Detached

A four track EP of recent work released this week on Bandcamp. Hitting your favourite streaming service on 3rd October:

Back to Berlin

The farthest I’ve ventured from home since the pandemic struck was Aberdeenshire, so it’s been a thrill to re-broaden the horizon with a few days in Berlin — a city that’s firmly on my very short list titled Other Places I Could Live.

Heinrich

This track is an experiment with the Soma Ether wide-band receiver, a device that captures radio waves across a very wide part of the electromagnetic spectrum — including electrical interference from the myriad machines and devices that surround us, and broadcast radio. All original sounds were recorded through the device then manipulated, composed and arranged in Ableton Live.

Music Of The Fears

Apparently your second album is much more difficult to produce than the first. It’s certainly been harder work but I’ve enjoyed the process much more. Music Of The Fears is out now on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and pretty much ever other streaming platform

Epic Failz

This is a transcript of a talk I delivered last week at a Creative Edinburgh Talking Heads event, which saw six of us explain how failure factors in our work. I wouldn't normally write out something like this in such detail, but it was one of those insanely stressful 20x20 Pecha Kucha style talks and I wasn't leaving anything to chance. I hope you enjoy.

Hello, my name is Joe. I’m a designer who works with tech startups on their products, strategy, branding and investment material.

In the next 400 seconds I’m going to tell you my life story and everything I’ve learned so far. I’ve done a few things right but I’ve had one gigantic failure, and I hope after listening to me you’ll be ready to have one too. So, here goes... 

My life can be divided into six distinct periods:

Once I’d learned to walk and talk I spent 14 years at school wishing I wasn't there. I left at 16 and got a job as a trainee sound engineer, which was when I discovered you can work at things you really enjoy and get paid for it. Five years later I started my first company.

But before I get onto that, I want to rewind to 1982, when my older brother and I got one of these as a joint Christmas present:

It had 16k of memory, a BASIC programming cartridge and some shitty games. If I hadn’t received this gift I don’t think I’d be standing here today. You see, the Atari 400 made me realise that I enjoy using technology to make things.

Fast forward thirteen years to 1995, I was 23 years old and the Internet was about to become a thing, and I set up a creative agency called Rocket.

As the Internet pervaded society, our work quickly shifted off paper and onto the screen. We built our first website in 1996 and enjoyed many years of success. In 2004, as a distraction from this day job, I decided to set myself the challenge of taking and sharing a photo every day.

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So I built a simple website one rainy Sunday afternoon, and I called it Blipfoto. Within a year or two I’d built a small but dedicated following and I decided to turn this idea into a product which anyone could use to create their own daily photo journal.

Almost in spite of us it grew like crazy, often knocking our clients’ websites offline under the weight of its traffic. So in 2010, we decided to spin Blipfoto out as a company in its own right, raised some investment and left our agency behind.

Things continued to grow like wildfire—our audience quadrupled in size and we closed two more rounds of investment.

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By 2014 Blipfoto was doing a million monthly visits, we’d won a Bafta, we’d raised more than a million in investment, I’d met the queen and Steve Wozniak—the father of the personal computer— was among our users.

But while we had users across the globe, half of our traffic was still from the UK and we firmly set our sights on America.

That same year I bumped into a man called Scott Hardy while speaking at an event in LA.

Scott is the CEO of Polaroid—he was looking for a way for this iconic brand to become more relevant online and we needed a way to break America and beyond. So in January 2015 we announced a worldwide partnership.

For a couple of months things looked good. Then this happened:

As the numbers started rolling in, we realised our US launch had been a bit of a damp squib. We were desperately underfunded and didn’t have the cash to keep investing in marketing, then an investor we had lined up took his offer off the table, kicking off a sequence of events which ended in the board handing the company over to the liquidators.

It was a very strange time, and weirdly similar to what happens when a relative dies; you find yourself dealing with somber men in suits who’ve made unusual career choices, and reminding friends and family that nobody died and it was always the most likely outcome.

It was of course horrible shutting the doors but after two years of immense pressure a weight did lift from my shoulders and bring some welcome relief.

One of our most prolific high-profile users was Mike Russell, a Scottish Government minister. Remarkably, he put forward a parliamentary motion commending our vision and pressing to secure the product's future.

