The Standard,
Daily.

Good Day. I graduated from DevStudios this past February, top of my class, with honours, and I thought that meant I was ready. Then I spent the spring and summer printing a racetrack, eighteen hours a day, and I learned what ready actually means.

A man named Corey Gauveau interviewed me and hired me on the spot. He promised I would be well fed, well managed, and handed the experience of a lifetime, and every part of that turned out to be true. On my first day he passed me a red binder, a hundred pages thick, and said, in effect, these are the client orders, everyone who paid for track graphics and sponsor signage and paddock and booth space, so call them, find out what they need, design it, print it, and go. That was the entire brief. Trial by fire, in the best way a young designer could ask for.

The job was the inaugural West Edmonton Mall Grand Prix at the City Centre Airport, the first time open-wheel racing has come to Edmonton, a temporary circuit laid across the runways in our own backyard. I handled the graphics. All of them. Track graphics, wayfinding, the grandstand banners, the client signage, the markings on the tarmac, the thousand things a crowd of two hundred thousand never once thinks about, precisely because they are done well. Windship Aviation, the company that took me on, builds hot air balloons the rest of the year, and I was meant to be initiated with a balloon of my own, except I was too buried in print to stop for it.

We had a printer ten feet wide, and I have never been so intimate with a machine. The largest pieces ran sixty feet long and forty feet tall, several of them, the grandstand banners, and at that scale a misaligned file is not a small mistake on a screen. It is an enormous banner that is wrong, in front of everyone, with no undo. I learned to respect the timeline I had drawn, and to hold it even as clients kept adding to that binder.

It rained on opening day, hard, the way Alberta rains in July. I stood at the edge of the paddock with water running off the brim of my hat and watched everything we had made get tested by weather and crowd at the same moment. Some of it I would do differently. Most of it held.

And then the cars. We had access to the pits, and a vantage over the back corner that fed into them, and I want to try to tell you what it is to stand a few feet from a Champ Car at full song. These machines lose their grip if they go too slow, so a driver comes into the pit at a brutal speed and brakes at the last possible instant, landing each tire on a square barely an inch across. Precision at that velocity, chosen on purpose, three feet from where I stood. Everything I had been taught about composition and hierarchy suddenly had a heartbeat.

Three months of eighteen hour days will strip the school right out of you and leave only the craft. I came out the far side knowing things no classroom teaches: that a deadline is a form of respect, that scale changes absolutely everything, and that the work the crowd never notices is the work holding the whole day up. I am twenty-two years old, and I have printed a racetrack. I do not believe I will ever be intimidated by a brochure again.

Something is shifting in this trade, too, and I can feel the edge of it. The web is becoming a real place to do the work, not merely an afterthought bolted to the print. Standing on that tarmac, watching machines built for one purpose move faster than anything I had ever seen, I had the distinct feeling that our own tools are about to start moving like that, and I mean to be ready when they do.

The grandstands are coming down now. The runway is a runway again. And I am keeping a photograph of that ten-foot printer, because whatever I become in this work, it started here, at the track, in the rain, three feet from something extraordinary.

Good Day. Apple shipped a telephone a few weeks ago, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. I am two years into this work, and I am quite certain I have just watched the ground move under all of us. It is the most exciting thing to happen to my trade since I entered it.

Here is what thrilled me. It renders real websites. Not the stripped, grey, text-only mobile pages we have all been grudgingly making, but the actual site, the one I designed for a monitor, sitting in the palm of a hand, and you pinch it with two fingers to bring it close. The web has come off the desk, and I do not think the trade has fully grasped yet what an opening that is.

Every site I have ever built quietly assumes a person seated at a desk, with a mouse and a wide screen and a little patience. Every one of those assumptions just became optional, and I find that liberating rather than daunting. The screen is now four inches across. The mouse is a thumb. The patience is gone, because this person is standing in a line or on a bus, deciding in seconds. That is not a problem to fear. That is a cleaner, more honest constraint to design into.

We do not have a name yet for how to design for this, and I love that we do not. The clever people are already talking about building small web apps that feel like they belong to the device, and I intend to be among the first to try. The old comfort, it looks fine on my monitor, quietly stopped being good enough this summer, and that is precisely the kind of moment a designer should run toward, not away from.

My instinct, and I trust it, is that this rewards restraint, which happens to be exactly where my whole craft is already heading. A small screen punishes clutter instantly. It has no room for the ten things we usually pile at the top of a page. It forces the one question I build everything around: what is the single thing this person came to do? The desk let us dodge that question for years. The phone makes it the entire job, and I could not be happier about it.

I would far rather be early and right than late and safe, so I am going to start designing as though the small screen is the real screen and the desk is the luxury. I suspect that before very long that will simply be the work, and I intend to have been building it since the first summer.

