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The roundup is back with a few shiny new graphics but the same collection of my favourite content on the web. I’ve collected up my favourite articles on art, design, creativity and productivity from the last month, plus a few bonus articles.

Short Reads

Angela Rizza conjure’s magic with The Princess Bride

Is there any better movie to go along with a discussion of storytelling than The Princess Bride? This video studio visit with Angela Rizza as she created the artwork for the Criterion Collection’s edition of the film is filled with fairytale wonder.

The interior design of the future will seem like magic

I have no idea what our homes will look like in the future. While I’m not sure I’m on board with walls that change colour in my personal space, the applications of some of this new interior design tech are boundless when it comes to shared and public spaces.

Want to cut your work hours in half? Create an A/B schedule

Coach Andrew Love explains how he plans his own days and encourages tells his clients they need to put on one hat–one role–at a time, and adopt an A/B schedule.

Instead of avoiding what I don’t want, I’m at peace with what I do want

“Most of us are obsessed with what we do not want. We focus on what we desperately must avoid. We are more in control that way, aren’t we?” Alex Mathers on why we need clarity and to lean into what we like rather than away from what we don’t.

Long Reads

Cover Stories

As a book cover lover I was super excited to see The New York Times bring back their Cover Stories series in which book designers discuss their work: concepts that didn’t make the final cut and the cover as published. I always find it fascinating to see the range of ideas that are created, and discarded, before covers hit our shelves or devices.

Stuff they don’t tell you: managing your time

We Transfer’s editorial series ‘Stuff They Don’t Tell You’ looks at all of the things that “creatives [have] to think about beyond having good ideas”. I this edition, James Cartwright considers how we might better manage our time with sensible advice and insights that aren’t wake up at 4am (unless you want to). It’s also worth mentioning that this article is beautifully illustrated by Haejin Park and wonderfully laid out.

In defence of emotional design: Timothy Goodman on his many many feelings

This interview with Timothy Goodman, best known for his Sharpie-style scrawlings of earnest catchphrases like, “Even my feelings have feelings,” discusses making incredibly personal work and sharing feelings as form of activism.

How Seasonal Affective Disorder Impacts Artists’ Productivity

As we hit that point in the winter where I think we’re all, no matter if you may like the colder months, longing for brighter days this article about the effects of seasonal affective disorder on art seemed apt to share. Artsy talks to Psychiatrist Dr. Norman Rosenthal, who worked with colleagues to first coin the term “SAD”, about historical artists and poets, like Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Vincent van Gogh, who all recognised “how the changing light affected their moods, and how that influenced their productivity” and what they created.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

In this piece for The Paris Review, Mairead Small Staid reflects on Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, 25 years after its publication.

Eye Candy

@eviemayadams

Evie May Adams makes some of my favourite animal portraits. She gets the texture of fur just right, but more than that she always captures the character of her subject. As well as wonderful portrait she does monochrome ink and tile pieces.

@andrea_m_kollar

Post-valentines day I thought I’d post something along the theme with Andrea Kollar’s nudes. It’s incredible how much she can make of a few simple lines. I could look at them for days.

@carmigrau

Carmigrau is a new follow for me, but I was so taken by how she fills the little square Instagram gives you that I had to share straight away.

 

If you like this monthly round up, you’ll love my newsletter. Every(ish) Sunday I share 2 articles and a social media favourite as well as a short personal essay and some original, often animated, illustrations. So what are you waiting for, sign up!

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It’s dark. There are children shuffling around me. The air is heavy with an unknown fusty smell. I could really use a trip to the bathroom. But I am grinning ear to ear.

That was me watching the new Mary Poppins film. I was a huge fan of the first and, it will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen my Spotify recently, I loved the modern instalment too. They kept the magic of the Julie Andrews classic and even sprinkled in a few near miraculous cameos too. But before I wax lyrical on how much I loved the film, and its soundtrack. I want to talk about the real thing I’ve taken away from the film. I want to be more Poppins.

We all know that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”. Mary Poppins is known for that sugar, for coating her lessons in joyful song. We remember her flying in on an umbrella, her bag of infinite size, and if you’ve seen the Emily Blunt incarnation her ability to bring a ceramic bowl to life.