There’s a whole other story to tell there but almost exactly a year later Blipfoto was saved by a small group of its users and now lives on as a Community Interest Company.

For the first time in 20 years I thought I might actually have to get a job, so I sat down in front of a blank screen and tried to write a CV. It was incredibly daunting, because I didn’t really know what I was good at. I’d done lots of things, but who was I? What do I do for a living? What did I stand for?

Then it occurred to me, everything I’ve done has been about blending creative ideas with new technology and taking them to market.

I get most excited when those three things intersect and it turns out that blend of expertise is in high demand. So I’ve been holed up in Codebase for the last couple of years, helping other startups get their shit together.

I’m also Head of Product at CivTech, a new tech accelerator run by the Scottish Government which is breaking down the huge barrier that exists between small innovative companies and public sector agencies.

Big beasts like the NHS can finally tap into the kind of thinking which is in abundance in this room, and early stage companies get the credibility these customers bring.

So what did I learn from my epic fail? Well, the first thing was quite surprising:

I expected to be ostracised after Blipfoto collapsed. After all, I’d lost a lot of other people’s money and fucked something up many thought would be a massive success. But actually the opposite has been true—my failure is a huge part of why people now want me to work with them.

I’ve learned that I need three things to feel fulfilled at work: making money, a healthy work / life balance and being on a journey, heading for a goal or a prize at the end of the road. All too often I think we compromise one or more of these things in pursuit of the others, so now I always strive for a balance of all three.

For many years I was Mr. Blipfoto; the product and company had become core parts of my identity. That’s perhaps the ideal way for your customers to think of you but when it was gone I really had to do some soul searching to reframe my life. As a result I’m much more clear now about who I am as an individual and what I bring to the party.

If you’re pursuing investment it’s easy for that to become your job. With Blipfoto, I spent about 70% of my time on that side of things—pitching, managing board meetings, keeping investors updated, and so on. The product became a by-product, and the very thing which underpinned our success pre-investment lost a lot of my focus.

When you're working hard on a project, company or product your self-confidence and self-worth are naturally measured by its success, and when it fails it’s easy to feel cast adrift. You lose that barometer against which you’ve been measuring yourself. So I think it’s important to believe in yourself and keep the faith.

Finally, and above all, it’s been scientifically proven that us failures are far more likely to succeed.

Although I’m very happy with what I’m doing now, I do intend to launch a new startup in the next couple of years—I’ll really enjoy putting this one to the test.

You are now offline

I left Edinburgh with the family last Friday, on our first campervan trip of the year—something we always do over the Easter holidays.

Unusually, instead of checking my inbox two or three times a day, I decided to try and abstain completely from email. Even with so much going on work-wise, a week into the trip I'm pleasantly surprised to still be on the wagon. (Thanks in no small part to two wonderfully remote campsites void of any mobile signal).

It only struck me yesterday that this is the longest period since my daughter came into the world ten years ago that I've gone without reading—and reacting to—an email. Goodness knows how we developed such guilt for making ourselves unavailable.

So if you've sent me an email this last week I'm sorry for not being in the least bit sorry for not immediately responding. Here are a few pics of our travels around the wilds of western Scotland to tide you over.

Think now, design later

I've been slowing leafing my way through The Advertising Concept Book over the last few weeks, after spying it in Krakow's Museum of Contemporary Art.

Written by ad veteran Pete Barry, its principal audience is students studying advertising, but the way it deconstructs the process creative teams in agencies use to develop a message and get it across is worthwhile reading for anyone trying to communicate better. His "think now, design later" mantra is all about building a concept and message before you get anywhere near a design or media plan; a great idea will increase the value of both but neither will improve a poor idea.

The book itself upholds this message visually, opting for sketched roughs instead of the finished, glossy artwork of the well-known ads it pulls apart. It's a really lovely thing.

My work for this year's EIE event kicked off this week, and I'm again finding myself telling the pitching companies to think of each slide in their deck as an advertising billboard; a single, memorable message communicated in the blink of an eye. I think I may be taking that idea a little more literally this year.

Back to school

I tend not to promote myself as a photographer for hire but if asked to take on an assignment I'll more than likely jump at the chance. So when the Edinburgh Steiner School asked me to work on a library of photos as an extension of the branding project, I did just that.