Two years ago I was printing a racetrack at the City Centre Airport, learning what it means to make something at full speed and get it right the first time. Today I am holding a sheet of glass with an entire website living inside it. The trade is accelerating, and I mean to be at the very front of it.

Good Day. I walked out of DevStudios this February, and I want to set the feeling down before it fades. I finished at the top of my class, and I am the one student of the six offered an internship, which is how a young man from a concrete crew finds himself about to design a Grand Prix.

Two years ago I was a concrete finisher, earning eighteen dollars an hour with my journeyman laborer's hands. I was good at it, and I told myself I would never get my certificate, because I did not want to become a lifer. What pulled at me was the high end, aesthetic side of the work, the design of it, except that on a crew a young man's job is to do, not to think. So in the fall of 2004 I left, and I put my own money, real money earned in the cold, into becoming someone whose entire job is to think.

I interviewed at every school I could find. DevStudios was the most expensive on my list and, strangely, the shortest, a two-year diploma compressed into five relentless months through their REV12 program. The moment I shook Grant Curry's hand I knew it was the place. That kind of acceleration is exactly how I am built. I left high school with a hundred and forty-five credits when a hundred will graduate you. I do not know how to attend something at half effort.

So I more or less lived there. DevStudios was one of the only schools with twenty-four hour access to the faculty, and I used every hour of it. There is a cot in that building that came to know me well. I would be at my desk by five in the morning, three hours of work already behind me by the time the others arrived at eight. I earned a great many perfect marks, and a few impossible ones above a hundred percent, not because I am gifted, but because I simply would not leave.

The thing that changed me was code. Kingston Fung taught us Flash and ActionScript, and the first time I made something move because I had told it to, in language, something opened in me that has not closed since. I came in believing design was print and polish. I am leaving knowing it is also logic and motion and systems, and that the web is about to become a real place to do the work.

I will be honest about one thing I carry. I hold a diploma, not a degree, no master's, no long letters after my name, and I know there are rooms where that will be counted against me. I have simply decided not to accept that arithmetic. Experience and relentless due diligence can stand in for years of training, and I intend to prove it on the work itself rather than on a transcript. I would rather be measured by what I can build than by how long I sat to learn it.

I believe design is the language through which I will change the things around me. Good design quietly solves a great many bad problems, and I want to spend my life solving them. That is not a small ambition for a former concrete finisher with a five-month diploma, and I am aware of that, and I am walking toward it on purpose.

The internship is at Windship Aviation, and the work, of all things, is a Grand Prix. I have no idea yet what it will ask of me. I only know that I walked out of that school certain of one thing. I am exactly where I am meant to be, and I am only just beginning.

Good Day. The Grand Prix is weeks behind me now, and the thing I keep returning to is not the banners everyone saw. It is the work nobody will ever notice, which I am coming to believe is the truest measure of the craft.

Because it was Edmonton's first year, a lead designer who had worked the Australian Grand Prix came and stood beside me, one on one, through part of it. That kind of company is its own education. You learn more in a week at the elbow of someone who has done it than in months of doing it blind, and I will not soon forget the generosity of it.

Most of my pride from those weeks is unglamorous. A couple of us in a back room, weeding vinyl by hand, a plotter cutting wayfinding onto sheets of Coroplast, stack after stack of signs, and the quiet, enormous task of knowing exactly where each one belonged. We got every last one done, in time. At that scale, simply finishing is the accomplishment nobody applauds.

Exhaustion is its own hazard in this work. On a twenty hour shift, staring at the same screen, words begin to blur into one another. We caught a washroom sign at the last second that, with a single missing letter, read as something far less dignified. We laughed, and we fixed it, and I learned that proofreading is not a step you perform once. It is a discipline you hold even when your eyes have stopped cooperating.

Then there are the things designed for a camera rather than a person. The graphics on the ground are not printed square. We set them on a deliberate angle, judged against where the cameras would sit, so they read true on a broadcast. The logos around a hairpin are stretched, sometimes as much as four hundred percent wider than the mark itself, because a camera sweeping past at speed compresses them back into shape. I was astonished at how far you must distort a thing for it to look correct.

That is the real secret of it. We were not designing for the eye in the stands. We were designing for perception itself, for the angle and the speed and the lens, giving each logo its best possible chance in the half second it would live on a screen. None of it survives if you do it in a hurry. You take your time, or you get it wrong, and there is no rushing perception into place.

It is invisible, and it matters, and those two things are not in tension. The wayfinding that gets a stranger from a parking lot to their seat, the angle that makes a logo land, the missing letter you caught at three in the morning, none of it is glamorous and all of it is the job. I suspect this instinct, to sweat the part nobody will ever credit you for, is the one I will carry the furthest.

A great many people had a wonderful day at that track and never once thought about how they found their seat. That is precisely the point. The best of this work disappears into a good day, and I am proud to have made some of it vanish.

