Image borrowed from Jess

I have been reading lots of inspirational stories that other bloggers (long long list of them below!) have been writing about something they’re scared to tell the world and wanted to write my own, so here goes, I’m quite anxious about posting this, at one point I wasn’t going to but of you’re reading this now, hello and welcome.

I had written a long post explaining how I have lacked in confidence all of my life, I’m naturally quite shy, I struggled academically with reading and writing at school but it went unnoticed somehow because I’d always get average grades and although I’ve had an arty and creative education, I’ve really struggled with being creative and battled against being a perfectionist.

Then I realised, all of that, it’s all getting better. Last year, I was more confident and creative than the year before, this year I’ve read more than I did last year and enjoyed it. I write on this blog and get better at it every time (I’m not sure if anyone reads it but nevertheless…hello, welcome, come in and I appreciate you staying if you’ve visited before). This change in view is why this post is called ‘part 2.’

If you’d said to me a couple of years ago that I’d be working as part of the print team in a sports marketing agency, designing, speaking to clients and suppliers on the phone (yes, on the phone!) I would have probably laughed in your face and called you a liar (sorry if I did!) Dialling someone’s number on the phone, who wasn’t one of my friends or my mum was the stuff of nightmares just a couple of years ago, I’d have to plan exactly what I was going to say and if the conversation didn’t go as planned, I’d get all tongue tied and embarrassed at the very best of times, I’d dread ringing people up, I can’t imagine that now, I’d never get anything done!!

I danced a lot as a child too and it was confidence and self belief that always held me back, I was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to do a particular dance without someone else in front of me, the confidence did seem to get less and less of a problem and I think if I was to do a dance now, I’d have to know it for myself, I know I’d work hard at knowing the steps so that I could do it on my own. What I’m trying to say with this is: I’ve learned to rely on myself a lot more, I’m starting to believe that I can do things that I never thought possible. I’m not sure if it’s just an experience thing or a growing up thing but I’ve definitely been able to work through some of these things so that they aren’t such a problem anymore and I’m so glad that I have. I still have days when I believe I’m rubbish and can’t do anything and just want to hide in a hole but I think to myself, ‘hey, I did this yesterday, why not today?’

All of the problems that I mentioned earlier are still very much a working progress. I am still very much a perfectionist and beat myself up about certain things but again, I’m working on it and these moments where I ‘beat myself up’ are becoming less and less, (and just so you know, it’s not a physical beating up, more of a ‘ooh Sian you silly girl, you shoulda/woulda/coulda…’ kind of thing!)

Being a perfectionist really held me back recently because I really want to start selling my own greetings cards again, I’ve got loads of other ideas too that I want to work on but I was too focused on it all being perfect, first of all, I was looking at other people who have their own businesses and how they’ve got it all set up and all sorted, their products were so nice, why can’t mine be like that? But I hadn’t put any work in, drawings that I had done just weren’t right but I’d only had time to do a few, perfection isn’t  going to happen by magic Sian! It seems silly to think of it now but I’ve realised that I just needed to find the time to put the work in. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote up a plan and here I am, I’ve been able to write a few blog posts and I’ve had ideas for regular features, I’ve drawn lots and lots of ideas for card designs and I’ve come up with a small plan for the big project that I’m keeping secret! Plus, I’m still working full time!

So, it’s all getting there, this post should really be called ‘things I’m proud to tell you’. I’m not scared, I haven’t got it all sorted, but has anyone? I’m now really excited for what the future has to hold, I love hard work, I love an adventure and a challenge. So, here’s to life, bring it on!

Other participants of ‘Things I’m afraid to tell you’ (List courtesy of Jess):

Design for Mankind | Little Brown Pen | Beautiful Hello | Curating Style | Sweet Fine Day | The Jealous Curator | Happy Days | Sage & Berries | Really Handmade |Peck Life | Satsuma Press | Rena Tom | For the Easily Distracted | The Hemborg Wife | Vitamini Handmade |Courtney Khail Stationery and Design | Meg in Progress |Dando Photography Blog | Widdershins22 | Alison Citron |Pink Moon Daily | Just Pretty Things | From China Village |Tea with Me | The Darling Ewe | Not Your Average Ordinary | The Electric Typewriter | Elleby Design | Parsimonia {Secondhand With Style} | Life as an Artistpreneur | Hello Cupcake | Dellie | The A & B Stories |Pretty Little Things | Feistyelle | Nib & Zed | Well and Cheaply | I Ripple. I Dance. | Whitfield Awesome Blog |Foxtrot Press | Dry As Toast | The List of Now | Apple Blue | For the Love of | Four Flights of Fancy | Miss Modish | Snapshots & Secrets | Dirty Laundry | Bubby & Bean | Penelope’s Press | Little Nostalgia | Vale Design |Pikaland | Fleurishing | Print Pretty | Vespa Tales | Hazel & Agnes | Amanda’s Musings | Mo’ Funk Designs | Ordinary Mommy | Camp 1899 | In Honor of Design | Liberty’s Yarn | Love, Life & Pictures | Stacey Winters | Owl in the Rain | Living Life Creatively | Emma Elizabeth Clease | I Live in Vacouver Now | British Cream Tea | Maquette |Little Paper Trees | Change is Necessary for Growth |Practically Perfect | Lovely Indeed | Radiant Republic |Teacher Goes Back to School | Acute Designs | This Little Street | The Proper Pinwheel | Kellee Rich | Gluten Free Travelette | Benbrie House | Sierra BB | Lost in Cheeseland| Going Home to Roost | Creative Soul in Motion | Quietly Fabulous | L’elephant Rose | The Anna Delores Blog | Some the Wiser | JRebecca Style | I Saw You Dancing |

