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A couple of weeks ago a new version of my portfolio made its internet debut without a bang. 

 

I’m so proud of the work that went into that stage left entrance and the little static show it’s putting on. So I wanted to share something of its backstory, because it’s a backstory of reinvention, technical triumph and procrastination.

 

This change came about because more and more people from my “real life” were finding my website and I was embarrassed by it. I wasn’t embarrassed because it was objectively bad, but because it felt like I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I’d made an online presentation of myself that didn’t feel connected to the me that people met in real life. 

So, in this new site you won’t find any cards (or anything else) for sale right now. I’d made the decision to make cards 3 years ago when I thought that was what you had to do if you wanted to be an illustrator online. But I was never 100% happy with the cards I’d made and the way I’d tacked them on didn’t feel good. So , in Marie Kondo style, I’ve gotten rid of them because they didn’t spark joy.

 

In fact, I’ve dropped almost all references to just being an illustrator. I’m trying to make the work I do during the day (the more research based stuff) and the work I do on an evening (the more visual stuff) a more cohesive whole. That’s why there are fewer examples of my work up right now. I’m in the process of producing more of the type of thing I’d like to be making not just what I’ve been asked to do in the past.

 

Because the reason for my change was all about content, that’s where I start my design work. I spent time sketching out what I ultimately want to make more of and how I want to support myself making those things. I stuck with pen and paper drafting out how I wanted to talk about what I do. I think taking the time to really think about the story I wanted to tell, away from the web side of things, gave me much more focus and purpose than I’ve ever had when designing past portfolios, where I’ve just dived in.

I stayed on paper to sketch out how I wanted to organise that information across the site and on the pages themselves. I’m no UI designer, but I went though sites I loved and tried to find elements that I thought would structure and highlight my work in the way I wanted. Through that process of searching for inspiration and like a magpie picking up what was shiny for my own nest, I ended up with a clear sense in my mind of how I wanted the site to look, feel and behave.

 

For the last three years, my portfolio has been hosted on Squarespace. Squarespace is an absolutely brilliant tool for quickly making lovely websites, particularly if you have your own store. But I was worried it wouldn’t be flexible enough for me to build something that really felt like it was my own. That sense of ownership was so important to this process for me. I wanted an identity I had crafted rather than fit into. So, I decided to look into other options and ended up going with Semplice. Semplice is a designer’s portfolio builder and came highly recommended by UXers at work. Not one to just rely on a recommendation, I weighed up the pros and cons before I purchased.

I’m really glad I went with Semplice in the end. I feel like I’m in complete control and that what I’ve made is flexible enough to carry me into the future. For anyone else considering Semplice, I will say that it does take longer to build a site than with the out of the box solutions. That was a price worth paying for me. The only regret I have is that the blog element isn’t as customisable as I would have liked, but I’m looking into what I can do with the little coding knowledge I have and raiding github.

 

That said there are bits of the site I absolutely adore. I like the warmer colour palette that feels at once neutral and bright. I’m so glad I took the time to create a font based on my handwriting to use as the titles. I think it speaks to the hand drawn nature of so much of my work in a way that no google font ever could. I love the animations and the way they’re both examples of my illustration and my personality. I even like the photo of me (as taken by the wonderful Sian) on the about. I typically hate having my picture taken, but I think having my real self as part of the internet presentation of myself is such a good way to bridge the divide that had been pulling me apart before this project.

It’s not all been plain sailing though.

 

All in all, I think it took me 6 months or so to get something out of the door and onto the internet. 

 

I had a lovely to do list on my wall all summer. I knew what I wanted to make and I knew how to do it, but I just couldn’t bring myself to just sit down and do it. 

 

I’m not normally a procrastinator, in no small part because I don’t give myself the time. So what was different about this? That’s what I kept asking myself. 

 

I think it came down to two things. First, it was a project for myself, meaning it felt like it was the least important thing on my to do list at any given time. Second, I’d put all of this pressure on it being not just a representation of a tiny bit of myself that I could use when I needed it, but it actually being me.

 

I’m not sure if that makes sense. There’s a lot of discussion about how to be visible is to exist online, and in a way it is. But not to be visible, or not to be shown in my best light, doesn’t mean I, the physical I, cease to exist. In fact, the visible internet I isn’t even all that well seen. 

 

A portfolio is just a way to showcase my work to real people. It’s not me. It’s also not a big deal for anyone else and I have to own that. It’s not a negative. It’s not a comment on my personhood. It’s actually quite empowering to try to view it as a sticky tape and cardboard project in my bedroom rather than a grand presentation.

 

On Instagram I described it as a piece of string project, it could be as long and winding as I made it. But I needed to make the cut. So I did.