Good Day. I find myself, this autumn, missing a machine. Specifically a printer ten feet wide, the one that turned my files into a racetrack, and I want to write down what it taught me before the memory cools.

It was a great bubble jet, fed by ink tanks that held two liters each, which you mixed by hand. A heat platen ran beneath the canvas to dry the ink as it laid down. The rolls were ten feet wide and weighed three hundred pounds, loaded by hand. The print head alone was something near sixty-five pounds, and once it was moving, its inertia was enough to take a careless person off their feet. You do not approach a machine like that casually. You learn its weight and its temper.

It was hot from the platen, loud enough to fill a room, and the smell could turn your stomach on a long night. And yet I loved being near it, because it carried a particular air of authenticity. What I had drawn on a screen was becoming real, at scale, in front of me. There is a seriousness to that which a glowing monitor cannot give you.

The stakes were physical and unforgiving. A sixty foot banner is printed in four passes, each ten feet wide. If the third pass of four carries a flaw, you have not lost a tap of the undo key. You have lost a hundred and twenty feet of vinyl, sometimes more, along with everything already printed on it. You learn to watch a print the way a surgeon watches a wound.

We burned about three hundred feet of vinyl once, and I want to be precise, because it matters. That was the machine, not the hand. On a late night print the colors drifted, and the work lights played tricks on our eyes, and only later did we see how far the color had wandered. So I learned color calibration the hard way, from screen to print head and back, how to remix, how to reset, how to make what you see become what you actually get. It is one of the most useful things I know.

Those late nights with the machine have a quality I have not found anywhere else. Past a certain hour you are running on something beyond energy, on passion and fumes and the simple refusal to leave a job unfinished. The machine does not care that you are tired. It asks only that you get it right.

I will carry this for the rest of my career. Whenever I ask for print in the years ahead, I will know the back end of it. I will know what a great press demands, what a wide format banner printer can and cannot do, how ink density and calibration and a clean set of nozzles decide whether a thing sings or smears. You design differently once you have stood beside the machine that has to make the thing real.

More than any single skill, it taught me that a finished piece is a kind of symphony. The file, the ink, the heat, the timing, the calibration, the steady hands at two in the morning, all of it has to arrive together, or none of it arrives at all. I did not expect a printer to teach me how design actually works. It turned out to be one of my finest instructors.

Good Day. My first year out of DevStudios is closing, and I want to name the things the school could not teach me, not as a complaint, but because they turned out to be the lessons that mattered most.

School gave me mock interview after mock interview, and they were genuinely good. They built the conversation and the confidence. What they could not prepare me for was the number on the other side of the table. I came from concrete, where I earned eighteen dollars an hour with my hands, and I had invested twenty thousand dollars of my own money, and ten thousand more in hardware, to become a designer. I would win an interview cleanly and be offered twelve or thirteen dollars an hour as though it were a generous gift.

I turned down a great many of those offers on principle, until honesty requires me to admit that desperation eventually won a round. I took a job at thirteen sixty-five an hour, briefly, at the Running Room, and I never once stopped hunting while I held it. Three months later I found work at eighteen dollars, exactly where I had judged my worth to be, and from there it has begun to climb. The lesson was not patience. It was refusing to accept someone else's low estimate of the work as the truth.

There is a quieter thing school could not teach me, which is how to stand near greatness without shrinking. I would study the people I admire, Edward Tufte and the way he makes data honest, the restraint that Apple and Jonathan Ive put into the world, the agencies producing work I could scarcely believe, and I would feel like an impostor in my own trade. I have learned to keep my eyes forward for exactly this reason. When I look back at my own work, I find fault. When I look ahead, I find the next thing to become.

It is humbling, too, to measure what you can make alone against what a team of twenty makes together, and to feel the gap. I am one person. I have decided the gap is not a verdict on me. It is simply the reason to get better, and to be honest about what one careful person can and cannot do.

Two things I have had to actively unlearn this year. The first is saying yes to everyone. Yes is how a young designer agrees to fifteen dollars an hour and then, through scope that quietly tripled, earns three. I am learning that a yes without a scope is not generosity. It is a slow way to come to resent your own work.

The second is my own perfectionism. Perfection is the enemy of progress, and I believe that now, even as a committed perfectionist. I hold a high standard and I will not ship work I am ashamed of. But I am learning which small imperfections will never sink a project, and to let those ones go, so the thing can actually exist in the world rather than live forever on my desk.

If I could add anything to a design school, it would have almost nothing to do with software. It would be how to pitch, how to truly listen, how to find out what a client actually needs underneath what they ask for. How to set a fair price and hold it. How to carry yourself as a luxury rather than a bargain, and to sound confident even on the day you are just beginning. I am learning all of it the slow way, in the field, and I suspect that is the only place it can really be learned.