Wave II (list found at Mimi + Meg):

Coco + Kelley / Court & Hudson / Sacramento Street / My Cup of Te / Crystal Gentilello / MIMI+MEG / The Decorista / Modern Eve / Apartment 34 / Design Blahg / Vmac & Cheese / Miles to Style / Life in a Venti Cup  / The Zhush / Radiant Republic / Savvy Home / The Doctor’s Closet / Design Manifest / Because It’s Awesome / {extra}ordinary wonders / Sparkling Footsteps / Hitha On The Go / Note To Self / So Much To Smile About / Blogstar / The Goods Design / Style & Pepper / Small Shop Studio  / Long Distance Loving / Maggie Rose Blog / The City Girl In Me / The Best Laid Plans / Concrete Jungle DC / Food Fashion Fitness / East Coast Chic

I have two confessions to make, firstly, I’m an advertisers dream, If I love the advert or packaging, it makes me want to buy into that product. It all started with a certain bank, when they started putting cute animations into their advertising and literature, I was hooked, I just HAD to transfer bank accounts (of course it wasn’t just because of the adverts). My second confession is that I love anything cute, anything animated with a cute smiley face, I’m there, I love it and cue me saying ‘awwwwww’ quite a lot.

I challenge you to say that you don’t love that little guy too!

Meet Isa, She is the founder and owner of Noisette Marketing, a full service creative agency and consulting firm specialising in marketing, PR, and branding for creative businesses. Isa is also the founder of Noisette Academy an extention of the blog offering e-courses and mentoring  (…in her words).

17th April 2012 saw the launch of the empowerment project. How it works is: Isa, who is in Rwanda as you read this, is armed with 59 sewing kits to distribute to the women of Aspire Rwanda. She gave us all a week to donate £20 each in exchange for an empowerment kit, which was a booklet full of printable prompt sheets for you to fill in. So, empowering the women of Rwanda with sewing kits so their families will have a better future and also to encourage the people who receive the empowerment packs to realise their dreams and go for it.

*Apologies for the ambiguous image, I’m not sure how much of this ad I can show because I didn’t officially design it, I just artworked it ready for press. I probably can’t tell you who it was for either as I’m not sure what the rules are for this kind of thing. I am wondering however, why the little 8 is there…does anyone know?*

A lot has been happening around here lately, I’ve been working really hard at work. Some of the ads that I’ve been working on have been in the free newspapers of London and also in a weekend supplement to a well known financial newspaper, which has been exciting! The first time I saw one of my ads in a newspaper, I felt a little bit famous!

I’ve been meaning to write about these for a while now, everyday they puzzle me and I think, maybe I’m missing something, but still I fail to realise what I’m missing.

They are the Renew bins:

Renew is a dedicated network of 200 street-side screen within the Square Mile, with the first phase activated on the 26th January 2012.

Renew’s daily audience will grow from 750,000 at launch to over 3m by the olympics. – Renew

Their aim is to rid the streets of the free newspapers and provide ‘beautifully designed’ communication pods which double as convenient recycling bins.

The part that I don’t understand, and let me know if I’m missing something, is that these bins show the news and you also use them to recycle your newspaper. Surely, if you have just read your newspaper and are finished with it, you wouldn’t need to read the news again on the front of these bins! I suppose they are good in the way that they give up to date news, I keep an eye on them mostly for up to date tube status, they also show some sort of stock market graphs, I haven’t a clue what these are about but it’s useful for these to be up to date too. Then there’s general headlines that are shown too, although, if you’ve just read your paper and thrown it away, you’d be up to date with the news anyway. As I walk past them I see a maximum of about 2 slides come up, most of the time completely irrelevant to what I need, and if I wanted to stand by one of them waiting for something interesting to appear, I could easily look for the news on my phone, don’t most people have the Internet on their phones now anyway? (apologies if you don’t.)

