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Week 61

Händer

[ photo courtesy ]

Blimey it’s been a while since my last weeknote/monthnote – given their consistent irregularity perhaps I should adopt Matt’s approach and just call them worknotes?

It’s been a busy few months since my last note, in Week 41. It’s Week 61, which not only means I’ve been really slack at updating weeknotes, but that I’ve been running my own business for well over a year now. It’s gone by mega quickly, but it’s been absolutely brilliant and I’m a total convert to the freelance way of working.

In the last year I’ve worked with fantastic clients like Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Profero, Branded, Vodafone Ireland and We Are Friday, wearing a a variety of different planning hats and getting the chance to tackle some incredibly varied challenges. I’ve gone from dipping my toe into the world of freelancing to setting up the company and getting to grips with the joys of being a small business owner and employer. All of which has been, I have to say, awesome.

I went into this adventure with an open mind, using the analogy of dating. I’d been in two very satisfying long-term relationships (spending a few years each in permanent roles at two terrific agencies), but I wasn’t sure I wanted to jump into another long-term relationship again – I fancied playing the field, so to speak. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to date around until I found someone I wanted to settle down with again, and freelance would be a stopgap until I worked out what and where I wanted to take a permanent role. As its turned out, I’m completely loving the range of opportunities that going solo has afforded me – the chance to work with a tremendous variety of people and organisations, with a mix of consulting and freelancing in-house, on a wonderfully stimulating range of clients and challenges. So much so that for the time being, I can’t see myself wanting to settle down – I’m enjoying being a planning sponge, and the amount I’m learning and soaking up in the process, far too much to want to take on a permanent role any time soon. But, just as I went into this adventure with an open mind, so I want to keep thus on this journey – so who knows what’s round the corner?

But back to the present, since my last note, it’s been busy busy round Seemingly Unconnected towers. I finished the Vodafone Ireland consumer digital project, helping them develop an overarching digital strategy, encompassing really fascinating challenges such as how best to manage and scale customer service in social channels, and the operational changes needed to deliver on the agreed strategic direction. They were really happy with the work delivered, and I’m very happy to be working with Vodafone Ireland again, this time with the enterprise team on a similar project, which is now currently well underway.

Work with Friday on HSBC continues apace – such is the nature of global business banking clients that I can’t say much about the work itself, but I can definitely say that it’s really exciting to be concentrating on the experience planning and product strategy side.

Other bits and pieces since my last note:

  • A few days strategy work with the lovely chaps at Branded

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  • A couple of days planning on a rather exciting brand for Citizen Bay

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  • A week of total digital detox, relaxation and getting rather bendier with my good friend Dr Jo Twist on a week’s yoga retreat at Yoga Rocks in Crete

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  • A phenomenal day’s brain candy in Brighton at dConstruct, followed by tinkering and being chased by Daleks at the Brighton Mini Maker Faire

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  • Meeting some incredible women working in digital and tech at the first (of hopefully many more) Women In A Room meetup

 
Onwards and forwards!

September 26, 2011 in Weeknotes | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Week 41

[ photo courtesy ]

Week 41 and life continues apace. It’s been a disjointed month with so many bank holidays and short weeks, but the weather’s been glorious and whilst I love my work, the chance to enjoy long weekends and London in the sunshine never goes amiss.

Vodafone is storming ahead, mainly working remotely but with a couple of trips to Dublin – I’ve been there several times for business, but only ever been to the airport, the client offices and the cab between the airport and the office. I know Dublin is meant to be awesome – I hope to find an excuse to go back and actually get to see something of the city at some point! The project is progressing nicely, and I’ve actually got a couple of proposals to write for some more potential work with them, so…so far so good.

The rest of my weeks are spent with the marvellous chaps at Friday: lots of awesome super-secret innovation work for HSBC, thinking about exciting digital futures for business banking. Plus some thinking about getting the nation gardening for the RHS. Workshopping, sketching, keynoting a-go-go.

As well as working with a truly brilliant bunch of people, I get to enjoy the fabulous Friday decor – last week the office was festooned with some awesomely hideous royal wedding tat:

[ photo courtesy Matthew ]

As well as some delightful fresh flowers:

[ photo courtesy Matthew ]

And the new agency Trophy Wall*

* these may or may have previously been the contents of a Croydon golf club’s trophy cabinet that was purchased on eBay

[ yes this photo is courtesy Matthew as well ]

In other news:

  • I started my Introduction to Product Design evening course at Central St Martin’s. All super interesting and stretching a v. different part of my brain. I am still appalling at drawing, but having lots of fun.

