- Hello, friends.
Long time no vlog.
I keep starting vlogs
and then just straight up not finishing them
because I feel like the content isn't interesting
'cause I'm not doing much.
Or I don't know.
I don't if anyone else is feeling like this lately
during this pandemic
but for me it doesn't really feel like,
it's not Groundhog Day, like it doesn't feel
like every single day is the same
'cause there's variation within each day
and I have different things
that happen on different days of the week,
like Mondays and Wednesdays is Spanish class.
Thursdays are the big meeting day.
Fridays we usually get takeaways or something.
I don't know, so there's variation there
but for me, it's feeling like Groundhog week
where the weeks just seem to be on repeat.
And it's really getting to me.
I think because a week is kind of a long time
to feel that repetitive
just reminds me how long we've been in this situation.
And it really sucks.
I know that I have it relatively, extremely good,
I'm extremely fortunate, like fared very well
throughout this whole thing.
Still got my job, job is stable, company is doing well.
I'm not having to worry about that,
which means I'm not having to worry about finances.
I was already working from home before the pandemic.
So I didn't really have that as an adjustment to my routine.
Don't have kids, so I'm not having
to deal with them being home from school
or anything like that,
like a lot of my coworkers, friends are.
So all round, I just feel like I don't have anything
to complain about really.
But just everyone in the world right now
is in a shitty situation.
And just because some people have it worse
doesn't mean that those of us
who may have it better can't also feel frustrated
or feel down sometimes.
So I've sort of been dealing with that lately
of like feeling frustrated
and like stuck in a rut
and then feeling annoyed at myself,
or feeling frustrated and stuck in a rut.
It's been a whole cycle.
I'm determined to actually vlog today though.
So I hope that you end up seeing this
and this doesn't end up as just another blog
that stays on my memory card
and then never gets finished or edited.
It's Tuesday and I spent the weekend
at Mark's parents' place.
So that was nice to have a bit of a change scenery.
Took some days off work as well
'cause I was really like I said feeling this rut feeling
and I just needed a break my routine.
Read a lot of books over the weekend.
So that's really fun.
But yeah, back to it his week.
I'm feeling a lot more inspired, which is good.
So yeah, if anyone else is feeling stuck like I was,
try and think of some way to shake up your routine
and do something different.
I'm definitely, it's a lesson
that I'm gonna try and take in to the weeks ahead
to always have like something to look forward to
or like some variation in the weeks.
Otherwise I'm not sure they're gonna get to me.
Just to give you a quick update on how things are
in Spain at the moment.
Cases are rising honestly, which is not great
since things have opened up again.
And just recently, it was mandated
that you have to wear a mask anywhere in public.
Previously, if you could keep like two meters distance
from someone, it was all right to take the mask for.
So for example, I'd wear my mask to the park
and then while I was going for my walk
and could very easily keep distance from people,
I would take it off so I could breathe the nice fresh air,
which is kind of the point for going to a walk for me.
But now you have to keep the mask on the whole time,
which is not fun.
But I understand it's necessary.
It's just a sign though of the fact
that we're not through this
and we're not over this yet.
So I'm sort of like settling in for the long haul.
Realizing that I'm gonna deal with this,
struggling with the mundanity, is that a word?
Of the weeks for a long time to come.
And so it's my problem to solve.
I am about to go make a coffee.
I just did my workout for the day.
And my legs feel a little like jelly.
I've been doing the Barre3,
which is like an online Barre studio classes workouts
and I love them.
I would highly recommend.
I'm not an affiliate or anything like that
but yeah, would definitely recommend
as an at-home workout thing.
And it's kinda late in the day.
So I'm just gonna make an espresso today
instead of making my AeroPress.
Sorry to all the coffee snobs.
(upbeat music)
(gurgling)
I actually remembered that I got a package this morning.
So let's open it
'cause honestly, I'm not sure what I ordered.
(chuckling)
(ripping)
Oh, more coffee.
This is the brand of a YouTuber
you might be surprised to find out that I watch.
His name is Jacksepticeye
and he plays through video games.
Mark and I've been watching him play Animal Crossing
and lately we're watching him play Last of Us II.
And yeah, this is his coffee brand.
It smells really good.
I'm excited to try this.
Anyway, enough coffee talk.
Time to get on with the workday.
It's kind of in, we're ramping up
for an extremely busy quarter at work.
And right now, I don't feel like,
I don't know, we're sort of at the beginning
of a lot of projects
and I just know that things
are gonna get real hectic, real fast with all of this.
So I'm just trying to like get things sorted
and try and make this quarter go as smooth as possible.
That was a really vague
and probably not very interesting was it?