A year ago I was certain school had prepared me. It had, for the work itself. The rest, the worth, the pricing, the standing in a room, I am building now, one hard conversation at a time. I would not trade those lessons for an easier year.

Good Day. Everything got glossy this year, and I will admit it openly, I loved it. The whole web turned to gradients and reflections and soft, candy-coated buttons, and after years of flat, careful print restraint, it felt as though the medium had finally decided to enjoy itself.

There is something almost impressionist about this Web 2.0 look, something modernist, a style we have collectively decided to attach to ourselves in a way we never quite had before. I have poured it into brands like Evolve Landscapes with real pleasure, leaning hard into the shine and the depth, into the sense that a screen could feel tactile.

The timing is not an accident. Phones are beginning to change. We are seeing Samsung handsets with proper colour screens that can render primitive versions of a website, and that small fact is quietly setting the whole study of user interface in motion. Suddenly there is a reason to think about how a thing looks and behaves on a piece of glass in someone's hand.

Clients have never seen anything like it, so every one of them wants it. It is a trend, plainly, and a fad, and I am clear-eyed about that even as I enjoy it. We are making things too bold, too cluttered, too shiny, and at times too distracting from the one thing the page is actually for.

Which is, I suspect, the gift hidden inside the gloss. I think this era will teach the whole field to focus on what matters, on the single main actor in a design, and to treat everything else as supporting cast. Because the truth I keep relearning is that design is less about adding things and more about tastefully removing them, to create attention and reduce distraction.

So I will ride this shine while it lasts, and learn what it has to teach. Trends are not the enemy. They are how a medium tries on its new possibilities. The discipline is to enjoy them fully and still know, underneath it all, which of them you will choose to keep.

Good Day. This is the year I started taking the web seriously, not as a lesser cousin of print, but as a craft with its own demands. I was coding in Dreamweaver, getting deep into HTML, watching CSS evolve into something you could actually build with, and realising the web deserved my full attention.

Along the way I noticed something that has shaped my whole approach since. Not many developers love design, and not many designers love to build. I had taken courses in development, intermediate programming, object oriented thinking, C and the rest, under an instructor named Mr. Koreshi at Centre High, and that grounding put me in a rare middle. I cared how a thing looked and I cared how it worked, and I refused to choose.

The first website I was genuinely proud of was for Mountain Industrial Safety, for a gentleman named Robin Posnikoff. In its day that was an enormous project, and finishing it well told me I belonged in this medium. Not long after came TNT Motorcycling, a riding school, and that one had a real back end, a booking and management system that held all their students. A site that did something, not just a site that sat there. That is when the web stopped being decoration to me and became architecture.

Print taught me a discipline I carry straight into the web. A friend of mine, Frank, used to remind me that some things are simply too small to read, and on the web you are fighting pixel densities and screen displays at every turn. In print we always tried to stretch the envelope of how small detail could go. On the web the lesson inverts. Never go too small, and find clever, quiet ways to fit the text without letting it overpower the page.

What resisted me most was the mastery of tables and CSS. It was a confusing realm of column spans and row spans, of structures that fell apart the moment a browser changed size, of writing exceptions for Internet Explorer and then exceptions to the exceptions. That fought me hard, and learning to win those fights is part of how I crossed over.

I did set the web down for stretches after this, drawn into branding and larger design work with developers at my side. But because I could speak their language, the design to development handoff became something I could shape rather than suffer. And I never truly left print behind. I simply kept it beside me, where it belongs.

Good Day. Flash is everywhere right now, and I will confess I build almost everything in it. If I needed to find a place to rent, I would build a little Flash applet to do it. It did not matter what the task was, I was writing it in ActionScript, assembling it in Flash, and putting it up on my Hostgator server.

What I love is the object oriented nature of it, and the magic of tweening. You set a start state and an end state, and the software fills in every step between them on its own. To put that motion into a website, and watch it open an audience's eyes exactly where you wanted their attention, is intoxicating. Between Flash and, for a short while, Director, the animation side of this work has never been more alive.

Flash took the limits of tables and CSS and simply removed them, then added a flavour of motion on top. For a designer who came up fighting browser quirks, that freedom feels like the future arriving early.

And yet it worries me, even as I use it. Flash needs the Flash Player to run, and the Player is forever updating. If a visitor does not have the right version, you are back in the browser chase all over again, rewriting the same work several times to keep it alive. That is a nuisance dressed up as progress.

My clients, I think, believe Flash will become their backend world-runner, a fully customizable liquid canvas that auto-forms to whatever they need, animated and database-driven and endlessly clever. I understand the dream. I am not certain the foundation can carry it.

Because here is what Flash is quietly teaching me. Security matters. The way this technology sits inside the browser opens loopholes, and I suspect that, over time, those loopholes will be its undoing rather than its update cycle. I will enjoy every animated minute of it. I will also not be surprised when something more open and more honest takes its place.