Famously, P.L. Travers, the author of the books the films are based on, never wanted Mary Poppins to have the saccharine songs and animations which are a big part of the reason they’re known and loved. While the film saved her from bankruptcy, she hated it. She hated it so much it brought her to hot angry tears in the theatre. She wanted Poppins to be as “tart and sharp” as she’d written her, for her to be the pragmatic realist she saw in her aunt, in herself.

While Travers felt that Walt Disney’s Poppins lacked the backbone a nanny needed. But, while we remember the “spoonful of sugar”, Mary Poppins does always insist we take our “medicine”.

There’s always a lesson in her songs. The play room is always cleaned. The children always go to sleep exactly when they’re told.

That’s the true magic of Mary Poppins. It’s not the songs. It’s not the dancing penguins. It’s not even the flying. It’s the way she teaches us to find the joy in the everyday and then just get on with it.

I want to be more Poppins. By that I don’t mean jumping into paintings to escape the streets of London. I want to find ways to find magic in the everyday, to find joy in the work I do while I’m doing it, no matter how hard or how soot covered. Not only that I want to find a way to sing about it. Perhaps not literally, you don’t want to hear me sing, but I want to share that joy wherever I can.

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We’re only at the end of January but already “burnout” is the word on everyone’s radar. There have been viral articles, videos, think pieces and there have been a lot of us feeling it. While I may not agree with all of the commentaries, I do know all about the feeling of being burned out. It had consumed me at the end of last year.

So, I decided that “in order to preserve what’s left of my sanity and my stability. [I was] thinking of taking a period of hibernation over this winter.” I planned it out and then I took a fortnight off all work and then a further month away from this blog to hibernate.

Planning is all well and good, but when it actually came to taking the time off there were three key things that I really focused in on and felt the benefits of resting, nesting, and ingesting.

First, let’s talk about resting. For me, going home is always the best way to switch off. I get to spend time with my dog which is something I end up yearning for somewhere in my soul when I’ve been away too long. My mum looks after me, even though she really doesn’t need to and probably shouldn’t. I’m so focused on being there, with them, I stop checking my phone and scrolling through feeds after feeds of content that isn’t nourishing. I go to bed earlier. I enjoy the lack of London rush. I am home. So the time I had there over Christmas, which totalled out to around ten days went some way to curing the tiredness I was feeling in my bones at the end of the year.

I talked a little about nesting in my hibernation post originally. I wanted to spend sometime before the new year to get my house, literally, in order. I’d like to say I got on the clear your shit up train before the Marie Kondo series mania, but I’m not sure what good it would do me. Taking the time to properly deep clean my space and reorganise left me feeling calmer, as it always does. I made sure everything had a place to go to; you have no idea the transformative power a shoe rack has had on my life. I also organised my digital files. I created templates for the documents I create most and structure around folders which had become dumping grounds. When you get busy, or at least when I get busy, things fall through the cracks and then after a while, bad habits are made. So, I reset and built a nest I wanted to come home to.

Finally, I ingested as much new content as I could. I watched films and TV. I read more. I’ve been to museums and parks. I’ve eaten new food. Mnemosyne, memory, is the mother of the nine muses. Remembering, putting ideas back together, is the foundation for all inspiration. If you don’t have memories to put back together, you don’t have anything to support your creativity.

But after that period of hibernation, I struggled to get back to my desk. I’d lost any inertia I had that had kept me running, even when all I had was fumes. Perhaps, that’s because I was still tired, even though I had plenty of ideas. Perhaps, it was a sign that I really needed to just sit and watch Netflix. But perhaps, it was a symptom of just going for a hard stop with very little preparation.

When you’re running you don’t stop by suddenly collapsing to the ground having a nap on the road and then have the expectation you can leap up and hit running pace immediately. You slow down. Then you sit. Then you rest (hopefully in the comfort of your own home). Then you get up again. You might walk at first. Then, and only then, do you start running.

There should be something similar when you take a break. There needs to be a transition period to help you adjust, to acclimatise to your new pace.

