As is traditional this time of year I’m going to do a bit of a yearly round up. I’m not going to do a ‘most liked’ or anything really here more a reflection on 2009 which was probably one of the wildest rides I’ve had in a while freelancing. It had some ups and downs and has been ended on an insanely high point that looks like to continue into 2010.
Let’s break with tradition though and start by looking at the end of the year. I am now working regularly freelancing over at Incsub and can’t express enough my huge smile this gig has given me and I’ve only been at it just over a month so far. I’m in awe to be honest of what they are doing and thrilled to be part of the team. My role so far is focusing mainly on BuddyPress theme design and development.
For a long while I’ve wanted to focus my business majorly on ‘the Press family’ of products (BuddyPress, Wp-Mu, BB-Press and WordPress to be exact) and with me working at Incsub I’m able to do just that. Prior to this I was able to inch it up to a majority percentage of ‘Press Family’ but now it’s complete game on. I’m still going to be doing freelance work just less projects with Incsub filling the majority of my hours. I still can’t quite believe my luck in being asked to join the team and for want of gushing too much about the whole thing I’m making sure the eggs I count are polished and pixel perfect so it continues. I’m loving the new challenges and the team over at Incsub is pure gold with everyone being so damn good at what they do it makes me want to up my game about a billion percent which is something I relish after these years of freelancing. I’m learning so much each day that my mind is spinning in a good way.
So why do I describe 2009 as a wild ride? At the start it all was good freelancing was a bit less due to the downturn and me doing a lot of work for startups/smaller companies. I ticked on though and through the year had a lot of great people I worked with on cool projects. Work wasn’t really the wildest ride for me though I was finding I need to think about where in this crazy world of freelance I was going. I can’t remember where I read about it but I remember reading around Spring about ‘finding your niche’ as a freelancer (there are probably a bucket full of posts about that in a variety of places though. As I now face 2010 I feel focused more than I have for a while now and renewed about what direction I’m going in as a designer and in general life.
As many of you will have noticed the posting on this blog has well for want of a better word been ‘lacking’ in the past year. I’m sure the web is full of ‘I’ll do better / post more’ posts so to try and avoid duplicating that here I’ll just say I’ve got plans for this blog too. With my work focus I want to bring the focus a bit more back to this blog. I have already started working out an actual posting schedule (something that was missing for a while). My commitment is to at least 2 posts a week what forms those will take isn’t decided but expect to see the focus around design still of course but maybe with some Press family focus too as that is firmly in my sights now. I’ve also got plans to get this blog back to it’s roots by drawing on the ‘Diary of a website’ concept a bit more and going through some from design to launch tales of some of my projects. I’ve also got some new projects coming up I’ll let you all in on soon that I’m rather excited about.
So there you have it that was 2009, this is 2010. A big thank you to those of you who stayed about last year and here’s to the next year which I face with a bouncy excitement about.