Good Day. Suddenly everyone has a page. If a business does not have a website, it is hungry for one, often without quite knowing what one is for. MySpace is here, the early social experiments are stirring, and the whole idea of a web presence has gone from rare to expected almost overnight.

Designing in this democratized moment is a strange and interesting thing, because everyone now believes they are a design expert. The word designer has come to mean anyone with a copy of Word. I have lost count of the people who have asked me to build them something like MySpace, and at this point in my life I am not the developer I intend to become, so building a MySpace would be an enormous undertaking I am neither equipped for nor drawn to.

So I keep my focus on the design itself, which in a loud and crowded realm is genuinely difficult. I have found myself drifting back toward print during this phase, where taste still has room to breathe, while keeping a close watch on how things move in Flash, in CSS, in plain HTML, and in this JavaScript that keeps gaining ground.

There are trends I simply refuse to follow, and I hold that line on purpose. Starbursts begging for attention, stacked on top of glossy buttons, became a plague, and I would not touch them. Comic Sans became fashionable in its own way, and I would not set a word in it. You can be inventive without reaching for the cheapest trick in the room.

Did I find something beautiful in the chaos? Honestly, I am not sure I did, and I am not sure I was even looking at it that way at the time. I was heads down, holding a standard, trying to keep clean work clean while the whole web shouted around me.

What the era was really for, and who it served, I could not have told you then. But it taught me something durable about taste. When everyone is suddenly allowed to make things, the value of restraint does not fall. It rises, because it becomes rare.

Good Day. People keep saying print is dying, and I do not think that is quite the truth of it. Print budgets are not collapsing so much as the web is arriving as a new cost beside them. Companies are doing both for now. The hard choice, the one where someone looks at the numbers and cuts print because the web is winning, that comes later. We are not there yet.

What I miss already, as the attention shifts, is the permanence of a printed piece. Once a thing is printed it is, in a way, immortal. There is something timeless about holding a physical copy that no power outage and no broken screen can take from you. If the lights go out you can build a fire and read it by that. There is an analog beauty in that which the web has not yet learned to offer.

The print principle I carry into everything digital is proportion, the golden ratio, the quiet mathematics of how a thing sits in its space. That does not change when the medium does. Good proportion is good proportion on paper or on glass.

I cannot say I have had a single farewell piece, a last great print job that felt like goodbye. But laying out a magazine for a freelance client this year, I did feel something archaic in it, a sense that the readership had quietly moved on while we kept setting type. Perhaps that was a small goodbye after all.

The people most certain about print used to say that nobody would ever read their news on a screen. I notice that more and more of us now get our news exactly that way. I suspect, in time, the printed paper will become the rarer thing, not the default.

So I am not mourning print. I am keeping it close, and carrying its lessons forward, because the medium that taught me permanence and proportion still has a great deal to teach the medium that is about to inherit the world.

Good Day. There is a phrase I keep hearing in client meetings, above the fold, and I want to talk about it plainly, because it has quietly become a kind of superstition. The fold is just an abstract way of saying, put the important message first and keep the actionable pieces visible. That is sound advice. The trouble is what people have built on top of it.

Somewhere along the way the fold became magic. People decided that anything above it was golden and anything below it was lost, and that belief gave us these enormously tall, scrolling pages stuffed with everything, on the theory that surely people will scroll. And in this era, sometimes they do. But the obsession bothers me, because a person interacts with far more than the first thing they see. The top of your page is a first impression. The real question is how you earn the trust to back that impression up.

So when a client insists that everything must live in the fold, I do not argue. I play a game with them instead. I draw three rings, like a target, and we put every idea in the outer ring. Then I say, you may move five ideas inward, so choose. Then from those five, or three in a smaller room, we move exactly one to the centre. We watch the targeting happen, the shift from throwing macaroni at a wall to throwing one true thing, and knowing whether it hits.

It is progression and strategy in service of clarity, because a wealth of information becomes a poverty of retention. That is the line I come back to again and again with clients. Say everything and they remember nothing.

I have also watched it happen. I used to run heat trackers on my sites, the kind that slowed everything to a crawl, and I would switch them on for a while just to see. You learn quickly how people actually move, what they truly click, how fast they scroll, and you see that when someone races past a paragraph without pausing, they read none of it. They caught a word or two, no more. Watching that, the fear of the fold simply falls away.

These days I do not talk about the fold at all. I talk about the priority of the structure, and the real need of the site. Because a website is a frictionless conduit, a way to carry a person from where they are to the thing they came to do. They might read your story and check your reviews, but only on the way to an objective. The page is the middle of the journey, never the destination, and once you see it that way, the fold stops mattering entirely.

