Let Go and Haul: our first creator event = success!
Week 5, 2018 – Brooklyn
Journey: where we’re at
Wow, what a month January was. We committed to a lot – probably too much – more on that in a sec, but, on the upside we made a shit ton of progress.
On Thursday night we threw our first creator event in NYC as part of a gallery show we curated! I just posted about it on our brand new blog, so head over there to get the whole scoop!
Both this show and the Internet Archive event were a good forcing function to get our brand identity work done (and while this will always be evolving), we now have something thoughtful to present to the world. I’m super excited about how it’s all been shaping up and weaving it into the app! I drew the first rev of our logo in a cabin in Quebec over the holidays and damn it’s all come a long way since then. January was a major month for Doing Design.
Journal: what I learned
I finished the week feeling so supported by my team, friends, community. It was so awesome to see so many people turn out to our party on one of the coldest nights of the year – including a bunch of you from this email! I feel so lucky to know folks like my friend James who helped us actually promote and put on the party (not a core skillset of anyone on the team) and my friend Simon who serendipitously was able to help us out with the 360 projections last minute. 🙏
With January behind me, I think the biggest thing I learned this month was how much work we can realistically commit to. It’s tempting to take excellent opportunities and there’s always going to be stuff that comes up that simply needs to be taken care of RIGHT NOW, but I’m really looking forward to spending the rest of the quarter totally focused on product and hiring. I’m also not mad at biting off a bit more than we could chew, sometimes you have to try to know, and we have a better understanding of our limits now.
I took my first weekend “off” (by which I mean I only did one call and answered a handful of emails), since the holidays. Oof. I’m still feeling a bit winded by January, but definitely feeling more alive than I did last week and ready to get back to working more sustainably this month :)
Jams: what I’m into
I’ve never been much of a Toro Y Moi fan, but after having multiple people recommend his latest album I decided to give it a shot. It’s good! It’s fun! It’s diverse. There’s only one song I’m not really into ha. You should listen to it too.
I’ve been p into into the new James Blake too – especially the collabs on this album. Similar to the Toro album, I feel like this is similar, he’s really come into his own, it’s such a long way from the melancholy dubstep production I was dancing to in London clubs in another life. His music is a lot “happier” now too, maybe this is what happens when you move to LA from a place where it rains every day? 😂