Design Diaries: April and May 2024
Welcome back to your monthly fix of Design Diaries, where you can binge the weekly updates like a full Netflix Series being dropped all at once!
Each week I will be capturing and uploading a week in the life of a brand and website designer living a nomadic lifestyle.
Follow along to see my day-to-day and the current projects I'm working on.
Episode 16
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Welcome back to week 16 of the design diaries!
Exciting news in the studio this week as we have officially hired our fourth member of the Studio 77 team, meet Becca! She, along with Mia (who as you can see, is working very hard) is coming on as our Project Director, welcome to the team!
We’ve started QAing the nonprofit marketing co website, so this is very nearly ready to go, a few more tweaks and we’ll be ready to push live next week.
We are also continuing to work on the sales page with Mindful Champs before they launch a new ad campaign, so we’re getting the final tweaks sorted on those.
We also made some changes to some of the print items and reprints for them too, including the Talking Matters Cards and the MindfulMe Journal.
We also did a lot of behind the scenes admin this week, we’re getting ready to launch our own ad campaigns in May so we’re getting preparing for that.
On the weekend we went up Sulphur Mountain in Banff and were just blown away by the views, this is our last weekend in Canmore, before we head off on holiday to Japan next week!
Episode 17
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And we’re back from holiday and ready to go!
Not without one final stop, on Monday we were big kids and went to studio ghibli park where we saw an exclusive ghibli short, got lots of silly photos with our fav characters and explored the park
Then we’ve been back the office, replying to emails, catching up and getting our heads back in business mode!
This week We’ve been doing some updates to The Kids Bathing Co website, adding some new products and adding awards and stockists to the site.
We’ve also started the strategy and research for a nonprofit based in Calgary, Canada, so I’ve been looking at their personas, thinking and wireframes and flow ahead of the call with the client next week.
We’ve also been working on our own marketing, we won 4 Hermes awards for our nonprofit sites, which is super exciting!
At the end of the week we went to Kyoto and saw the famous 1000 gates, the bamboo forest and the golden temple, and finished the week in an economy-aki restaurant in Osaka, followed by a games night in an arcade!
Catch you next week!
Episode 18
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Week 18, and I got a new hat.
Welcome to the design diaries, where we’ve had another wonderful week
This week I’ve been working on a branding project for Becca Jules & Co, here you can see me spending hours trying to get the right ampersand, we’re not quite there yet but a bit more delving and we’ll be good! Also been playing around with the colours, this project actually ended up looking really different from the route I had planned, but I’m happy with the direction so far! Sometimes when I design I surprise myself with what routes are explored!
I’ve also been working with Nima on sprucing up her email flows, going through and just getting the spacing and fonts all spot on!
Then on Wednesday we popped over to universal studios for our last day out in Osaka, we went on all the rollercoasters, then realised we can’t handle them like we used to, ate a load of sugar, and bought a snoopy toy home with us.
On Thursday we were back in the office, working on some proposals for new clients, as well as tweaking some of the designs for a new nonprofit site we’ve been working on.
And on Friday, we hopped on a flight to the Philippines, and drove 4 hours into the middle of nowhere, where we’ll be staying for the next month. Good news is that we made some friends at the pool.
See you next week!
Episode 19
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A week in the life of a digital nomad, let’s go!
This one’s a big one, as Studio 77 turned 7 years old this week, cheers to that. Bruce (we’ve named him ‘Bruce’ came out to celebrate with us.)
Along with the other plethora of wildlife, we have become friends with over the last week.
We started the week perfecting the logo design and the colours for Becca Jules & Co! Currently, we’re working on getting that B looking perfect, we’re hoping to have the final B, and the branding completed by next week. We tweaked a few colours too to warm up the palette a little and it’s popping now!
We also started working on the website for Becca too, early stages with this, but I’m vibing the direction so far.
We’ve also been building some new pages for the nonprofit Do it Now Now ahead of a new campaign they’ll be running soon, as well as working with Veranda on designing some email template designs for their store launch.
This weekend we were invited to a birthday party by one of the locals, whilst neither of us spoke each others language, we connected through the universal language of Kareoke.
We finished up the week with a drive to a local lake and some smoothies.
See you next week for more Bruce updates.
Episode 20
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Week 20 in the week in the life of a digital nomad, let’s go.
This week started well, with working on nonprofit, The Kinsmen Club of Calgary Foundation site. This is such a great foundation, they have raised so much money for so many great local causes in Calgary.
We’ve made our final design edits to the site, and Will is now in full-steam-ahead build mode, we’re hoping to get this live next week!
We also finalised all of Becca Jules & Co branding and handed that over to the client. We finished the website design, so that will be going into development next week. Just a few little content tweaks to do on my side first.
On the weekend we went to a local eco-park and had a dip in this natural lake, little did we know that we would stay this wet all weekend as a tropical typhoon came and hit the town that we were staying in, with winds of up to 100kmph and extreme tropical downpours it was really scary.
Luckily, no one was hurt, but a lot of people's houses were destroyed, here’s part of our roof on the floor, and we were the lucky ones here.
Tune in next week for an update. Stay safe out there.
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