 

The version of www.natalieharney.com you see online today isn’t “done” but it’s never going to be “done”. There are more projects I want to share, page elements I want to refine, load issues I want to smooth out. But it’s a start and a start that I’m proud to share.

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Whenever I wanted something when I was little I would make it. Crafting and building things was all about doing things for myself. I was focused on the outcome but also on having something that kept my weird little introverted only-child self enthralled.

 

I’ve lost that a bit as I’ve grown older, busier, more independent in other ways.

 

It’s something I’ve been missing. Making things for an audience has kept me accountable to keep pushing my illustration, but I think only making things with someone else directly or inadvertently in mind has left me feeling empty with my practice. 

 

I’ve tried to just start making things for fun but without a clear project, it’s easily fallen by the wayside to work for clients or visible work for this blog.

 

That was until watching hours of Bon Apetit’s Gourmet Makes reminded me of the child in me who loved to make homemade versions of what she’d seen polished and shiny out in the real world, even if it was half cobbled together.

Ever since I started my job as a design researcher, I’ve found myself envious of the stickers that seem to adorn the well beaten macbooks of my colleagues.

 

Adorning your laptop seems to be a right of passage. It always seemed to me that it would take a certain kind of confidence to display a message or an identity so prominently everyday. (Note: this is why I don’t commit to slogan t-shirts). It also seems to be a right of passage because I don’t know how these stickers seem to magically find their way into people’s hands.

 

Recently, I’ve been feeling a little bit of that confidence in the values I want to embody and the version of myself I want to work towards being. So, I felt like it was time I earned my stickers.

 

Or rather, it was time I embraced my inner child and made them.

 

In the spirit of embracing my inner child I took inspiration from my 15 year old self who covered (some may say vandalised) one side of a desk in the art room I spent every lunch in with apple stickers. It was my way of claiming a sense of belonging. Plus, fruit stickers are the coolest.

So I did a little bit of research into vintage fruit stickers, then just got drawing. I used the basic oval and pull tab shapes as a basis then filled them with things that meant something to me. Largely, I worked around two themes being a quiet soul and design research. There not universal themes. As I mentioned in my last post there might not be all that many introverted user researchers out there. But these were stickers for and about me so I kept it personal. 

 

I now have my own fruit inspired stickers, which I’m using to mark out my space of belonging even if I only have a hot desk.

 

It felt really good to make something just for myself. I couldn’t stop ruffling through the sheets when they came in the post. They’re now proudly displayed on my own well beaten macbook and my notebook, and they’ll probably make it onto any new office supplies I get. If there’s one thing I’ve learned hot desking across offices, if you don’t mark your charger it will be borrowed, never to be returned.

 

I think making these stickers was a bit of a turning point for me. I’ve talked a big talk about making work for myself in the past, but never really followed through. But the joy I got out of having something I had made and wanted to use was so huge that I’m prepared to say no to other people and put the things I want to make first. 

 

I have another couple of projects in the works as well as a big overhaul of my online ‘branding’ for the want of a better term. So I’m hoping to share a few more of these kinds of posts soon.

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It’s been such a long time since I caught you up with what I’m reading. There were so many brilliant potential picks for this month’s book club, because my summer has had a plentiful harvest of paperbacks. Stand outs have included My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, which is worth all of the hype because I devoured it in about 2 days, Solitude by Michael Harris, which is one of the best books I’ve read recently about pursuing moments of a solitary life, and Hello World by Hannah Fry, which is a fascinating and accessible guide to some of the algorithms that shape our modern world.

 

But, today I want to write about Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli and translated by Christina MacSweeney. It’s a short book that I picked up, almost at random, off someone else’s shelf and that I may not have found otherwise. So I wanted to display it on my digital bookshelf, which is how I see this book club, so you might be a little more inclined to pick it up too.

 

Faces in the Crowd weaves between three stories. “In Mexico City, a young mother is writing a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. In Harlem, a translator is desperate to publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet. And in Philadelphia, Gilberto Owen recalls his friendship with Lorca, and the young woman he saw in the windows of passing trains.” 

 

Each tale is layered on top of the other creating what the mother calls a “vertical narrative”. The layers are short fragments which could be anything from a line to a page long, which give the story an unsettling unstable position of narration. Stories disintegrate and disappear into one another. 

 

While Owen and the younger translator are characters in their own right, they also appear as constructions by the mother as she writes. At one point, the unnamed translator—who is a younger version of the mother and also a character in the mother’s novel—talks about her acts of forgery to an old man who asks: “So what does it matter if he [Gilberto Owen] never met Lorca or saw Duke Ellington play?” “It doesn’t, I’m just saying he could have,” the translator says. “Exactly,” replies the old man, “and that’s what matters.”

