How many notes do you have on your desk right now? Ten? Twenty? Hun­dreds? Like many peo­ple, you prob­a­bly keep them on scraps of paper, or sticky notes stuck to your LCD, or in a pile on one side of your desk. That works just fine for some, sure, but orga­niz­ing your notes can be a real task, espe­cially when you have many top­ics on a sin­gle sheet of paper, or those sticky notes become…well, not so sticky. I’ve come up with my own method of keep­ing my notes and being able to feel pro­duc­tive that I thought I would share, as it has been absolutely fantastic.

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If you’re a designer (or any­one in a sim­i­lar busi­ness), what I’m about to tell you is likely not news, but based on my recent hell­ish expe­ri­ence, I thought it would still be per­ti­nent to go over this.

The “this” I am speak­ing of is, of course, why being your own client sucks. It’s a hor­ri­ble, detestable, deplorable task that is an unfor­tu­nate fact of life. Per­haps I am just an awful per­fec­tion­ist, or just have masochis­tic design ten­den­cies, but the path I rode to get to my cur­rent design was a long, painful, ten month ride.

At first, the project I gave to myself seemed easy: just redesign my site, as I was tired of my old design and it needed some def­i­nite fresh­en­ing up. Seems sim­ple enough, right? Just come up with a new design, code it, and get it online – no big deal.

…But oh how wrong I was. Frankly, I should have known bet­ter, as I’ve gone through this trou­ble of design­ing for myself before, but sadly I for­got and “his­tory repeats itself because no one was lis­ten­ing the first time.” (—Anony­mous)

So with­out the slight­est sec­ond thought about the dif­fi­culty of the task in front of me, I began on the first design:

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Well, it’s taken eleven months, but I’ve finally man­aged to pro­duce a new design I’m (fairly) happy with. I’m never quite sat­is­fied with my work, so I’m sure I’ll tweak the design here and there, but at least it’s a change from the for­mer (not so great) design.

Fairly soon I’ll be writ­ing up a some­what detailed look over my design process and why I’m undoubt­edly my own worst cus­tomer. It will detail the many other designs I cre­ated, pon­dered, and sub­se­quently scrapped, as well as some other fun tidbits.

As for right now – I hope you enjoy the new design.