Advice for small businesses & creatives

I create colour palettes quite often when working with my visual identity and brand clients, so I thought I’d run through a few different tips and resources for DIYing your own colour palette!

From using existing palettes, to playing with a random generator, to creating your own palette from a moodboard — I’m covering all my tried and tested methods for injecting colour into a design!

Something a little bit different on this blog today! No, it’s nothing related to creativity or the Internet. But it is a special day. Today is 7 years since I moved from Canada to the UK!

I think with everything going on this year, and movement between countries grinding to a halt, more people will be seizing the day and following their dreams when a sense of normalcy resumes.

And living abroad is on the top of a lot of people’s lists.

Social media has been ubiquitous in our lives since the dawn of the Internet – even if it wasn’t always called that. Before platforms like Twitter and Instagram there was MySpace or Neopets. Before that chat rooms and forums ruled the world. The landscape is ever-changing.

The harsh reality of social media is that none of these platforms belong to you. They belong to huge corporations who, at the end of the day, couldn’t care less about you and your content. Beyond using it to make money to line their own pockets, of course!

Journals, planners and anything else that promise me a more organised and fulfilled life are my obsession. Unfortunately I am incredibly bad at sticking to one.

I’ve tried quite the variety over the years. I’ve also gone down the slightly more woo path of memory and gratitude journals, to reflect and find my place in the world.

I thought today I’d share some of my favourite organisational tools and journals that I am currently using. Sometimes.

I’ve been using Adobe for design work for as long as I can remember. When I first started creating websites, Photoshop was the industry standard. Looking back, it’s really hard to see why.

I pay monthly for Photoshop and Lightroom currently, but they’re definitely photo editing programs (and that’s what I use them for), not fit for designing a website.

I decided to look for an alternative, and I found Affinity Designer.

I wanted to write a pretty casual post about my working style because it’s been bouncing around my head a lot the last couple of weeks!

I started this week dead set on trying the method of blocking out certain days for certain related tasks. I thought I’d have a day of admin, a day of blog post writing, a day of design work. But, you know, Thursday is my shopping day, and oh, I need to sort out a new bank account, and actually I want to start this new project right away. The next thing I knew, my plan was completely out the window.

And it was only 12:04pm on Monday.

I’ve always loved the concept of a bullet journal – the simplicity and the flexibility, combined with the opportunity to be as creative as you want. The bit I am not great at is being consistent with that. I’d create beautiful layouts for a few weeks in a row, before falling off the wagon and reverting back to my old planner-less ways. Enter my digital bullet journal on my iPad Pro.

Use the GoodNotes app to create your own digital bullet journal spreads. Or download my free template!

You probably read the title above and thought: of course it isn’t. Surely your navigation can go in any order you choose, right?

Wrong.

Well, obviously it can. You (hopefully) live in a free country and can, therefore, put your navigation in any order that you want. But is it in the order that best suits your audience? Is it in the order that will be most effective when it comes to converting a visitor to a customer?

I’ve been a professional designer for about a decade, and people often ask me how I got into it. The short story is: by accident! Kind of.

From humble beginnings as a teen girl with a blog (that was cringe), to my time having my work featured on design websites (that was cool), and my experience at design school.

A little trip down memory lane…