Pilcrow #25
French press and disconnecting from work
Hey friends, how are you doing?
After 3 weeks of holiday, it’s time to get back to work for me. This pause was much needed after the intensity of these last months, I took time for myself and tried to stay away as much as possible from screens — with some fails haha. More on that topic below in the “Thoughts on” section.
Here are today’s topics:
What I’m working on
Thoughts on disconnecting from work
Interesting works of the week
What I’m working on
Well, not a lot as I was focused on staying in holiday mode haha! I kept an eye on the Figma Community page of my plugin Styles to Variables, just to see if someone encountered a bug or something, but that’s it.
The plugin has been observing since its debuts more than 100 downloads per day, with a strong start with 2400+ downloads in the first 48 hours when it was released almost two months ago. I’m still trying to document my journey as much as possible, both to reflect and share with people that might be interested in creating their own plugin or widget for Figma — or just start anything on their own!
Thoughts on disconnecting from work
Like a bunch of designers, I dived into the design world to create my own stuff. For me, it was Cydia themes, to allow users to customize the icons and overall look of their freshly-jailbroken iPhones (actually I didn’t have an iPhone back then, so I used my iPod touch haha, but that’s another story). Then I started to create websites, illustrations, and a bunch of other stuff.
I wasn’t really aware that some people were paid to do this as a regular job. I always wanted to be an architect. And until college, I was really looking into getting architecture classes and doing my design hobby on nights and weekends. Then, booom. I learned about the work of industrial and software designers, and that’s how my journey into design really started.
I always worked on side projects besides my studies, internships, and jobs, because I’m really passionate about design. I love exploring new techniques, learning about other designers’ approaches and works, and of course redesigning over and over again my portfolio. I’m sure a lot of you can rely on this. So disconnecting is really hard for us.
There is this famous work from Confucius that says “Choose a job you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life”. And while I think it’s 99% true, I think there is some kind of a trap here. In a really small font size, with almost invisible characters, at the bottom of the page, there is a condition to the love word.
Loving something (or someone?) requires energy, inspiration, and time. And so, by missing one of these 3 ingredients, you may not be able to completely love what you are actually doing and end up bored, frustrated, or even anxious.
Give yourself some time to recharge your batteries, both as a human and a designer. Make sure to explore and diverge a lot, explore other designers’ work, no matter the format (print, packaging, ad, motion, web, whatever). Use time constraints wisely.
Here are some tips that you can do to better disconnect on day 1 of your holiday, but it also works for nights and weekends:
Log out from your work inbox and accounts from your phone and personal laptop (forever if you can, not really a good habit — or at least use the Focus feature)
Put your work laptop in a place that is not visible
Create a ritual that helps your brain to understand that, now, it’s me/family time: can be listening to a playlist, walking outside, or anything. Better if it involves moving to another room.
Go outside and breathe some fresh air. Yes simple but hey, that works.
Interesting works of the week
You/Dystopia — Branding
Paul Lapkin — Website
Christina Kosik — Website
Ways into Practice — Website
Tonik Design Meetup — Branding
That’s all, friends — have a great Sunday! 🖤