Despite knowing the school well, being involved in some of the wild and wonderful things they get up to has been a real treat. Here's a selection of my favourites, which I think (and hope) communicate what makes the place so special.

Kings Of Ceiling

As promised this time last week. The eBay purchase turned out to be a print of a Kings Of Leon photograph, who shall forevermore survey my office from above.

I suspect there's a very fundable art project in purchasing items from eBay based purely on their physical dimensions but sadly I am far too busy with work to consider such pursuits. (This is also my excuse for a lack of more considered blog posts this week and last. Back to normal soon, I promise.)

Fixing a hole

I have a hole in the ceiling of my office where a section of ceiling tile is missing.

It measures precisely 17x26cm.

Once I have posted this, I will search eBay for '17x26cm' and sort by lowest price. I will then order the item nearest the top of the list which is rigid enough to fill the gap, regardless of what it is.

I shall report back in due course.

Sleeping and walking

I flew off to Kraków with the family on Monday, where we've been walking around until our feet hurt and catching up on some much-needed sleep. So the writing will have to wait until next week, and you'll have to make do instead with some photos of our adventures.

Mech Tech

Due in no small part to a subreddit I stumbled upon last month, I have found this month's obsession: mechanical keyboards. 

A mechanical keyboard is one which uses old-fashioned metal switches and properly sprung keys with removable caps, rather than the rubber membranes used on the MacBook and other Apple keyboards. The switches themselves (the German Cherry MX being the brand of ubiquity) are available in a range of flavours, offering different sounds, resistance to pressure and tactile feedback.

They're revered in equal measure by PC gamers—on account of their more consistent and reliable operation—and writers who consider them the best tool for their craft. And they can be beautiful:

/u/ctzn_voyager

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Being the sort of person who recognises that having the best tools will instantly transform one in a master of their craft, after some extensive research I placed my order—the Ducky One, 108 key, ISO layout and Cherry MX Brown switches:

I've been tapping away on it for a couple of weeks now. During this time my typing speed has dropped from 65 to 50 words per minute, I've started annoying those in neighbouring rooms with my incessant click-clacking and developed a deep ache in my forearms from angling my wrists up while reaching for its considerably more pronounced keys.

But I fully intend to persevere, not because I feel like an idiot for spending money on something which makes a job harder, but because I know it will help me become a better person. Like a high-performance car which demands more thought and discipline from its operator, but rewards with an infinitely greater driving experience. Or a wood-burning stove which, with all the stacking, chopping and carrying, is considerably more work than flicking on the central heating but delivers a warmth for which there is no scientific measure.

Ambiversion

I've long had myself down as an introvert who got on in life by learning to switch on the extroversion when required; I even wrote about this recently for Creative Edinburgh. But this week I discovered the term 'ambiversion' and realised I've been wrong all along.

An ambivert is someone who sits somewhere between the two extremes of introversion and extroversion. They enjoy working or socialising with groups of people and will tolerate being the centre of attention, yet still relish time in their own company doing their own thing. They look forward to a weekend full of social events as much as one with no plan at all. They'll talk at length about something they're interested in but are just as happy to shut up and listen quietly to others.

To a tee, this is me. In fact, I seem to have unwittingly engineered precisely this balance in my working life—I give myself lots of opportunities to work and hang out with other people, but also have my own private space to retreat to, to think, create and just be. I value both equally.

It's always good to realise your place in life.

All of a to-do

A brief moment of calm this week has afforded the opportunity to catch up with a long list of hitherto neglected tasks. This got me thinking about the bizarre mishmash of tools and apps I've put in place around me as I've tried to maintain order in my work (and mind). Here's a quick rundown of my current organisational insanity:

1. Things

Things is a task manager for iOS and macOS, and the tool I most consistently use. If there's something I absolutely have to do—big or small—it's probably on Things. If I feel a sudden panic while cooking dinner because I remember I need to do something, I'll whip out my phone, add it to Things and let my inner peace return.

It lets you do all manner of advanced stuff like define projects and set tasks within each, tag stuff, add deadlines, sort tasks to be done 'today', 'next', and 'sometime'. All manner of advanced things I seem unable to make sensible use of—everything I have to do is simply listed in 'today' and ordered (approximately) by order of importance.