  • Did my first VAT return. Yes the life of a freelancer is truly rock ‘n’ roll. Well I say I did it, actually FreeAgent did it for me. Praise be for web apps that just work.

  • Had fun beta-testing Bloom Studio’s utterly gorgeous new iPad app Planetary – which is now in the App store, free to download, and getting coverage all over the place. Highly recommended.

  • Got very meta reading about the ‘inside out’ movement of weeknotes (the brainchild of my friends at BERG) in the Evening Standard: The ‘inside outers’ are a London design firm changing the world of business.
May 9, 2011 in Weeknotes | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Week 35

California 35

[ image courtesy ]

Week 35 – and 2011 is just flying by.

Over the last month, it’s all been go, with two juicy projects underway. Three days a week I’m working on a digital strategy project for Vodafone Ireland, mostly based at home in London with the odd visit to Dublin – it’s a cracking strategic brief, and really enjoying the opportunity to work really closely with a terrific client team across all aspects of their communication – not just brand comms but the really interesting questions around how best to deliver customer service via social channels.

The remaining two days, rather confusingly Wednesday and Thursday, are my Friday days. Friday being the marvellous We Are Friday team, a super smart and thoroughly lovely bunch of people, with whom I’m lucky enough to be working on a wonderfully meaty brief for HSBC. It’s getting me out of my comfort zone and getting me right in the thick of deep experience planning, working with a kick-ass UX planner and content strategist, involving lots of sketching, planning & prototyping which is both scary and awesome. One of the major motivations for going freelance was wanting to get stuck into really different kinds of planning – to be a planning sponge, soaking up different styles and ways of applying strategic and creative thinking to different kinds of problems (and developing different kinds of solutions). It’s absolutely wonderful to be thinking about designing experiences that will offer genuine utility and delight – giving people something they really want, instead of designing campaigns to sell them things they don’t. It’s great to have two days in the office with all the fun of office banter and the like – although as Friday towers is in the midst of deepest darkest Hoxton I’m seriously going to have to up my hipster game, though I fear the obligatory Shoreditch asymmetric hairdo & legwarmers may not be my best look….

The focus for the last 10 days has been the annual pilgrimage to SXSWi, which should probably be the subject of a separate post, but needless to say my mind has been truly boggled, my liver put through its paces and I’m still having meat sweats from an insane amount of incredible BBQ. I then had a fantastic few days holiday in San Francisco cheekily tacked on the end of my trip, with much fun and frolics with wonderful friends. And as it’s physically impossible for me to leave the US without a new pair of trainers, a rather spanking new pair of silver hi-tops as well.

In other news:

  • A project I worked on last year with the lovely folks at Rattle, originally codenamed Project Southwold, has soft launched in beta – and can now be revealed as Mr Fante’s House of Judgement. I know how hard the team have been working on it, so I’m really excited to see how it unfolds.


  • I also acquired a thoroughly delightful 11″ Macbook Air, which makes lugging a laptop round so much easier, it’s just a dream – though my 13″ Macbook Pro now seems enormous by comparison! Cloud-based services make working across two computers and keeping everything in sync totally seamless: thanks to all my documents syncing automatically via Dropbox; my contacts, calendars & local bookmarks syncing automatically across both machines & my iPhone via MobileMe, and all my email living in the cloud courtesy of Google Apps.


  • And finally, my attempt at a contribution to the rather marvellous Playlist Club went live – A Discoaholic’s 70s Guilty Pleasures
March 22, 2011 in Weeknotes | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Week 30

30

[ photo courtesy ]

Following other notes-ers, I think I’m going to switch from Weeknotes to Monthnotes as it’s what I seem to be ending up with mostly anyway. That said in the interests of keeping up the same numbering, because I’m a pedant, I’ll still be tracking time in weeks, just aiming to write up every month. Nothing like a cop-out, eh?

January ended up being not quite the month it was originally shaping up to be, as the digital strategy consulting project that was due to kick off at the start of the month ended up being delayed due to the joys of admin that needs to be processed to consult for a big multinational corporation based in another EU country. Although all the work is being done in the UK so no tax liability abroad, to tick the compliance box they require all contractors to go via a 3rd party – though being big global brand they also have big global brand standard payment terms of 90 days, so whilst the 3rd party contractor solution is necessary from their end, being able to operate under standard 30 days payment terms is invaluable from the standalone consultant point of view.

