It's time to wrap up a busy year. Abandoning our studio space, moving countries, leaving Berlin behind and taking on a few new big projects that I'm really excited about while growing our design and operations team quite extensively – 2022 was full of decisions, surprises, and new experiences. But first and foremost it was full of time spent outside in a lovely place. I sincerely hope 2023 has more of the same to offer.
Read the 2022 recap
Started mentoring on ADPlist
I've participated in mentoring programs via LinkedIn before, but that was a couple of years ago. I like mentoring, trying to help people. My experience with ADPList has been positive so far, mentees were respectful and polite. Especially the call with the Iranian designer was lovely. However, I have to wonder if I actually helped anyone – an interview with me is certainly not representative for the typical hiring process. Plus I'm old, very opinionated, and apparently ask hard hitting questions. My plan is to keep it at one session a week from now on. Let's see how it goes.
Living in Austria, once again.
For the second time in my life I moved back to Austria. For now only temporarily, but living in the rural countryside of Styria has been an amazing experience so far. Nature, wildlife, and the adjusted lifestyle of living in a house with an actual garden has been quite refreshing. I definitely spend more time hiking and chopping wood than watching TV and without any option to order in, I have reignited a little passion for cooking. It's been a good six weeks so far, but it's also still autumn – let's see how I can adjust to the wintertime here... and yeah, for a week I had sheep in my garden. They were pretty sceptical of me, but we got along. Even Gusti like them.
Taking time off
It's been a while since I took a week off, so I was looking forward to a week of hiking in the Saxon Switzerland Mountains with my dad. Our tour was cut short due to the wildfires, but it was nevertheless a refreshing few days without looking into a screen all day. Note to myself: do this more often.
A short-lived Midjourney hype
When I got my invite, I was excited. AI and ML are interesting to me. There's no doubt in my mind that the development in these fields will change the creative industry drastically. But the hype was short-lived. It's cool to have a Kanye painting in the style of Gauguin, but in the end it's a soulless copy of an artist's style, and even if the technology overcomes its current limitations in terms of visual glitches and inconsistent styles across multiple images, it's still just a machine to output content. And if there's one thing that the internet doesn't need right now, it's people who are usually not able to create quality visual assets themselves having copy and paste machines doing it for them. Some barriers should stay.
Oh no another relaunch
It's that time of the year again... I relaunched my website. Why do I keep doing this to myself? 🤔
Read more about the relaunch
5 years FWA judging
Still not convinced that I'm qualified for it and, to be honest, I really don't care about awards – but it's a good kick in the butt to stay active and see what's out there.
Gustav Sans
Currently working on my first typeface. Based on Lining Gothic, named after my dog. There's something soothing about drawing shapes. Will most likely never finish it.
featured type
We launched featuredtype.com as part of our typographic practice with Milan. Had a lot of fun developing this and creating lots of type explorations.
Bye bye, office.
We dragged it out for a while, but we finally got rid of our unused studio space. I wrote a bit about our decision to become a fully remote company on Medium:
New year, new resolutions
Starting today I'm working only 3 days a week on client projects. That's kinda exciting, kinda scary. Let's see how that turns out. 🙃
Break.
Taking off three weeks. Haven't done that in years. A change of mind or a change of times? We'll see.
Team gathering
Team offsite visiting Milan in Belgrade. I love the Balkans. Museums still aren't inclusive. Milan complained, BBC listened.
Christmas Dinner
Closing this year at Crackers, one of our favorite restaurants in Berlin.
Smart layer renaming in Sketch
I don't care about renaming layers in Sketch. But as others do, I tried to make my life a little easier with a plugin.
NakedSSL turns one
I wrote a little recap on Medium about everything we learned from launching our first profitable venture. It's not much yet, but it's covering the rent and helps us act more independently.
Gran Canaria offsite
The whole team went to Gran Canaria to play board games, do some yoga, get drunk, and finally get lost in the desert.
FRTG 2
Fredmansky was foolish enough to invite me to rant for 1.5 hours about everything that sucks about building products and working with teams. Bonus points that I could go with Tom.
NakedSSL
Today we released NakedSSL, a developer tool and our first SaaS. Let's see how that is going to financially support the studio moving forward.
Launching palette
Launched palette and got featured by muz.li, Smashing Mag, and Design Made in Germany. I love these small little experiments.
Starting a company
Today I co-founded our digital product studio okay bueno with Jesús. We moved into our first office space, two shared desks at Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26 in Mitte. Exciting times. No clue what we are doing, but it feels right.
FWA Jury
I start judging for the FWA. That's kinda cool I guess.