Let me get into it
and I'm sure I'll find something interesting
that I'll show you that I'll work on today.
(upbeat music)
So it is really, really frickin' hot here in Spain today.
It's only 29 degrees right now
but it's gonna get up to like 32 today.
But it's warm.
It's very humid also.
That's not at all related
to what I was gonna say but hey.
I've been trying out a mechanical keyboard.
This one is Mark's.
Not for any sort of ergonomic purposes
or like typing speed purposes.
Mostly because I've seen some really cool pictures
of like pastel keyboards online
and I just think it looks so cool.
And basically, if I can have something
that's gonna look cute, I want it.
And so I'm trying to see if I can get used
to using mechanical keyboards
so that I could buy one and do customized key caps
and fun things like that.
I know that's not the reason you're supposed
to use a mechanical keyboard but hey.
It's going sort of well so far.
It's kind of weird to get used to
after how flat the Apple one is.
But I feel like with it,
I don't know if this is placebo
because I know I'm meant to be able to
but I feel like I can type better without looking
at the keys.
I don't know if you've ever noticed
in my blogs when I'm filming where I type,
but I do not type properly.
I type with like three fingers.
I can type pretty fast
but it's absolutely not how you're taught to type
in school and things like that.
I don't know, just wanted to let you know,
this is what I'm trying out at the moment.
Don't know for sure yet
if I'm gonna go for it
but continuing to do my test.
(upbeat music)
All right, I wanna show you some of the design work
that I'm getting into for the afternoon.
My morning was mostly spent
on like strategy, research type stuff.
I've been finding myself doing more and more of that lately.
And I think it's just a product of like progressing
in my career since I know that I'm like involved
in more of that sort of stuff now
and not just pushing pixels around all day.
Also sorry if it's loud,
I've got the window open
because like I said before, it's quite hot.
I'm sure actually me saying
that it's 31 degrees right now
is like not actually hot for some places
but it is really humid here in the city.
So I don't know.
I don't know why I'm feeling I have to justify the fact
that I'm feeling hot to you.
Let's look at the design.
So this is a wireframe that I've made
for a landing page about our free plan.
So there's two different main plans with ConvertKit
at the moment.
A free plan and a complete plan.
The complete plan has like all of the features
that you see on our site.
The free plan has honestly most of them
but there's a couple that doesn't.
And our ads team
has been finding that they really need one page
to direct people to
that just talks about ConvertKit's free plan
and what's included in the site specifically,
catered to people we know will suit the free plan
and not people before the complete one,
if that makes sense.
So yeah, this is a wireframe that I've put together.
And ever since my own podcast series actually,
I've learned something from my own show.
How big headed is that?
But Inside Marketing Design,
my series where I'm interviewing marketing designers
at other tech companies.
If you haven't checked it out yet,
then I'll leave it on a card.
You should go have a look
because I'm really proud of it
and how that series has been turning out.
It's also been the thing taking up a lot
of my energy recently, honestly
when it comes to content creation.
But in the episode that I did with Johnny from Webflow,
he talked about the fact
that designers need to be able to write their own copy.
And I've never been, well,
I'm not gonna say never.
I'm sure early in my career I used lorem ipsum a lot
but in the past few years of my career,
I feel like I've always tried
to write like useful dummy copy,
if that makes sense
and you've probably seen some examples of it
in some of my past videos.
For this project though,
I decided to take things a step further
and instead of writing my useful dummy copy,
I've written, well, tried to write some actual copy.
I don't if it's what will end up on the page.
It's probably not
but yeah, it was a good experience for me
as I went through and created this wireframe,
which is using pieces from other designs,
which is why it's not looking super wireframe-y.
Yeah, I need to go through
and refine this a lot, especially this section.
What is going on here?
This is hell of a ugly.
And yeah, get things ready
for some real copy to come on in.
So that's my plan for the afternoon.
(upbeat music)
Okay, in about nine minutes starts
our marketing team meeting for the week,
so this is basically the end of the physical work
that I'm gonna do today.
I didn't get as far as I wanted to
on the landing page
but I started thinking through some things
like what imagery style to go here,
which made me think that maybe I want a little demo video
for each point.
I don't know, not sure yet.
Again, yeah, trying a few different options
for this hero imagery and okay, this here.
Tell me if you do this too if you use Feedback.
I know they have a commenting feature
and I could just like leave a comment
with a note to myself
but I prefer to write giant, like bold messages
at the side of a canvas
to remind myself of things to do with the project.
So this right here is a list of tests
that I think we should run with this page.
A few years ago, we ran a test
of having navigation on a landing
versus just like a logo
that linked to the home page
and we found that no navigation converted better.
I do, like from a user experience perspective
will wanna make sure people have an option
to find the information they want,
so I am putting a footer on this page.
