Week of Dec. 30, 2024 - The changing of the year
- The end of year doldrums? The pull between wanting to do as little as possible but wanting to close out projects is very real. Most folks are on leave this time of year in staggered timelines. This means that regular syncs may not happen or, if they do, they’re very low key and chill. Distractions are nigh.
- Planning for 2025. This includes preparing for our upcoming retro to do a full year reflection and identify what we want to focus on in 2025. The year promises to be bright not only for my own work but for my team as a whole. Hopefully. Maybe. I might have to tamp down the over-eager-excitement so the fall doesn’t feel as hard if it comes.
- Our team has grown, then shrank, and may be growing again. We’ve always been a small content design team with a content-to-product ratio of about 1:10. We started 2024 with 11 people and ended with seven. We’re looking to hire two juniors, and our summer intern will return so that’ll put us back to 11. We’ll be a junior-heavy team but I think that’s ok. We did a lot of work this year in laying the foundation. This year will be stress testing that foundation.
- Content auditing one facet of a beast of a product. Doing this audit makes me wonder why we allow ourselves to work in inefficient or less-than-optimal ways. I tend to gravitate towards optimizing and efficiencies, which is partially why I’m doing this audit but every time I load the Figma files up for this I balk for 10 seconds and then get right into it. This project includes consolidating text patterns within a workflow, across different user types. Some are the exact same but on occasion, there are minute differences. You might not catch these differences though because the patterns sit across 3-5 design files, which have multiple pages in them. Lots of sweeping eye movement happening. I can already see the benefits of the consolidated file I’m creating for my product team so hopefully the finished document is that much more effective.
What I’m Reading
- Butter by Asako Yuzuki (translated by Polly Barton)
- Leading Content Design by Rachel McConnel
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