Good Day. It is the ninth month, so I set myself a small discipline this September, to design with only nine fonts for the entire month. I wanted to feel the constraint, and it taught me more in four weeks than a year of unlimited choice ever could.

The first lesson is the simplest and the most useful. No more than two fonts in a single design. I put all nine into a few pieces just to play, and they have their pros and their cons, but the constraint keeps you in a wheelhouse. You stop fretting over the unique character of a typeface and start working the things that are not limited.

With your choices narrowed, you create variety another way, through spacing and repetition, through alignment and proximity, through figure and ground, through playing with the individual letters themselves until they hold their own interest. Above all you learn to play with white space, because when the type is fixed, the room around it becomes your instrument. A constraint, used well, breaks creative block rather than causing it.

Typography matters enormously to me. I have something near six thousand fonts now, and the library never stops growing. Foundries like Linotype have been an education on their own. I love asking what makes a face read as regal rather than loud, quiet rather than outspoken, elegant rather than plain, because every one of those characteristics speaks for a brand. Pairing a brand with its true voice in type has become one of the genuine joys of my life.

The tools, I will say, have always been a frustration. There is still no good way to view a font library. You end up in Adobe Illustrator, squinting at a preview an inch wide and a quarter inch tall, trying to judge the details of one typeface among thousands. So I have built my own way around it, curating my own lists and even printing specimen sheets, so I can hold the type rather than fight the software.

What I want most, and what the web does not yet truly allow, is to put real type online. Today, to use a custom face, we still have to bake the title into an image, and that image is invisible to search, unfriendly to readers, and slow to load on a weak connection, so the headline arrives ten seconds late, if at all. The day we can set real type on the web, brand character will finally cross over into it, and a great deal of careful, intricate craft, every kern and ligature, will finally get to be seen.

Good Day. A client asked me for a blog this month, and it turned into a small education. It was for DesignHouse, a salon, and they wanted to keep their clients up to date and, more than that, to push the content themselves, in their own words, on their own time.

They feared it would be hopelessly complex, and my job was to prove it would not. I built it on early WordPress, and it broke more than once, mostly because they would strip out the inline style tags whenever they edited. So I found a way to make the CSS hold without them, styles tied to standard HTML elements, so the thing stayed on brand even when they did not think about it. Getting them comfortable still took time.

I learned that written guides help a little, but the thing that actually works is direct support, walking a person through it, patiently, more than once. That is the real cost of handing someone the keys, and it is worth it, but you should know it going in.

I also learned the hard truth of a content management system. The moment you give a client control, they take liberties, because they do not see the structure the way the builder does. You hand over a beautiful, finished portfolio piece, and three months later you return to find it overgrown. Inconsistent posts, stray fonts creeping in, off-brand colours, all because someone needed the page to say a thing and did not much care how it looked while they said it.

It is like building someone a beautiful front and back garden, returning six months later, and finding it an overgrown forest because nobody once mowed or pulled a weed. Your careful work is still under there somewhere, hidden. You develop a thick skin about it, and you learn to photograph your work the day it ships, for the case study, before the lawn grows over.

And yet, for all the frustration, the blog revealed something I find moving. People need to be heard. They want to voice their thoughts in a way that presents them as the expert they are. We are storytellers, all of us, and a business that tells its story lets people feel included in how it thinks. That, in the end, is what a blog opens up. It is also, if I am honest, why I am beginning to want to publish my own. I have experience worth sharing with the designers coming up behind me, a record worth keeping, and a legacy I would like to craft on purpose rather than leave to chance.

Good Day. Two years into this trade, and I want to set down what has surprised me, because the surprises have been the real teachers.

What surprised me most is how hard it is to find freelance clients consistently. I have been in and out of work, a couple of years here, a few clients there. When it is good it is wonderful, and when it is hard it is genuinely hard, and the swing between the two is steeper than anyone warned me.

By the close of the year, the thing I am proudest of is simple. I am still a designer. I am still here, still standing in the trade, and after the lean stretches that is not nothing.

I am still insecure, too. The impostor feeling has not left me. I do not always trust that I have what it takes to stay on the cutting edge of web design as fast as it moves. I can feel myself at a crossroads, tempted to bifurcate, to lean hard into brand design and marketing strategy and let the web evolve on its own without me.

But the work ethic and the research ethic that brought me here are still very much alive, and I trust those more than I trust my doubts. They are the part of me that does not quit when the clients are scarce.

If I could speak to the version of me walking into 2008, I would keep it plain. Keep growing. Keep doing what you are doing. Keep reading the books, keep challenging yourself with design-a-thons, and keep pushing hard, because hard work pays off. I do not have proof of that yet. I have a conviction, and for now that will have to be enough.

