- Good morning people.
Welcome to the vlog.
It is Monday,
I had a four-day weekend
because it was Thanksgiving in the US
so I took some time off as well.
And I didn't get nearly as much as I wanted to done,
over the weekend. Very disappointing.
And I feel like I'm sort of,
because of that, coming into Monday, feeling already behind.
So we've gotta try and turn that around
cause that is not an attitude,
that I wanna have going into the week.
There's a few things I wanna show you
before I get into today though.
Number one, I changed my office around.
I don't know if you can tell
or if you remember what it was like before.
But yeah. Basically I moved my desk
from sort of like here-ish to over here.
So I have like a little command center area
It is what Mark has been calling it.
I got some new plants that I potted over the weekend.
Check out this beautiful new leaf that opened on a Monstera.
Some other ones here.
And yeah, that's not a good sign.
We've got a dead leaf already,
probably need to cut that out. (laughs)
But yeah, this is what the office is looking like.
There's still stuff to sort out.
We had a rainstorm over the weekend.
I was actually meant to be like recording video interview
on Friday and we had this wind howling around
(wind howls effect)
outside in the rain, and then there was hail.
It was very weird and also kind of annoying.
Not something that you planned for happening
in Spain when you were booking a recording day.
But unfortunately we had water
like coming in through the window here.
It was like running down here, running down here
running down here
and now the wall I'm like, you know, we're worried about it.
It's, I think you can see there's a little like wet patch.
So we've got a heater on it drying.
We've had to move everything out
from the wall
where it was touching before.
So yeah, that definitely put like a, wow.
We're really bright over there,
put her spanner in the works.
So plans over the weekend,
spending time sorting that out, I guess.
Very frustrating, but I mean, I don't know.
What can you do?
I'm determined like I said, to turn today around
and have it be a good one, have it be a productive one
'cause it's a lot of need to do.
Last week was a short week.
I only worked three days and I fit a lot of work in.
And so I think I'm still tired from that, honestly.
But yeah, there's a lot more to do still about to do today,
catch up on stuff,
just sort of like get ahead for the week as well.
But before I do all that,
I took like a week off doing workouts
because I tweaked my back the past weekend
and basically did use that as an excuse
the whole week to not do anything.
And so I like, I feel like I don't have much time
but I'm just gonna quickly put on a bar through video
and do a little bit at least to get the blood pumping
and try and kick off that healthy habit again for this week.
Let's go.
(bright upbeat music)
(finger snaps)
Alright, you have to excuse the noise.
'cause I've got all of the windows
and the doors open at the moment.
Letting fresh air and sunshine in to my office.
Look at that beautiful light coming on my arm.
Harmony. (laughs).
First thing that I have actually coming up today
at 11 is an interview with Chris Pearson
who works on the Design Systems Team
and what leads the design systems team at Condé Nast.
I'm doing a series with Figma over on their YouTube channel
where I'm talking to designers and getting a peek
inside their design systems, which is going to be super fun.
We're meant to film this interview on Friday.
But because of the storm that I was talking about before
it was so loud, I had to reschedule and I felt so bad
because I had already rescheduled on him once before.
But we tried to make it work
and it just, it was yeah.
Going to be a very poor quality video.
So today, apart from that truck outside,
we're sounding good.
The weather is nice and bright.
So I think the video is going to look good.
So I need to get like, start getting ready for that.
Soon-ish, but first I also want to kick
off some work things.
Today I've got a lot of writing to do honestly.
Well, some writing and some designs.
So
I owe our team an update
on this brand campaign that I've been sort of leading
for the past few months.
We are working with an agency on it
and we're producing these like brand ad videos, which we've,
it's not something we've done before.
It's brand new for ConvertKit.
So it was really exciting to be working on it.
There's two videos
and both drafts are like looking really good.
We just have like small nitpicky details basically
for each of them.
So I want to share them with the wider team
to like show them what's coming.
So I need to write an update on that project, brief plan
on something we're going to do as a brand team for Q1.
It will be the first full project that I lead really
as the creative director.
So that's exciting.
And then I also need to do some design work.