But yeah, I think it'll be interesting
to test this when we run ads to it
for navigation versus no navigation
and see how that forms.
We also wanna test a bunch of messaging for the headline.
So basically use the ads we run as a chance
to test which messaging connects.
So yeah, we'll have different ad messaging
and then we'll swap out the heading on the page
to match the ad messaging.
And then photo versus app,
this is my idea for testing
like do we want something like this
versus something more like this sort of thing
that's more of like a product illustration.
I don't know yet.
I got a bit waylaid with some other things
but all in all, I feel like it's been a productive day.
And I'm excited for our meeting
to chat through some things on the marketing team.
I feel like my eyesight during this quarantine,
even though it's not the quarantine anymore.
I just keep calling it that, has worsened.
When I got my new glasses,
was it a year and a half ago, something like that?
I don't know.
I remember the optometrist saying to me you need
to take more breaks from looking at the screen
and look off into the distance.
Just like the 20-20-20 rule or whatever,
like every 20 minutes you should look 20 feet away
for 20 seconds to give your eyes like a break
and stretch them, I suppose.
Haven't been doing that.
And I feel like I need a stronger prescription already.
It's my own fault.
She told me to do it and I didn't do it.
So I have to look into that.
Anyway, time to get a quick drink of water
and go into a meeting.
(upbeat music)
(lively music)
Well, friends, I did it again,
I forgot to end the vlog on the actual day I was filming it.
It's Thursday now.
So we've skipped a day
but hey, the good thing is that missing some time means
I can show you a bit of an update to this page
before I end the vlog.
So it's probably looking pretty similar
to what we had last time
but I think I showed you already
that instead of icons,
I decided to do these little illustrations.
I've been working on the main image.
So we started out with this.
But I felt like the hero content,
there was a little bit too much going on.
And so I've done this one,
which is a bit more toned down, subdued colors.
That way the color picker stands out more,
which kind of looks cool
and to me, this is like a universal sign
that you can customize stuff, right,
having a color picker.
I don't know if anyone else thinks that way.
But it's what I'm intending with that anyway.
I also had to get rid of this like green bar graph
because I wanna use that for the purchases part
and so as not to be confusing,
I've put in this graph,
which shows like a rising trend of a growing audience,
I hope, that's my intention with it anyway.
But yeah, this is where I've got to.
These are all drafts
but I've been starting to figure out
what they're gonna be.
I think that, see if this one here,
this little illustration has sort
of not actual text on it,
it's just like lines representing text.
I think that's what these little side ones need to be,
so like this text is fine
but this text is way too small
when you zoom out,
so I want that to be sort of like bars instead.
I'm figuring out the style as I go
with these little illustration mock-ups.
This sort of style of icon
is what I was going for
where it's like pieces of our app,
and it looks like our app
but it's a much more stylized way of doing things.
So yeah, that's what I'm aiming for here.
And this is where the page is at.
This is new, this section here.
I just did this this morning actually.
I think it's better than what I had before,
which was this, like a long list.
This is kind of nice just to call out
that there's $0, have a button
and all this stuff there.
And it's closer aligned
to what we have on our pricing page as well.
So yeah, I'm excited with how this page is coming together.
It's been moving very quickly.
Anyway, I'm gonna end this vlog here now
before I forget again
and also before my meeting,
which is in about in eight minutes time.
So thank you for watching.
And I'm gonna be uploading videos like this
every now and then over the next couple months
as Inside Marketing Design is still going out.
That's my main focus on my channel right now
is getting that content out, that first series.
That should be wrapped up in September.
So yeah, there's another I think six or more episodes
that I've got to go.
Seven, I can't remember,
but like I said, every now and then,
I'm gonna put other videos up as well,
like this vlog and you might have seen,
a couple weeks ago I did a video
about the build of my font store.
If you're interested in that,
I'll link the video on the card
and you can go check out
my font itself at charlimarie.store.
I would love of you to have a look.
It makes me happy every time I see
a purchase order come through
for that font 'cause I am so proud of it.
And it's even better
when I get to see people using it.
So yeah, that's pretty fun.
Thank you for watching this vlog.
I'm sure it was a mess.
I've gotta get my vlogging mojo back
and get back into the habit of it
but I hope you enjoyed seeing
what I'm up to anyway
and yeah, just those thoughts on the state of mind
that I've been in.
I'm feeling so much better this week.
It's amazing, I'm so glad I took those days off last week.
I've just found enjoyment in my work again,
which is good 'cause it really sucked to lose that.
And feel down about it.
Anyway, thanks for watching,
hope you had a good week
and I will see you in my next video.
Bye.
(upbeat music)