Good Day. My toolkit is lean and serious this year, and at the centre of it sits jQuery, running on a Hostgator server. It lets me do things on the fly that feel close to magic, reaching for pre-built modules instead of writing and designing every component by hand, moving at a pace that makes me feel briefly invincible.

And yet that same speed has started to unsettle me, because I notice I know a little less about my own code than I used to. The moment jQuery arrived, a dozen libraries followed it, and I find myself reading more documentation, learning more syntax, forever. It is like trying to learn thirty languages at once, living in thirty countries in a single month, waking each day in a different tongue and spending it just working out what everyone is saying.

That is a real challenge, and overcoming it daily is its own skill. It has pushed me toward a more agile, more mindful way of working, and toward an honest question I now ask of every tool. Not is this clever, but is this what the client actually needs.

I never stopped hand coding, and I do miss the challenge of building a thing from the ground up. It is the difference between digging the hole and pouring the foundation yourself, and having a single Lego brick arrive that simply is the foundation. The brick is there for you, and it saves you, but you lose the quiet satisfaction of the labour that used to come first.

The trade-off, though, is real and worth it. Letting the tools carry the repetitive parts lets me put my attention where it matters. And it is teaching me a lesson I suspect I will need for the rest of my career.

Tools are always changing. The skill is not mastering any one of them forever. It is learning to integrate with whatever arrives next, to hold loosely to the syntax and tightly to the judgment, and to keep asking, through every new library and every new fashion, what the work in front of me truly requires.

Good Day. The financial crash this year began in the States, and we have watched it from here with a certain distance, but the distance is not as safe as it looks. I have a client in Las Vegas who lost a great deal, and watching that up close taught my clients, and me, that nothing is certain, and that we had better be pragmatic in how we work.

This has been a downturn in more than money. People have stopped spending on design, and stopped valuing it the way they did a year ago. I have struggled to keep clients, watched budgets simply evaporate, and learned, out of necessity, how to stretch a dollar further than I thought possible.

It also pressed a bad habit into me that I am still trying to break. In desperation I began to discount, to bend on price when a client pushed, and once you start that, it is hard to stop. I want to say this plainly, as much to myself as to anyone. The price is the price.

You would not haggle over a Mona Lisa. You do not walk into a grocery store and negotiate the price of a pound of ground beef, or argue the cost of a gallon of milk. You decide it is worth it, and you pay, and you carry it home. Yet this downturn has quietly taught a whole market that they may negotiate a designer down, and too often, in a hard month, I have let them.

I am naming it because naming it is the first step out. The work has a value that does not move with someone else's anxiety, and treating it as though it does is a slow way to teach the world that craft is cheap.

So this is the year I learned both halves of the lesson at once. How to be lean and resourceful when money is tight, and how dangerous it is to confuse being generous with being undervalued. I have not mastered the second half yet. But 2008 made very sure I will never again forget the question.

Good Day. The App Store opened this summer, and I have been turning it over ever since from my home studio. I happen to have every early iPhone, imported from the States back when getting one into Canada meant wrestling with SIM card access, so I have felt this shift in my hands before most people here have touched it.

It is a slightly anxious moment and an exciting one at once. In building for the web, security has always weighed on me, protecting data, guarding everything passing through the gateways, making sure a site cannot be turned to nefarious ends. So what strikes me about the App Store is that, for once, someone else is watching too. A large company is choosing to protect its audience rather than leave them to the wolves, and I find that genuinely cool. It has quietly deepened my evangelism for what Apple is doing.

I believe apps are the future. Everything will have one, and the businesses without one will be left in the dust. So I have thrown myself into the design of apps, because the building of them is still a mysterious black box of Apple code I cannot yet see into. If I am honest, I wish I were building some of my own ideas into apps right now. I suspect a few of them would do very well.

I also think the App Store is about to warp what clients expect. They see that anyone can charge ninety nine cents and sell a million copies and make a million dollars, and they conclude that this is cheap and easy and quick. They do not see the ten million in research and development behind the overnight success. So once again I find myself explaining that cheap, easy, and free are not the same as good.

Here is the doubt I will admit. I am betting heavily on native apps, and I am not sure I am right. A web app, in the end, may do the very same thing, and building everything several times over, once for one platform and then again for the next, starts to look like a great deal of redundancy for its own sake.

What I am coming to believe is simpler than app or website. The only thing that truly matters is whether the tool works, whether it genuinely helps and actually saves a person time. If it does not, it is not a tool at all, it is a distraction. So I am steering my clients away from the question of app versus site, and toward the only thing that counts, the touchpoint where a customer comes to trust the brand and do the thing they came to do.

Good Day. The budgets are vanishing this autumn, and to my own surprise, it is teaching me one of the most valuable lessons of my career so far. When a client cuts their scope, the easy reflex is to cut your service in equal measure, to give less because you are paid less. I have learned to do the opposite.

