04 Jan 2012

Self-indulgent Review of 2011

In last year’s review, I was fairly open about the fact that it wasn’t a good year businesswise. Not terrible, but more stressful and less productive than it should’ve been.

Over the past year there were additional business (major hardware & software upgrades) and personal (wedding) expenses to deal with, so the balance of work was skewed by this, but overall it went really well and the business is in better shape than ever. The only downsides were that I was too busy to blog much, and most of the interesting & challenging projects were confidential. That’s the problem with anonymous freelancing for other agencies: if you do too much of it your portfolio can start to wither, so it’s important to try to include ‘indie’ sites & personal projects.

Anyway, I’m still enjoying the office (not many landlords invite you to a slap-up Christmas lunch and let you have the dog under your desk), and looking forward to working with a couple of new clients on an interesting mix of projects. I’m also planning to change my company branding, revamp this site, and launch one or two quirky little sites.

A selection of blog posts from the past year:

Cheap’n’Geeky Office Art: Not to everyone’s taste.
View Source (Code): ASCII-based marketing is the future.
Using The Flash Right-Click Menu For Version And Credits: A simple ActionScript tip.
Web Font Embedding Fully Arrives: After a long, slow journey.
Wedding Photography Copyright Revisited: Attitudes are changing, but slowly.
Why Twitter Really Works: #itsallaboutthefollowing

And here are all of the ‘link dumps’, in case you want to rummage through everything that caught my eye online in 2011:

Wednesday, 4th January 2012, 12:10pm GMT

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Comments

Congratulations on getting married! That post had passed me by. I'm on the tail end of saving up for our one next year (can't wait for the last invoices of 2011 to be paid so the event is covered.)
Personally I'd say don't re-brand much unless you're really hating the current look, as that's a common time-wasting trap designers get caught in. I'd expect the vast majority of people who come to this site to still find it fresh looking, and for clients a bit of continuity is a good thing as they're sure they're in the right place.
I've had a lot of work from existing clients this year, which is great but is harder to write about on my site, potentially making it look a bit dead.
Good to hear everything is going well, and thanks for all the link dumps over the year, I always find something good in them.

— Paul Silver, 4th Jan, 12:27pm