project_log: 006

Happy New Year!

It's been slow around here this past week, which has been exactly what I needed after a huge year. It's allowed me to recharge, rest, and prepare for 2025.

Let's do a quick update on the new site, then get into the approach for 2025:

The new site is pretty much complete. I'm now just spending time curating and recording some screen captures of my work for the carousel. I'm planning to have this live on Monday, January 14th.

I'll only be announcing the launch here. I'm not fussed about doing a big launch for a partially finished website (even though I think it looks super sick and love the new direction).

This leads well into my theme for 2025:

Done > Perfect

This past year, I've relentlessly been pursuing polish and perfection. I would spend hours on something to get it just right, even if it would make a project unprofitable. Silly, I know. But this year, that changes.

If you read project_log: 003, you'll know that I'm exploring product creation to help myself and other independent service providers make more money and be more productive.

As I explore this, I have begun to realise the importance of getting something into the hands of users and iterating from there. Spending hours on small tweaks to make it feel just right is not a viable strategy for validating an idea. It is a luxury that should only matter when I have people using the products I create.

I am by no means saying to ship garbage. It should still be beautiful and function well.

It's a difficult mindset shift that I've been battling with around my new website. I'm pretty happy to say, though, that I've managed to keep this build under 20 hours total, which is what I allocated.

Goals for the week:

This is where I set my goals for the week ahead to keep myself accountable.

I'll be jumping back into client work at the end of this week:

1. Credit union site → The client has some feedback that I need to action. Once this is complete, we wait for the client to enter content and then get this project live.

2. AI Company site → Designs are ready for a couple of new features. I'll be finishing these up at the end of this week / early next.

3. Design agency site → There are a few pages that are changing design. While I wait for these, I'll be continuing on the long list of interactions I need to build. I'd like to get my portion of this site done by January 30th.

Internal projects:

1. Get the new Over-Stimulated site live. Once this is done, I'll update my social accounts to match the theme of the new brand.

2. Start high-res designs for the first product I'll be building for myself and releasing under Over-Stimulated. I'm super excited to handle design, dev, and marketing for this product. Here's the low-res / wireframe to help understand what's essential for the MVP:

That's all for this week. A quote I want to leave you with:

"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare."

Will