Don’t get me wrong, the thing that I love about them is that they recycle, I don’t pick up a free paper intentionally because I see so many of them strewn all over the ground, I’d pick up a used paper if I really wanted to look at the news. So in that respect, these are great, haven’t used one to recycle yet and haven’t seen them in use, so there’s no telling if they’re being used, I’m sure some people use them, but from my experience, free papers get left on the seats of trains and on the tube, to be read again I guess!

What do you think? Pointless technology or going green and keeping up to date?

I wrote a post just over a year ago about my love for pinterest, I started using it quite early on when it was in beta stages of development. It seems to have taken the world by storm now and there have been a lot of people commenting on how it is good for business, how it directs so much more traffic than most other social networking sites, and there have also been advice posts on how to use pinterest for your business.

You just have to search ‘Pinterest business’ on Google and you get a whole host of advice on how to market your business on Pinterest.

I disagree with these posts because pinterest is more of an organic tool, (I know, not organic in the way that it doesn’t use pestisides on the pixels to keep away nasty viruses) but organic in the way that people use it.

The way that it works, if you don’t know, is you find an image you like anywhere on the internet and pin it. You can categorise those pins and when another user sees this pin, they click on it and go to the website it originally came from and that is where the traffic to those sites comes from. Likewise, they can also ‘repin’ and ‘like’ that pin and it goes onto their own pin board. Creating your own library of images you like becomes effortless because you don’t have to have the pinterest window open at all times, just use the bookmarklet straight from your browser, I see it a bit more like delicious, just with images instead of descriptions.

The reason why I say it is more organic than other social networking sites is because there are no other companies buying advertising to force in your faces, there are no recommendations. I haven’t even seen any advertising for pinterest itself, just by word of mouth between friends and the ability to share pins on other social networking sites. You even have to request an invite to join, it makes you feel a bit special. I just hope this isn’t some secret ploy to get us hooked and then they’ll start introducing advertising. One way to encourage traffic to your own site is to pin your own images and others with see them, repin, like and go to the site itself, however if someone just does this, it gets a bit boring, annoying and a bit like spam. Your audience will start to get bored.

So, as I say, it may be great for driving more traffic to other sites than other social networks but I think this has all happened by people being interested, wanting to create pin boards and wanting to find out more about what they’re seeing. It has been a natural process, or am I missing something? And that’s what they want me to think?

For me, pinterest is great for research, it keeps all my (internet based) image research in one place, all my image inspiration in one place, all organised, all categorised, without me doing much at all, and when I want to see where I found that image in the first place, all of that information is there also. I love it!

For others, pinterest may be a marketing tool, a tool to help planning an event or an outfit. I suppose it is what you make it, like most of the other networking sites.

My Philosophy is best summed up by the phrase, ‘plain, simple and useful’, Such things may not win many design prizes, but neither do they go out of fashion. – Terence Conran

I’m a bit late with this one but a few weekends ago, I saw the Terence Conran exhibition at the Design Museum. I loved these giant pencils because they would make an amazing den, they also have written on them, designer, entrepreneur and retailer, 3 things that are dreams and realities for me, I am a designer, I have entrepreneurial spirit and I’m working hard to be able to sell my work eventually, so it seemed relevant to stand by the pencils and have a cheesy ‘this is me’ photo. I’ll probably go to see the exhibition again due to having to take about 5 modes of transport just to get to the Design Museum and being incredibly hungry, we kind of rushed through this exhibition.

For Conran, design is not simply a business – it is a way of life as well as a mission.

The main reason for going to the Design Museum was to see the last day of the ‘This is Design’ exhibition. The first thing I saw was this sign, firstly because it had my hometown on it, Watford (quite a few road signs point to Watford, it makes me feel kind of famous!) and secondly because it is so meticulously laid out. On closer inspection, you can see all the little guides for spacing and I love the accuracy that is involved. Before the work of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert, road signs didn’t have this meticulous system.

Each character has a separate exclusion zone for every other letter in the alphabet as seen in the image above. This is an excellent example of design that has to be meticulously designed, if it is unclear, drivers wouldn’t be able to determine which direction to drive and it has to be seen by drivers in cars, trucks, vans and on bikes so has to be seen from all heights, so clarity and space is absolutely vital.

Then there was this poor mini cut in half!

There was also the Designers in Residence exhibition, where I was intrigued by the work of Hye-Yeon Park, the clock that she designed is great, it behaving like a regular clock when it senses human presence in close proximately but when it doesn’t sense human presence it takes on a more playful appearance and shows seemingly random displays. I loved the concept and found that the clock almost took on a playful and mischievous personality.

