A few days away from the launch of a possible new Apple product (Canvas, iBook, iSlate?), and I’ve finally finished a five year loan for my current two computers. Yes, yes, I have been running my business on a five year old G5 PowerMac.

I bought my machine when I was in college (back when banks were giving loans to people for sport) and it always served as my home machine. It served me faithfully through college (I worked in the evenings creating websites) and when I eventually began working for myself in January 2008 (after a short spell working for The Man), I, of course, used my trusty G5 in my home office.

After a lot of early morning commutes, I took advantage of self-employment by sleeping and working late. It was in this first year that I started doing, on average, 10 hour days. I’d start about 10.00am, work until six, cook and eat dinner and usually head back to my office for a few more hours. I never had any problems with working like this, simply because I liked the work I was doing, and by getting it done faster, I was getting paid faster.

At the end of 2008, I had an opportunity to move into some office space, and for numerous reasons (mostly more space and better heating) I moved my office out of my home and into my new space. I convinced myself that by having a separate office that my work/life balance would be better, I wouldn’t feel obliged to work in the evenings, I could keep office hours, get my work done without the distractions of a home office (long lunches, short naps) and generally be as productive or even more productive in a separate office space.

After a gruelling year I realised a number of things-

• Even though I was more productive in the development side of my work, the more creative design side was suffering (who’d have thought that creativity doesn’t kick in after morning coffee).
• As Jon Hicks noted recently, when self employed, the amount of work hours actually done is a lot less than eight, due to paperwork, more paperwork, phone calls, emails, meetings and a little bit more paperwork.
• Having an office outside of your home is really, really convenient and beneficial for client meetings- a lot more professional.
• Even though I increased the amount of work done in the year, I probably could have done more.

I thought I could solve my work/life imbalance by working in a separate office space, but the imbalance swung the other way. I now spend a lot of free time in the evening twiddling my thumbs, thinking I could be doing something more productive than trying to ignore the crap on the box.

I was always planning on upgrading my machine this year and I was considering a shiny new iMac, but I think it’ll have to be a MacBook Pro instead. Even though I’ll probably repeatedly curse the decision, as I pack the machine up every morning and evening, I think in the long run, it’ll allow me to be more productive all round.

I plan on doing a lot of side projects this year, and I don’t plan on spending warm summer evenings in a stuffy office.

I hold an honours degree in Printing Management and even though I am now a web designer (a long story for another day), most of what I learned during my four years in college still stands to me in my day-to-day running of my web design company.

In the third year of my course I had a lecture each week called Operations Management. The lecturer was really great, he had some great insights into how a production-based business should run, not just from a theoretical standpoint, but also from a pragmatic point of view.

One such insight was when he told us that when referring to any process, the old saying “practise makes perfect” should really be “practise makes permanent”. A guy (or gal) who picks up bad habits during a period of time or is initially taught incorrectly, will then proceed to do their task or job incorrectly, unless corrected.

The lesson was that you must constantly check your processes, whether it’s a human or mechanical process- time has a habit of changing things, one way or the other.

The web is such a fast changing medium that you can easily pick up techniques and habits on a day-to-day basis. Even though publications relating to the web, like books, can go out of date quickly, their benefit is in reassessing what you know and the way in which you’ve been carrying out your job. This allows you to correct yourself and continue on progressively enhancing.

This is another belated post, this time for an exhibition which took place in June, 2009. Due to several reasons (lazyness being the most prominent) I only wanted to use a single screen for this print, but printing a solid colour is boring. I had seen a print on Flickr (seen here) which used multiple colours at the same time on a screen. This is commonly known as ’split fountain’ printing.

Split Fountain is when you put multiple colours in the fountain or ink well. In commercial printing, this is most commonly done when printing currency- if you’ve ever seen currency with multiple colours blending into each other, if you check out the printing under 10x magnification, you’ll see a consistent blend of colour with no halftones. This not only makes forgery that bit harder to do, I’d assume it makes the printing a bit of a pain, because of potential cross-contamination of inks, affecting the colour.

Only recently I came across this process on the excellent For Print Only website- a couple used this technique for printing their wedding cards.

Artwork

For the artwork, I had some silhouettes of trees that were in the ditch outside my office. I reversed the trees, so the image of the trees would not be printed. After creating the screen, I went to work in earnest. My first colours were an orange, (shitty) peaches and yellow colour scheme. I produced a couple of prints using the split fountain technique, and it worked really well. The only problem was that the colours, although blending together nicely, were too separate still. I did a number of prints squeegeeing along the long-edge, mixing up the ink half way through- I wanted a mixed up texture, not perfect bands of colour!

Black, Red and Grey

After cleaning up the screen and scooping the excess into an empty pot, I set the screen up again, this time I was squeegeeing short-edge down. I decided to use a black, grey and red colour scheme. Although the first few prints were fine, the black overpowered the other colours, making the prints very muddy looking.

Shades of Blue

My next colour scheme, having learned from last time, was a collection of blue hues, allowing for more subtle blends of colour, as opposed to a single colour overpowering everything else. I added in some Silver to the colours too, to give it more texture and affect. I was happy with the prints. Using shades of colour worked a lot better.

Longways

For my final trick, I decided to back to the orange, shitty peaches and yellow colour scheme, but print the short-edge down. I used the ink I scraped off the first print run, so the ink was thoroughly mixed up at this point, giving better mixed-up textures.

Twofer

In the run up to the exhibition, I had trouble choosing which print to enter into the exhibition. After much deliberation we decided (it was a group decision at this point) to put in two prints as one, commonly referred to as (but technically incorrect) a diptych. I use a local framer, who is so good all I have to do is give a basic direction and she decides everything else. I have yet to see a badly framed picture from her.

The diptych was exhibited and sold on opening night. More photos are on Flickr.

In the last year or so, I have seen a trend appearing in a lot of website blogs I read on a regular basis. They’ve morphed into Tumblr style blogs, where original content is scarce and links to other sites abundant. Other sites have gone one step further and are only producing lists of other ‘popular’ websites to visit. There’s an endless loop of sites linking to other sites linking back to the same sites.

I’ve unsubscribed to most of these blogs because I didn’t originally subscribe to them for their links. I subscribed to them because I was interested in the author’s writing and opinions.

So it is my mission to produce original content for this site. My interests are fairly varied, so the content of the posts will be varied too. I have already planned at least six posts profiling artists from the British comic 2000ad, some more screen printing posts and some posts relating to web design and development.

Follow me on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed for this site, as there will be more to come.

As an extra fun element I’m going to occasionally add different colour schemes to compliment each blog post (when I have time).

I’ve used the very clever and talented Jason Santa Maria’s approach to layout- drawing heavily on the 24ways article, Modular Layouts.