So we're going to have a mixed,
mixed bag today of, of stuff, but I'm going
to start my morning out with some like writing and updates.
I feel like that'll feel good to be getting that organized.
Yeah, let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
Okay. All set up, done something
with my hair and face ready to film.
I got this new microphone
in a black Friday sale. I'm very excited about it.
I don't fully know how to get the best, like from it yet.
I've had a few recommendations
of like a thing that I need to add to raise the game on it.
But yeah, I don't know.
It is a short essence MB.
It is beautiful.
And hopefully it's going to sound beautiful too, but yeah.
Or an upgrade or when using my blue Yeti for five years
something like that for recording podcasts.
And now that I'm streaming and just like, you know,
in general on calls a lot more.
I thought I'd upgrade.
I also recently added this camera
as well to my setup.
So yeah, now I use this little Logitech stream cam
for my video instead of the one on my iMac.
It's working out well. Just in general,
upgrading the setup all round.
I'm going to do an updated office tour.
I think I said that already
at the start of the video, but yeah.
Going into detail about all of the tech set up as well
as the, you know, office setting and everything like that.
Yeah. Think I'm all ready to film.
I'm just sort of going
over my questions that I'm gonna be asking Chris
on this call whenever I'm interviewing someone.
I know, especially someone who like is not
a fellow content creator podcast or whatever
it's always my job to make sure
that my interviewee feels comfortable, feels proud of the
like the job they did.
And answering questions
and feels prepared.
So, yeah, Chris and I had a call last week.
I think it was before to, to just sort of
for me to meet him and go over the design system to figure
out what would be the best points to focus on.
So yeah. We've got some questions here
that we're going to go into
and I'm looking forward to this.
It's going to be good.
(upbeat music)
Done. That went really well.
I think the Figma team said they wanted it to end
up being a 10 minute video
and we recorded for like 25 minutes.
So I don't know if they're going to have trouble editing
that down or not, but hey,
I think it was all good stuff.
And so, you know, whatever.
And I think this new microphone is sounding pretty amazing.
I'm very excited about it.
I've had people recommend to me that I need
to get something called a cloudlifter
to make it even better.
Because what I have doing, this is a microphone
that you can't just
like plug straight into your computer with USB.
So I have it going to this,
I think it's called an audio interface.
I don't know. Can you tell it to know
what I'm talking about?
But yeah, people have said that
if I get a pre-amp as well as this, it will be better.
So I don't know.
I need to look into that.
Anyway, now that's not the way I can get
into my writing for the day.
And I think I'm going to go and make another coffee
before I do so.
Because I've been trying not to drink coffee afternoon,
and it's 11:45.
So I'm like, Oh, I can sneak another one in for the day
which I'm sure defeats the purpose
of having this noon cut-off time.
But, hey.
(laughs)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music continues)
Oh, (indistinct) (laughs)
(upbeat music continues)
(speaking foreign language)
Hello, we have fast forwarded to Thursday.
Yes, (claps) it is Thursday.
It's been a busy, busy freaking week.
Monday ended up getting really hectic.
And so I didn't get to like really finish the vlogs.
I thought I might as well, keep it going a little bit today.
We just had some people come over to the flat to look
at the water damage that we had during the storm last week.
Now I'm getting like back into some stuff for the day.
Today on my list is a little bit of like campaign planning
organization stuff, but also some design stuff.
I really want to like, spend some quality hours today
on the design of this page that I really want to
get finished because there's other like design
projects I want to move on to.
So you know what, maybe we should get into that right now.
I just had my Spotify wrapped.
Happened yesterday.
And so I've got a great playlist of my top songs from 2020.
If you want to a sneak peek at them, one sec,
I will show you
If the screen will work.
Here's what we got, we've got some Enter Shikari,
we've got some Spanish songs I've been listening to,
some smaller pop punk bands,
All Time Low, Falling In Reverse,
Stand Atlantic, Dance Gavin Dance.
This is a good playlist.
And like, I look at this and I'm like, man
I've got great music taste. (laughs)
Definitely wouldn't be to everyone's taste.