I think the human desire for perfection has been reflected in the objects we’ve created. We design tools to manipulate the world around us, however the clock is an exception, visually representing time which is beyond our control. – Hye-Yeon Park

Below is a video of Mr. Clock, the project that Hye-Yeon Park worked on at the RCA in 2010, the one at the design museum was slightly more developed.

Mr.Clock_Hye-yeon.park_Design Product_2010 RCA from hye-yeon.park on Vimeo.

[Pocket Planner by Jessica Hische, writter of the blog post featured in this post and inspirational typographer and designer, I have this planner and carry it with me everywhere, wouldn't be without it!]

Recently, I have been trying and trying to draw more, write more, sketch more, read more, lots of things…more and better. I’ve been trying to practice what I do, and get to grips with what my style is, what my voice is. I’ve also been keeping up with design blogs, illustration blogs and pinterest to gather inspiration, wondering why none of my work looks as good as the work that I see on the internet and in the galleries and museums that I also go to. This all does make it sound like it’s a bit of inspiration overload and I’m just getting confused, which is possibly true. But I also think, I’m possibly not looking into the wrong things, also possibly putting way too much pressure on myself (which is also fairly common of me!)

I read this post in the week by Jessica Hische, and realised that I’ve just got to calm down, stop panicing and accept that everything like this comes with time. I’m not sure if Jessica really meant that in her post but this what I understood from her post:

It’s OK to copy
She uses the analogy of a new musician: if you’d just bought a guitar and had never played one before, you would copy the greats, practice the notes and make mistakes. You wouldn’t do all that and then publish an album with all of those practice pieces on and state that you wrote those songs. You also wouldn’t become famous from these beginner’s songs either, no-one gets famous over night, not in real life. It’s great to practice, by copying others, but just don’t tell everyone. Work that is in a sketchbook, stays in a sketchbook.

Not everything you make should be on the internet
A lot of designers/illustrators I follow ‘seem to’ post absolutely everything online, and it all looks amazing but what I’ve got to remember that those people have probably got rubbishy sketchbooks lying somewhere, where all the mistakes are made, all the copies are and where all the learning was done, they wouldn’t post these on their blog/website, that would make them look bad! I’ve got to remember that not everyone is perfect, and not every piece of work is perfect either. I’ve got to remember that just because my portfolio isn’t full with amazing pieces of work by now, it doesn’t mean that I’m a rubbish designer, I’m only starting out, I’m still learning.

Diversify your inspirations
Looking for inspiration isn’t just looking at a few blogs to see what It’s Nice That is writing about, what Creative Review think is amazing or what my friends on twitter are posting up. It is about taking inspiration from EVERYWHERE! Jessica says it better:

Your ultimate goal should be for people to look at your work and NOT immediately think “oh she is a big fan of this person”. If you diversify your inspirations, the chances of this happening become much smaller.

History is important
Following on from the point I made above, taking inspiration from what is happening now is good but what about what people have done in the past? Jessica refers to music again when she asks if you have ever looked into a new band and found that they were inspired by a whole host of other musicians from the year dot. It would all be quite boring if musicians and designers just found their contemporaries inspiring, it would all sound/look the same. It’s easy to forget all that we were taught in University, research into the past is SO important!

Train your eye
As you look at more work and study more designers, artists, illustrators etc. Your eye will become more experienced to seeing little details in certain work. You will know what characteristics of one piece of work by one artist is different from one by a different artist. This is useful because you will start to see details in your own work that are characteristic of someone you’ve found inspirational, or as you get more experienced you’ll be able to identify that your work is completely original and inspired by a whole host of subjects, artists and things.

Jessica makes other points that I didn’t find relevant in the search for my style. I hope to take all of these things into account and continue on my quest. I hope you have all had a lovely weekend, I’ve done a lot of relaxing.

Poster by Ed Hall, inspired by this list. 

I’m not sure I agree with all of these and it isn’t an exhaustive list either but it is a starting point and a fun poster.

Wenlock and Mandeville are the two mascots for the 2012 Olympics. When they were first launched, I wondered what connection there was with the Olympics, or London. I later found out that they were made out of the two last drops of steel left over from building the Olympic stadium, by Grandpa when he retired (It all makes sense to me now!). I didn’t really think too much about them until before Christmas when I saw the following two posters on my travels:

Designed by McCann London these posters make me smile every time I see them. These made me realise that it doesn’t matter that I’m not too keen on the idea for the mascots, they weren’t designed for me! They are to keep children interested, and I just love the playful-ness of these posters. It really looks like Wenlock (or Mandeville) is going to dive into the bath, and you can really imagine Mandeville (or Wenlock) running the race against the London bus and the toy dinosaur. They capture the imagination of a child perfectly.