 

So as much as this is a book about literature and translation and storytelling, it’s also about how we fabricate ourselves and the lives of those we encounter. The novel is filled with glances across packed metro stations, where characters see faces in a crowd and turn them from mere faces into people who feel so well fictionalised they might just be real. They tell the stories that they want to hear, the stories that fit with their own personal narratives.

For this alternative cover, I wanted the layered text to mirror the layered narrative surrounded by individual fragments.

The outcome is something so surreal but at once so close to how we actually encounter the world. How we exist in our own heads is different to how we exist in the minds of others and vice versa. We are constantly retelling our own narratives in fragments, picking up memories, changing them slightly each time we do, and relating them to our present.

 

Faces in the Crowd is a challenging read. It can be heard to follow in places and it pushes you to add your own interpretations and fabrications into your reading. It’s probably not going to be a big beach side read. But if you’re prepared to work with Luiselli, there’s some real magic to be made in this one.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ…

  • As the book progresses, how do you know which storyline you’re in? Does it matter?
  • What are the points of similarity between the narrator and Owen? Where do they merge?
  • What is fact and what is fiction? How can you tell? Is your perception of the fabrication the same as the narrator’s?
  • What impact does telling the story in such fragments have on your perception of the told and untold aspects of the narrator’s life?
  • Have you ever caught a glimpse of someone in a crowd who you thought was someone else?

 

IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

  • The Observer heralds Luisella as an exciting female voice joining a new wave of Lating American authors
  • The Rumpus discusses Faces in the Crowd as a “haunted novel” filled with fragments of ghosts
  • Stephen Piccarella writing for Electric Lit writes that “it is here in these spaces that open at the end of the novel that the writing of fiction really begins”

 

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

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How do you choose what to watch, read, listen to, engage with next? 

 

I’m guessing, for at least one of those, you rely on what’s recommended to you online, whether you do that consciously or unconsciously. Recently, I realised quite how much of the media I engage with is being served up to me by algorithms and group decision making. I am one with my Netflix recommendations. I’m constantly checking in with my Spotify Discover Weekly Playlist. I read what I find shared and then promoted to me on Twitter or what comes through my Pocket recommendations. 

 

The last 6 months for me have been a time for introspection. It feels like I’ve hit a stable place and I’m looking at where I go next. In doing that horizon scanning, I’ve been trying to hone in on my own sense of taste.

 

In order to refine your palate you need to try a huge variety of whatever it is you’re interested in. You have to know what you dislike as much as you need to know what you like. You have to immerse yourself and grow and come out the other end. We do this in the extreme when we’re teenagers, trying on different hats (sometimes literally) and finding out a bit about who we are while we realise we don’t have the bone structure for a beret. But we never stop, or at least we shouldn’t.

 

As much as I feel like I’ve hit a stable plateau in my life, I also feel like the menu my palate has been served in the past year or so has become very safe. I know what I like: I like procedural shows, I like clever dramas where I don’t think anyone’s a good person, I like action movies, I like subtle yet feeling illustrations, I like Maggie Rogers. But I don’t think my taste has been pushed. I’ve not fallen in love with anything new.

 

Perhaps it’s just my sense of taste refining as I get older. Or, perhaps, it’s got something to do with the algorithms I’m relying upon to help me order.

 

Before we start discussing algorithms, I think it’s worth spending a little while getting to grips with what we’re talking about, because it’s a term that’s thrown about a whole lot without much context. Hannah Fry, in her brilliant book Hello World, explains how algorithms are just a series of logical instructions that show step by step how to achieve a specific goal. But when we say algorithm, because of their common usage now, we’re usually talking about the mathematical ones that work in computer code to crunch calculations and follow those instructions to achieve their goals.

 

Fry very breaks down the big groups of algorithm by the kinds of goals they’re given. This has been the easiest way I’ve found of thinking about what’s going on on the other side of the services I use. Fry’s four categories of actions are:

  1. Prioritisation – ranking one thing over an other (you’ll like this one best)
  2. Classification – putting things into categories (you’ll like this because you’re x kind of person)
  3. Association – finding and marking relationships between things (you’ll like this because it’s linked to something else you’ve liked)
  4. Filtering – isolating what’s important (you won’t like these but you will like these, and I’ll only show the ones you like)

 

The algorithms at work in most of the services I mentioned at the start of this post rely on a mixture of all four of these actions with the aim of keeping users engaged with, and so loyal to, their service for as long as possible. Their aim isn’t to expand your taste, it’s to keep you eating. The best way for them to do that is to rely on what you have liked in the past and keep serving you things that you’ll find edible. 

Now that certainly has its pros and its cons. 

 

In the pro column, you’ve got the fact that it saves you, most of the time, from things you’ll just outright hate AKA no horror movies for me. By filtering out what it presumes are the definite nos it saves you precious browsing time as well as nightmares. 