I think of it a bit like jet lag. Once you know it’s coming and you can give yourself space to deal with it, it doesn’t leave you half as wobbly.

Hibernation isn’t a sustainable solution to burn out. Working to a point of exhaustion and then taking a couple of weeks off – then having to fight myself to get going again – doesn’t make for a good lifestyle.

I need monthly, weekly, daily reminders that I’m not a shark. I can and should stop. I have to prioritise my life over a faux-need to be productive. My work will be better for it. But more importantly, I will be better for it.

But it’s easy to type that. It’s much harder to deal with the nagging sense of guilt when I’m not making and to shake the idea that when I am making it should always be for an audience, for external value.

I’m working on it.

In practical terms, going forward from here I’m abandoning my official content schedule. I don’t want to compromise quality, whether that’s in what I make for you or for clients, or in the life, I make for myself, for nothing more than strict adherence to a self-imposed consistency measure. That said, I still think I’ll write about two posts a week. There’s a huge list of things I want to write and illustrate and share with whoever may be out there. But I’m going to share when it’s time to share, rather than when the excel demands it.

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Instead of doing a monthly round up this month, I’m doing a whole series of year long reflections. I’m kicking off with sharing a few of my favourite things with you. I did a post like this last year and it felt good just to talk about stuff that I love and has stood the test of 12 months of use. I’m still loving and using everything from that run down (although I do have some new headphones, the sentiment is the same), but I’ve acquired a few new bits and pieces over 2018.

 

Nothing in this post is sponsored, I genuinely love everything in this list.

iPad and Affinity Designer

This year I gave into temptation and all of the reviews and invested in an iPad Pro. I have to say that I’m so glad I did. I didn’t notice the difference at first, but a few weeks ago I had to go back to my wacom bamboo and macbook set up and it felt like such a step back. The one app that’s really made the iPad work for me as a design tool is the release of Affinity Designer. You all know it’s one of my favourite apps, and getting to use it with the iPad is a joy.

 

Google Suite

I mentioned that I’ve finally started to make proper use of all of the tools Google offers in my design toolkit recommendations for 2018. So, GSuite had to be up there with my favourites of the year. It might not be the shiniest toy out there, but it’s genuinely made so much of what I do easier and more efficient.

 

Levi’s

This definitely isn’t a fashion blog, but this is a list of my favourite things from the year and finding a pair of jeans I love has definitely been up there. I may now own 3 pairs of exactly the same cut (the wedgie fit FYI) and I have no regrets. I also have a new appreciation of denim having written a design story on its origins.

 

Tarot

Tarot has been a big influence on my recent work, it’s also been a calming influence in my quest to battle my anxiety. I’ve written a whole post on my new found love for reflecting on my day using these wonderfully illustrated cards, so I won’t waffle here. But all I’ll say is tarot has really pushed me to be more reflective in a way that isn’t purely negative.

 

My Local Park

I’m missing this favourite a bit at the moment now it’s darker and colder outside. But earlier this year I started walking though my local park on the way home from work, and it has genuinely brought me so much joy. Those extra 15 minutes of walking have given me time to unwind after a day at the office, allowed me to actually see some green in London and made me feel so much more connected to where I live.

 

Spotify

I’ve had Spotify since the end of 2014 and it probably could have been a favourite every year since, so I thought it was about time I mentioned it in one of these lists. I’m more likely than not to be wearing my headphones at any given moment, and Spotify powers a big part of that, especially now it has podcasts as well. As I write this I’m at once intrigued and a little bit terrified to get my annual summary of how much and what I’ve listened to this year.

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Last year I made a Christmas jumper colouring sheet for this blog. This year I wanted to up my game a bit and make a much more involved colouring spread, in the form of a little wintery scene.

 

It’s something I hope makes you feel cozy inside as you shade to your heart’s content. Taking some time out of your day to just sit and focus on doing something is good for you, especially in a season when anxieties run high and plans seem to be non-stop. But don’t just take my word for it “everyone from researchers at Johns Hopkins University to the editors of Yoga Journal suggesting colouring as an alternative to meditation”.

If you want to tap into the calming power of colouring this Christmas download and print out the design below, grab whatever crayons you have to hand and get going.