Instead of cutting, I focus. I ask what is most important, and we build a minimum viable version of exactly that, a fraction of the original plan, done properly, with a phased path to the rest. When revenue returns, they come back, and we add on. That reframe changes everything, because it turns a retreat into a plan.

And something unexpected happens along the way. Often, in cutting to the core, we discover that a piece they were certain they needed was never actually core to the business at all. We cut the fat, and the thing gets clearer, and the client trusts me more for having helped them find it.

That trust, it turns out, is the real product. Restraint as necessity, forced on us by a hard year, is quietly becoming restraint as philosophy, chosen on purpose.

I want to be precise about one distinction, because it matters. There is a difference between cheap and lean. Cheap is about paying as little as possible and getting as little. Lean can still be quite expensive. Lean is about removing everything that does not serve the goal, and what remains is usually far more effective for the cutting.

So I am grateful, in a strange way, for a season that took the budgets away. It is teaching me that the most useful thing I can offer a client is not more. It is the judgment to find the one thing that matters and the discipline to build only that, beautifully, first.

Good Day. The web grew up this year, and so, I think, did I. The downturn has been a hard teacher, and I have felt it most as the year closes, applying for work heavily and watching client after client decide that design is a luxury they will revisit later.

The timing makes it worse. We are into the holidays, the year-end numbers are landing, and whatever budgets existed have already been consumed by the season. Trying to find new work right now is like knocking on doors in a building where every light is already off. Everything is shutting down for the year at exactly the moment I need it open.

But a lean season has a way of pushing you somewhere new. Rather than only chase the vanishing client work, I have started to turn my craft on myself, to productize what I can make rather than wait to be hired to make it.

So I launched a clothing line this year, called Forfame, and I have simply been having fun with it. With the client work thin, building something that is mine, a small business of my own, has been a genuine joy and a quiet kind of insurance.

That instinct feels important, more important than the line itself. When the market will not pay you to make things, make things anyway, and find a way to put them into the world under your own name.

The web grew up this year because the easy money left and the serious question arrived. Not what can I sell quickly, but what can I build that lasts, that is mine, that does not depend entirely on someone else's good quarter. I do not have that figured out yet. But 2008 made very sure I would start asking.

Good Day. Twitter has me thinking about constraint again, and I find the limit thrilling rather than confining. You are given a small handful of characters and told to say something true in them, and after years of designing for endless space, that boundary feels like a gift.

It rhymes with the discipline I set myself with nine fonts, the same lesson in a different key. When you can only say so much, brevity stops being a style and becomes the whole task. You learn clarity, focus, voice and tone, and how saying less changes not only your writing but your design.

And there is a stripped-down honesty to it that I love. With no visuals to lean on, the words are all you have, so you choose each one with real care. Language, used that deliberately, becomes powerful out of all proportion to its length.

It is making me more creative, not less, because a hard constraint demands more of you, and I have always believed we should do hard things. A blank page of infinite room is easy to fill and easy to waste. A tight box forces you to decide what you actually mean.

I keep noticing how often this is the real shape of craft. Not more room, more tools, more words, but a chosen limit that sharpens everything inside it. The fold taught it to me. The fonts taught it to me. Now a hundred and forty characters are teaching it again.

So I am grateful for the small box. It is one more reminder that restraint is not the enemy of expression. Most of the time, it is the thing that makes expression land.

Good Day. This spring I did something I did not expect. I walked into a hospital's audiovisual department and set about turning it into an ad agency. The result is a new Creative Services Department inside Covenant Health, and helping build it has been the most meaningful work of my career so far.

The larger task was a rebrand. Caritas Health Group is becoming Covenant Health, and I have had the privilege of working on that transformation alongside a friend who serves as a vice president of communications, an ally who understood that good design is not decoration in a place like this. It is part of how an institution earns trust.

What we built out of that old AV room, based at the Grey Nuns and Misericordia hospitals, is a genuine internal agency, a creative function that can serve the whole organization rather than scramble job by job. We are carrying graphics and brand across fourteen facilities throughout Alberta, which is a scale I had not worked at before, and it asks a different kind of discipline. At that size, consistency is not a nicety. It is the brand itself.

Designing for healthcare has changed me. You are not making something cleverer than the competition. You are making something that meets a person on what may be a frightening day, and treats them with calm and clarity and respect. That responsibility sits differently in the chest than a commercial brief does.

I am still taking on freelance clients on the side, because I do not think I will ever fully stop, and the mix keeps me sharp. But the institutional work is teaching me something the freelance years could not, how to build a thing that outlasts me, a department and a standard that will keep serving long after any single project is done.

That is the part I am proudest of. Not a poster, not a logo, but a function, a way of working, set into an organization that cares for people. I came in to design a brand. I am leaving, eventually, having helped build something that will go on making good work when I am no longer in the room.