the effort where I can
to get to know new people on the team.
Anyway, I'm gonna stop rambling
and get into the work.
(upbeat music)
Hello everybody.
You might have noticed that I've changed my clothes
and that is because it's actually the next day.
The end of yesterday was just back to back
meeting, meeting, meeting.
I didn't even have time to go
and grab a drink of water in between them.
Yeah, basically by the end of it,
it was four hours of meetings and I was pretty exhausted
and completely forgot to end off the vlog.
So I'm gonna do it today, the next day,
and show you the homepage that I promised you
at the start of the vlog.
I'm sorry that I kept you waiting until right near the end.
Okay people, this is it,
this is the new ConvertKit homepage
that there's a couple of tweaks still to be made,
but mostly this is it.
See how this animation is just playing in the spot there?
Isn't that so cool when you look at the page?
Oh, I'm obsessed, I really, really like it.
She says, about her own work, but hey.
So yeah, this has turned out how I wanted,
which is very exciting.
We've got these big photos here, text.
See that cool animation there that Corey did with a lion?
Loving it.
Then we end here with a template
and then these are dynamic content,
so this pulls the latest guide, the latest upcoming workshop
and then a link to quick tip videos.
Yeah, this is our homepage, it's all come together.
Honestly, when I look at it, it is pretty simple
and so it's ridiculous the amount of time that it took,
but that's just how these things go
and it took a lot of time to synthesize the information
and get to this point, to decide this is what was best.
Yeah, as we shrink in,
these blogs bleed off the edge of the page
which I love,
I think that looks really cool to have it coming in
from the side there.
Yeah, really, really proud of this.
These two videos play on the page as well.
Yeah, just overall really proud of this
and I think it's a great representation of our brand
to be leading with people
instead of just screenshots of software,
although we do have some screenshots in there as well.
Yeah, I'm now thinking, if I just open it up over in Figma,
hold on a sec.
If you've been on our website before,
you will have seen that this is our old homepage,
so it's definitely more of a product focus,
talks about features specifically,
shows little stylized illustrations of features
if my camera is focusing.
And I really like this page, I think it's a good page
and a lot of work has gone into refining this
and making it into a really good converting page
but this version over here
is just a much better representation of our brand
and the types of creators who we're trying to attract
to use our product.
Because I like this page though,
I'm thinking of turning it into our features page,
which is currently quite an old page.
I'm thinking that there's a way I can reuse
the whole pathway flow type thing,
to instead lead to blocks about our different features,
with links off to the other feature pages,
I don't know, just an idea at this stage,
but that's probably something that I wanna look at doing
in the next few months.
Hope you enjoyed seeing that, you can probably go,
I'm fairly sure it's gonna be launched
by the time this vlog goes out,
so you can go to convertkit.com
and see it for yourself if you like.
Let me know if you spot any bugs.
All right, I will end this vlog here though,
so that I can get on with my Thursday.
Thank you for watching, I hope you had a good day,
I hope you had a good week
and I will see you in the next vlog, bye.
(upbeat music)