May is for Stretching
When I say stretching I am NOT referencing the death-defying, hanging from a rope wrapped around your wrist a la the photo above (though there was some extreme stretching in that show I saw – Circus Extreme at Shephard's Bush). I AM talking about some design stretching and some literal stretching.
This past month has been a design juggle like no other as I worked on a variety of projects for various clients that all seemed to be in different realms of design output. It is a total stretch of the design brain! Since starting March and Bloom, I've never had the same day twice, and that was more than true as you can see a sampling of what I did over the past four weeks:
• packaging for something edible (ice cream)
• packaging for something NOT edible (haircare)
• welcome gift designing and sourcing, including flower seed packets
• social media templates for a gardener, a woodworker and a floral designer
• web pages for a home organisation business
• lookbook updating for another florist
• proposal design for a woodworker
• website for the new wholesale business of an ice cream shop
• sales deck updating for a textile reseller
• final grading for the students in my university design course
• job description write-up for an internship
I've been in a constant rotation between my Adobe Creative Suite programs Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop and then in Canva, Squarespace and Mailerlite, as well as Word, Excel and (my least favourite program of all time) PowerPoint. And of course the gazillion open tabs in my web browser.
This is all to say that I truly think it's that stretch of the various different design touchpoints that gets me excited to be at my desk everyday. Many creatives (myself included!) can get bored quite easily if they aren't being challenged creatively and allowing that part of their brain to be put to the test. The "test" being: "how can I come up with this new thing for this new idea in a new way?"
A Real Stretch
Along with all of this design stretching also came with the realization that I haven't been doing enough literal stretching during the workday. If I work out, it's first thing in the morning and too often in the past few months, I haven't walked more than the steps downstairs to my kitchen and back up to the office between 9am and 4pm. The sun came out in London last week and I knew I had to change that, so off I went for an early afternoon walk twice last week. It might not seem like a lot, but for someone who is constantly realizing they "only have x minutes left before school pick up, so I must do x, y, and z first," it was huge.
When I worked for other agencies in New York, even if I ate lunch at my desk (which sadly I did more than not), I would make it a priority to get out and stretch my legs for a walk around the block at some point in the day. Now that I am running my own show, you would think that would be something I'd bake into my day but I have not – I am a terrible boss to myself sometimes! So, last week that's why I started the mid-day stretch. Fresh air is so crucial!
So I'll leave you with that, get outside for a daily walk and make sure you're challenging yourself with as much variety as you can in your workday. Until next time...
