One word to sum up my Monday. Tan.
Leicester has been absolutely roasting over the last few days, as has the rest of the UK. 30 degrees though? đ„” Honestly, talk about mood-lift or what! I have to say, I do prefer the colder days in winter as I am a December baby after all, but then again, there is nothing like an extra ice-cold G&T in the sun.
Here are my top 5 stories from the past week:
Long-term planning time.
We only have a few months left until we finish our project with Homes England so last week, I decided to have a bit of a think on the long term goal of the project to make sure we are tracking those important milestones. I invited our content designer, research lead and delivery lead onto a zoom cuppa call and did a bit of a brain-dump on what our plans are and where we need to align. We all already have a roadmap and sprint planning board, but this plan is just an extra layer of detail relevant for our immediate team.
We work in two-week sprints here a dxw, and sometimes I think it can get easy to lose the long-term vision sometimes when your head is so into the daily work, which is why I decided to have a bit of a reminder session. We all found it very useful and itâs something we can now keep reflecting on every week, plus itâs a great thing to share with the client.
Mental health makers day.
My absolute highlight of the week â makers days. The dxw makers days are an opportunity to work together on a problem we want to solve or something we want to make better outside of our client work. We had working groups around mentoring, learning and development, blended teams, earth group and mental health and wellbeing.
It was a difficult decision for me to pick one that I wanted to join, but I ended up going to the one that was closest to my heart â mental health and wellbeing. We started the day off reflecting through our recent survey results and discussing what insights stood out to us the most.
After a thought-provoking âHow might weâ session, me and Beth Dixon co-hosted the ideation stage where we squeezed out the teamâs creative juices through research, inspiration boards and lightning demo activities. The next day, we continued the design thinking through a good old round of Crazy 8s â we had some killer ideas which feed very nicely into our next steps.
I am now eagerly waiting for the next one to pop up in my calendar. New faces, lotâs of virtual biscuits and talking about things that truly make a difference. Thatâs my type of energy.
âBanter breaksâ are a thing.
Before the Makers Days, I noticed a real energy dip throughout the week for some strange reason. Maybe it was the footy final? Or hay-fever draining me out? Or the crumbling of my gym routine?
Whatever it was, there was something in the air and a bunch of us found ourselves getting into a bit of a âpower napâ routine. I said to myself, âEnough of this!â, letâs get back into the chirpy spirit so I popped in a random 15 minute calendar invite with my work buddies Morrighan and Beth to up the mood. After a quick google search, I discovered a site called Drawasaurus which is basically an online version of Pictionary. Before you know it, we were rolling on the floor laughing, practically in tears. Might have to make the banter break a regular.
Illustrations are back.
This time last year, as we went into lockdown, I decided to take up something new as a way to stay mindful and cope with all the changes surrounding me. Fast forward twelve months, my passion became a side-hustle and now I spend my evenings designing custom portraits and branding small businesses.
Last month however, I reached a bit of a brain block so had some time off to freshen up and set a personal brand strategy. Now I am back, I am starting to really appreciate how little things like drawing can impact the mind! Similar to weeknotes, this is a practice where I can just release all the moving parts in my head, but this time, in a visual format. You can see some of my work here on instagram.
*New project alert*
Tomorrow, I will be starting a short project at dxw with my interaction design hat on, in collaboration with a national mental health charity. I love that I am able to zoom in and out, switching between different design skills and projects. Also very grateful to work in a company like dxw that supports this way of working!
A few years ago, I always use to stress about what type of designer I am and the fear of not going down one particular specialism. I started in fashion then worked my way into graphic, marketing and social media design. I then transitioned into digital and UX design and over the last few years particularly, my focus has been around service design. I tend to switch between them often so when people use to ask me what type of designer I was, I always struggled to answer without over-complicating my response.
The lines between these disciplines can be so blurry as a lot of them share very similar tools, methods and all should have one main goal â to smash out the most amazing experience for users. As long as I am doing the latter, letâs just stick to being called a âdesignerâ for now.
Have a good week âïž