Yeah, we got some Black Pink in there too.
And Nice Mix.
So I'm going to put that on
and get in to some design stuff.
I think that I can set an aim today
to get the page sort of like ready for development.
We're still waiting on a bit of content
but I think we can be ready to build
out the template today if I focus and get down to it.
So let's freaking get down to it.
(singing in foreign language)
(upbeat music)
I decided it was another
poke bowl for lunch kind of Thursday.
Well, I ate my poke bowl before I could, you know
get some nice B roll footage of it.(laughs)
But anyway, now I'm back at work, had one meeting
and I just want to show you the design that I worked
on today.
I think it's pretty close to finished.
And so that feels good to have gotten this done.
And I want to show you what I've done.
So it's this page here that I might've shown
in some other parts of, I can't remember.
It's a page that talks about, talks, speaks directly
to musicians and tells them how ConvertKit can help them.
And we're trying some new things with it.
Trying something like hand drawn stuff
like you see here surrounding the Learning page.
And this is like, I don't know, offset line here,
drawing on the photo.
Something like, I don't know, annotation type stuff
which I'm actually using my own font gray scale for, ding.
We'll put in a little image
of my font here.
When I was sharing it with the team,
this was the previous version here.
This is what I had.
So I was just sort of putting
like, Italic text and Nathan was like,
I feel like this needs to be like handwritten all caps.
And so I started like writing it and I was like,
we could use it as a vector.
And then I was like, wait, didn't I like just design a font
for pretty much exactly this reason.
And so we put it in and I think it works.
I think I'm going to do a version
of gray scale with the baseline.
Not as even, let's say so it can look even more handwritten.
I don't know. I might ship it as an update
to everyone who's purchased so far if it ends
up working out, but for now this is what we'll use.
And it can be actual text, you know, which is cool.
Yeah. We're adding these, like this is a piece
of watercolor sort of touch
to it.
Another little annotation.
Annotations on the product imagery as well
as sort of a different style of doing things with this line
and some slight water color instead of the, let me go along
this is our normal way of doing product imagery.
Nope.
Oh, I don't even have it
in this file because I was doing different stuff right
from the outset.
But usually it's like just
a vector blob behind.
Anyway.
Back to the page.
So yeah, it talks about the main like benefits to a creator.
And then we've got a little section here
with our predecessions videos in it.
CTA. I think it's going to be good.
I think that I could have pushed it further
but I'm happy with how we're going.
And I think when you make tweaks to a brand
it's good to sort of take, take baby steps with it.
And like, you know
this will be a project where we try it out.
So yeah, I'm excited about that.
Just had a bit of a gap in between my first meeting
of the day and the next ones, which are going to be nonstop
for the next like three and a half hours.
So I'm going to go grab some water,
finish off some little like write-up things
that I needed to do.
And then we'll get into another afternoon meetings.
This is honestly turning
out to be kind of like my ideal day,
ideal work day at least. (background cheers)
I managed to do a workout this morning.
I spent some time, like a little bit of strategy
time to sort of warm up for the day
and then did a few hours worth of design.
And now I'm into meetings to, and talking
to people and I'm planning things, moving things ahead
that way. I don't know.
This feels like a good mix for me.
If I get this sort of stuff in every day, that'd be great.
Okay. I have no idea what the last clip is
that you just saw because I forgot to end the vlog
and I was just gathering the footage together to send it
off to my editor and realize that fact.
And there's no pretending here
because my hair is a completely different color.
And so I'm just chiming in to say that
I forgot to end the vlog.
Probably I'm going to guess though, what I did
after the last click who saw was have a bunch of meetings
because that's how my evenings have been going lately.
I sort of like have meeting
meeting meetings where I'm like, you know
on my computer until like eight o'clock
when I tear myself away to go and have dinner.
It's not healthy.
I know that.
That's probably what happened.
Anyway, thanks for watching this vlog.
Hope you enjoyed it.
I'm looking forward to watching it back.
Cause I can't remember what happened in it. (laughs)
But yeah. Hope you had a good week.
And I'll see you in the next one.
Bye.
(upbeat music)