As wise sage Phil Gyford pointed out in his ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Freelancing‘ blog post (from a few years back but still v. much true today and exceptionally useful for anyone starting out), as a freelancer you are your own account manager, finance department, new business department, HR department and so on – and managing your cashflow is obviously hugely important. You definitely learn a lot, fast, but as it’s all for your own benefit I actually find it all pretty satisfying. Being an anal-retentive sort who is slightly obsessed with organisation, I really don’t find the book-keeping and general paperwork side of things too much of a chore, I’m actually quite enjoying learning the ins and outs of running my own business, especially as I made things official and set myself up as a Ltd company, and very recently needed to become a VAT registered business as well. The whole process is made infinitely smoother as a result of using the terrific FreeAgent for bookkeeping – it’s absolutely fantastic for the freelancer who’s after an accounting package that just works. Xero was recommended by several people but seems to be suited more to people running small businesses, and as FreeAgent is designed specifically for freelancers, it seemed to fit the bill exactly, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. The UI is simple and elegant, it’s UK-native, it’s got really great time-tracking integration, the support (so far) has been clear and helpful – the only niggle is that unlike Xero, it doesn’t (yet) have direct bank account integration so you have to export your statements and upload them manually, but not a huge dealbreaker.

On the business side of things things are feeling even more ‘official’ with the development of a visual identity on the site, my business cards, invoices, letterhead and so on. All credit must go to the wonderfully talented David Lowbridge who developed a look and feel that I absolutely love, and which far exceeds anything I could have hoped for. My favourite part is the little logo which you can see in the footer of this page, the little ‘Seemingly Unconnected’ smiley: the name of the business (and this blog) comes from one of my favourite quotes, a William Plomer quote which I think is a lovely encapsulation of what we try to do as planners:

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected

I adore ‘Faces in Places‘ (or charmingly, ‘little fellas‘) – joining together seemingly unconnected elements to spot faces in everyday objects – and the logo is very obviously inspired by these pictures, only in this case it’s the initials of the company that when you connect them together form a little fella. This site’s undergone a little bit of a fresh paint job to reflect the new colours, logos and so on, and I’m rather enjoying feeling like a ‘proper’ company with my beautifully designed (I can say this, as I didn’t design it!) matching branded bits and bobs.

So, admin aside, on the work front, the slightly late kickoff of aforementioned big global brand project was actually a blessing in disguise, as I’d also taken on a couple of other bits and pieces and had a horrible realisation that I thought I’d made a slight cock-up by over-committing myself. One of those was the development of a one-day course on ‘Understanding Social Media’ for the IPA with my co-pilot and partner in crime Jamie Coomber. It was intended as a basic primer to help account directors respond confidently with the right questions when clients do the ‘I want a Facebook / Twitter / insert latest shiny thing’ thing. We ran it on 9th Feb and the feedback from the attendees was really positive, so looks like we’ll be running it again later in the year, Rather gratifyingly, so the IPA tell us, the following day there was a request from an HR director who’d sent one of her flock on the course, asking when it would be run again as she wanted to send more people on it as the feedback had been so good. W00t!

Other ‘other thing’ was a rather nice little project helping out the very lovely folks from Addidi – a wealth management / financial services boutique who specialise in helping women create, invest and enjoy their money – with some brand strategy work to help them refine their proposition, to help inform the overhaul of their comms and marketing materials. Short and sweet, but a lovely brand to work on, run by very smart and inspirational people. Happy days.

Also on the plate as of this coming week, in addition to aforementioned strategy project, I’m going to be doing 2 days a week with the brilliant guys at Friday, doing some experience planning work on a really juice big financial services brand. One of my aims of going freelance was to broaden my experience by getting stuck into a wider variety of projects, learning new & different skills and being a bit of a planning magpie, so I’m really excited about getting my teeth into a more service-design orientated project.

In other news:

  • This Friday it’s the return of The Story (yes, another Conway Hall conference), which promises to be fantastic

  • I can’t believe it but it’s now less than a month to SXSWi. Judging by how quickly accommodation got snapped up, it sounds like it’s going to be even bigger than last year, which is nuts, as it was massive last year, even overtaking the music festival in terms of attendance numbers. An awful lot to do before then, but really looking forward to the Austin pilgramage, followed by a visit to San Francisco for a few days of chilling out and seeing friends.

  • Joined Playlist Club, a fab new initiative from Greg Povey and Marie Foulston – which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s open to all, so check it out and do sign up as a contributor if lovingly choosing and sharing a delightful selection of music is your bag. It’s my turn to curate a playlist in a few weeks time, and already getting playlist anxiety, especially as I’m in such esteemed company….
February 15, 2011 in Weeknotes | Permalink | Leave a Comment
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