If I'm under pressure to get stuff done I'll usually add an empty task as a dividing line and drop anything I don't have to think about today below that. (Of course Things provides a way to focus only on the immediate stuff, but I find if I move anything to the 'next' section I tend to forget to go back and find it later.)

2. Trello

I'm a sporadic but keen user of Trello, the web app based around the kanban / agile approach to getting shit done. You set up a board for a project which has columns containing cards. Each card represents something to be done, and you nudge them along left to right as you do them (next > doing > testing > done, for example). It's also good at collecting small assets related to those tasks—text, links, pictures, comments, etc.

I tend to use Trello enthusiastically when I'm working on a bigger project with lots of moving parts spread over several weeks or months. It's a good way to make something huge more manageable and prioritise things when resources are limited. And because Trello boards are collaborative, they're particularly useful when several people are working on the same thing.

3. Apple notes

My rational brain doesn't see any reason to use Apple notes. Nonetheless, it's found its place as a more casual or urgent repository: things to remember to take with me tomorrow morning, stuff to pick up at the supermarket, items to pack for a trip, books people have recommended (which I know I'll never read) or ideas for blog posts (which I'll probably never write—this one wasn't there).

The fact it syncs between phone and MacBook is probably key, as is the absence of any need to think about structuring what I add.

4. Calendar

If I want to get something done on or before a particular date, I'll block out a chunk of time in my calendar. I might not end up doing what I want to do precisely when I book it in (more on that below) but if it's there I'm much less likely to let it slip.

5. Email

Whether I like it or not, my inbox may be the biggest driver of what I do hour by hour. I tend to triage every message as soon it arrives. If it's very important or connected to my current task it gets dealt with straight away, if not it gets marked as unread and goes into the backlog, and receipts for thing I've purchased get flagged for later logging in FreeAgent. So effectively here's another to-do list, separate from Things. (Why would I waste time adding "reply to Bob's email" to Things? Replying to Bob is probably quicker.)

In conclusion

Either Things or Trello could cull this list to a single, central solution but, much as I've tried to make that happen, I don't think it ever will. I think it's because us creative types constantly play this silly game with ourselves to make sure we get things done but don't get bogged down and held back by tool many ordered, practical tasks.

I hate being told what, when or how to do anything, even if it's me doing the telling; I like to keep my spirit free to float and tend to rebel against my own to-do lists. My yesterday self wanted me to do that thing today, but my today self wants to focus on something completely different. Today self knows tomorrow self might well do the same thing, so picks the best weapon from the list above to minimise the chance he will.

(Yes, I know—I have issues.)

Pilgrimage

I came into this world on the kitchen table in a tiny remote cottage in the Leadhills, halfway between Sanquhar and Wanlockhead—the highest village in Scotland. Every few years we make a pilgrimage to see how the place is bearing up.

It’s a couple of miles off the main road, at the end of a rough track which weaves its way between the vast rolling hills, alongside a river favoured by gold panners and hawthorn trees. The imposing, claustrophobic character of the Leadhills gives way to big skies and views several miles to the south east as we climb the last slope and reach our destination—Glenim.

Aside from the occassional owl and lost sheep, I don’t think anyone’s lived here since we left in the mid 70s. It’s sad that it hasn’t been looked after but it does mean many of the fixtures are the ones we left behind, and they help the few misty memories I have flicker back into focus. Power lines hop their way across the hills to the house so I assume we had the luxury of electricity, but our water came from the burn and had to be tested regularly due to our proximity to the lead mines.

It was boarded up sometime after our last visit six years ago, and I think the roof may have been patched up to stop the rain causing any more damage. I thought we’d have to make do with a peek through a window, but noticed the padlock on the front door wasn’t secure and we were able to venture inside.

We left for home just as the sun fell below the hill opposite, slipping everything back into shadow. Until next time, Glenim.

Career advice

in

I overheard a mother on the bus the other day, talking to her young child about money. The child asked where money comes from, to which her mother replied "You have to go and do something you don't really enjoy and people give you money for doing it."

No, children, no, no, no. Please, find something you really love and get good at it. It doesn't really matter what it is. By the time you're a grown-up, you'll probably find people queuing up to pay you to do it for them.