 

In the con column, there are more than a few limitations. These algorithms learn from what we’ve liked in the past and what people similar to us have liked too. But what happens if they’ve got what you like wrong? What if you’ve just gone through a phase of being obsessed with one thing, but now you’re a bit over it? What about those hidden gems that you stumble upon that ‘aren’t your type on paper’? What about those things you’d definitely love but aren’t part of the service’s catalogue? What about if your tastes have evolved? For some reason as a child I hated tea but now I have at least 4 cups a day, if I only trusted algorithms how would I have refound that love? There’s also a question of how do you become an individual in a sea of grouped recommendations? How do you develop your own personal taste? Then there’s a whole bunch of ways those personal tastes may be modified when sharing your opinions for algorithms and people on social networks, but let’s just tackle one thing at once.

 

As ever, I don’t have a definitive conclusion for what we should do next. But the one thing I do know is that if I want to truly develop a sense of my own palate, I need to step away from the algorithms. That means accepting three basic principles:

 

  1. You have to get outside – look for recommendations outside of the web. I’m going to be asking friends about what they’ve enjoying more. I’m also just going to get outside and trust my eyes and my ears.
  2. You have to take risks – there’s going to be stuff you don’t like. Without the “is it edible?” filter there are going to be some sour grapes in the mix, but that’s part of the process. I’m going to have to bite into things that might be awful and see how it goes.
  3. You have to work for it – accept that this way is slower. I’ve gotten used to the ease of trusting recommendations and not having to search them out, but testing your palate takes time and work.

 

There’s nothing wrong with a recommendation to cut down on the hundreds of hours searching for a show, and the more horror trailers I can avoid when I’m browsing late at night the better. But what about the unexpected hidden gems? You have to dig for those not just in the third page of your google search results but out in the real world.

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Last year I read 25 books total. This year I’d read that many by the end of April. I know for a lot of people that’s not a lot, and for others that’s a huge amount, but I think it’s just about the most I can do right now.

 

When I was little I loved to read. I would devour books. I could spend hours and hours reading. There’s a reason I studied English.

 

But ever since I finished my degree I’ve been struggling to really get into reading. I had to read miles of critical texts and source material every week. But I had to scan and skim and read with an essay in mind (not every well I might add). I had to stop devouring and slowly I feel like I forgot how to. I forgot how to enjoy reading.

 

But this year I wanted to make a conscious effort to get back into reading. And I think I’m doing okay so far.

 

So I wanted to share some of the ways I’ve overcome readers block.

Set aside enough time to read in gulps

It’s hard to really get into a book if you’re only able to read a few pages in a go, AKA the only time you have to read is the 2 minutes before you go to sleep and you can barely keep your eyes open. I’ve tried to go to bed a little earlier (although the BBC still thinks I’m an extreme night owl) to give me the time for an extra chapter. I’ve also tried to pick up my books in lunch breaks and tube rides, but more on that further down.

 

Build a varied reading list

One of the most rewarding ways I’ve been working to read more is changing what I’m reading. I’ve read more non-fiction, more biographies, more (non-literature) academic works than I have ever done for fun before. That range has given me so much more to delve into. I’ve had some hits and some misses, but I’ve always had something new to look forward to. I’ve not forced myself to read anything I’ve not fancied at that moment in time. I’ve looked for books I’m genuinely been interested in and then just given them a go.

 

But don’t be afraid to return to what you love

While I’ve added variety to my reading list diet, I’ve still turned to old favourite genres and writers. If I’m ever feeling like I’ve had a patch of books that I’ve not really liked, that haven’t left me wanting to read more, I’ve not been afraid to just read what I know I like. In my case, I love thrillers (I was a murderino before it was cool), I love a good romance, and on occasion I’ll even return to my truest love of all fanfiction.

 

Change up your reading media

I think the biggest change for me has been moving away form just reading paper books. As much as I adore how a ‘real’ book feels in my hands and smells when you thumb through the pages, it’s not always the most practical. I get motion sickness if I read on a train or tube, and my bag is often stuffed full. So I’ve started to download books on to my phone for quick breaks at work and to replace my endless scrolling. I’ve also discovered a new love of audiobooks, which I still class as reading no matter what anyone else says, and they have transformed my commutes.

 

Reading more has given me a power I’d forgotten. Sure it’s nice to say you’ve read however many books, but what’s really exciting is when those books start to join up in your mind. Now I’m reading again, I’m joining up dots and I’m starting to feel inspired to make my own work. When I say that I don’t just mean I want to make (I always want to make) but to push myself to make things that join up those dots and have that giddy feeling of literary power I’ve been feeling recently. I’m not sure I’ll ever live up to it, but it sure can’t hurt to try.