2018 Year in Review

I'm just going to jump right into it. I'm basically going over the projects that I worked on, notable events that happened during the year January 2018. I worked on a desktop application called Cinesampler and this was very interesting. I got connected through Twitter to a guy in Los Angeles who makes samples of orchestra instruments, like really legitimate orchestra instruments. You can check his stuff out@cinesamples.com so he wanted an app called Cinesampler that could stream these instruments that he records and you could preview them. My second son, justice, turned eight years old. It's crazy that he's eight years old. Okay, February Epicurrent's winter work week. I did like a three day class called Practical Product Design. I made so many slides, slide after slide after slide of content for Practical Product Design. Kind of like in the UX realm, but just designing apps from start to finish, whether it's a large complicated app for a client or a medium sized project or even little small ones. And had a lot of fun going through that. I'd love to eventually take synthesize that material into an online course one day, but that was a lot, a lot of fun. Big thanks to Dan Petty for having me out to Yosemite. Okay, so back from winter work week. Winter work week, I started a new project for a company called Fiberstream in Toronto and kind of helped them do some rebranding, design their backend kind of sign up process for installing basically Internet service. That's their main thing. They do Internet, they do TV and phone. But anyway I did that website launched it, that took a couple of months, so it was a fairly large project. And then later in March I worked on an Envision Studio Jam. With Envision kind of rolling out studio slowly. It was still in really early beta during that time period and they asked me to create a studio jam. So I made like a running concept, kind of prototype, just something for fun to make like a fast paced time lapse. A lot of fun checking out studio for the first time. When I did that, I also went on a spring break trip with my family. For me, trips like this and spinning time with my family like this, this is like number one priority. And so everything that I'm doing supports. So that's why I put it on the list because we had a great time. I worked on another app in March called Shoppers Choice which was a very interesting transient product that happens between an advertiser's like ad and a final retailer's website. So this is very interesting. Interstitial screen where someone might say, yes, I do want to buy bottles of toothpaste right now. And then you go to this interstitial screen and you can choose to buy it from Amazon, Walmart or Target or wherever has the best deal and then you can choose right from there. April still wrapping up Fiberstream, I went to Creative South 2018 and I gave my practical product design presentation a smaller condensed version of that that I did in February with Epicurentz Winter Work Week. And last. Okay, last year I did a recap video for 2017 and I left off one of the most. One of the things that I was the most proud of. And that app is called Contrast. It's a little tiny app and it comes out and then you can check the color contrast of your text. So you can see we're rocking a triple A score right here. You can flip the colors, see what it looks like. I forgot to include that in the recap, so I'm going to include it in this one. Sam Sofas and I worked on that in 2017 and released it and it's been one of my go to design tools. No matter what software I'm designing in, I'm always checking color contrast. And during that same time I wrote a guide for accessibility for designers to check your contrast in your interface in your interface designs and I published it on the website. But in April I published it to Medium to get some more traffic and it was very well received. So I just wanted to put that in there because I forgot to do it last year and yeah, so Contrast. Anyway, moving on. May. May. I got to work with a friend of mine, Anthony Harman, who I'm going to put somewhere along in here. He reached out to me for some help because he needed. He didn't have enough time to dedicate fully to this project. So he and I tackled this iOS and web app called Zipper like a two or three week project that we worked on together and lots of fun, kind of a complex project startup in the startup world and things were kind of crazy for them timeline wise. But all in all I'm super excited about the designs we put out and some of the thinking that we put into that product for them. So this is also May is when I really started considering applying to the Design Forward Fund. How much time are we? Oh, and I'm only halfway through. Gosh. So May, I applied to the Design Forward Fund at Envision and pitched them the idea of creating this full blown studio course where I was teaching people how to use Studio for design and prototyping and I think I bought the domain Learn Studio. That was kind of the main thing. And then they had the domain switch to studio.com. so we ended up using that domain and things started. Conversations started happening along in May and June and also in May, my youngest son, my sweet little tiny baby son who's no longer a baby anymore, he turned four years old and he is just, gosh, he is the cutest little thing. Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you Happy birthday dear Nixon Happy birthday to you. I love all of my older kids, but there's something sweet about a four year old. Okay, June, middle of the year, we, me and Maddox, my kind of partner in this co working space, the niche that we've actually been in, this office space, the office space out here, we've been in here for about a year or so, but only this previous year, early on we decided, all right, look, let's, let's get this thing organized and official. We hired someone to help us kind of get things set up. We hired a community manager and we've got probably, I don't know, 15 or so people, some full time, some part time that come in. So we've really pushed the niche co working space. It's Itchspace on Instagram. If for whatever reason you feel like following that. And then June, I'm still kind of like coming up with Switch to Studio ideas, but I'm also talking to Vincent Lemoine about the streamline icon set. He had this huge, huge icon set, streamline 3.0. And he had been kind of like emailing me about possibly doing some work with him. And it finally came together that we actually, I would say like May, June and July, we were kind of all working on this, but I designed and developed the new marketing site for Streamlab 3.0. Vincent and I kind of collaborated on that and partnered together to launch that thing out into the world. We launched it like late July and it's been really, really great. Vincent was amazing to work with, very generous and patient with me as I fumbled through all of my coding endeavors. But it worked out great and I am really excited to have launched that streamline icons.com and also if you go to streamline icons.com free, you can download 300 of the icons for free. There's like a 30,000 icon set, but you can get 300 of them for free by going to that link. I'll put links to everything down below. Okay. Moving on to August. I was working more on switch to studio.com. my oldest son Noah turned 11. I cannot believe I've got an 11 year old. My wife turned 36. Okay. Epicurrent Summer revival. This was more of a just come to epicurrents and hang out. And I did kind of like I participated in one of the panels. But gosh, Dan. Dan Petty, thank you for being so generous always having me at your events. It means a lot. Okay. September comes and I'm working hardcore on a switch to studio still because I videoed, edited, designed, developed the website, all of that stuff. It's a lot of hard work. I also took my family. I kind of had. I was like, I love going to Yosemite, but I was by myself. My wife and four kids were at home and I was like, man, there was nothing I wanted more than my family to be able to experience hiking in Yosemite with me. It wasn't feasible at the time because the kids are in school and there's all these logistics you have to figure out. But anyway, I had the hiking bug when I came back. So we planned a trip to Toccoa Falls, which is just north of Athens here, and took the family on like a half day hike. Even my 4 year old like hiked it. It was sweaty. Some of the kids were acting up. I may or may not have screamed at them a little bit, standing too close to edge. But a fun time and a fun little adventure again. I want to make sure that I am incorporating adventures into my family's life as much as I am in any other part of my own personal or professional life. So that was fun. October rolls around. I'm still working on Twitch to studio. I actually finished it up close to October and started working on FlowKit version 2.0, which is like A. You just go to use flokit.com you can see all about it. I've got. I'll put links to that below. But Flow Kit is essentially a toolkit to use within Sketch or within Figma to create all of these user flows or content maps, sitemaps, things like that, like a bunch of pre designed curves and points and all of that. I don't want to go into this whole Flow Kit pitch, but you can go check it out if you want. My wife and I purchased a new house to renovate and this has been A huge portion of my attention has gone to coming up with ideas for like renovating the house. It's a 1960s like one story ranch and there were tons of walls and we wanted to see if we could open it all up and make this cool vaulted Ceiling. So I dusted off my SketchUp skills. This is about like the third or fourth project that I've used in SketchUp. And it's kind of clunky. Hard to figure out at first, at least for what I need to do inside of SketchUp. My dog turned two years old. His name's Salvador Flowkit 2.0. I started working. We released, switched to studio right after Thanksgiving and. And then I started immediately working on the additional videos because we launched with like four sprints. Each sprint had like videos inside of it pertaining to that topic. And then the deal was I was going to do an additional five sprints with more videos. So I wanted to go ahead and try to knock that out before the year ended. I also purchased some filmmaking gear. I've. I've had this camera for a while, but I got a new mic here. I got a better light. I got like an audio recorder down here. Let me see if I can actually record some of this. So, yeah, my light right here. New microphone and new little like recorder thing. Anyway, I'm really trying to step up my. I want to produce more video content, specifically courses like premium courses that I can create, teach people to do some of the things that I do. And I want it to be really high quality. It's really because I care deeply about it and I want to teach this stuff and I want to make good videos about it. Oh, and Dan Petty came right after Thanksgiving, I think it was the week after Thanksgiving. And we worked on a secret video project of his. He's been posting bits and pieces here and there, but he's got some really cool stuff coming out. And I was very thankful to be a part of what he's doing with his secret Dan Petty project. I'm not gonna say anything else about it because he hasn't really made any announcement about it. He hasn't released it, but. And okay, December last month, my daughter turned seven. Oh, and I cut her hair. I cut her. I gave her her first short haircut all by myself. I watched some YouTube videos and at first I cut it into like a weird he man mullet by mistake. And then I fixed it by cutting it the other way. I think it turned out pretty good. Also, my little Yorkie poo Oscar, who my wife and I had before we even got married, he's 15 years old. He finally passed away and it was really sad. All of us were kind of around him. My wife and I were actually petting him when he took his last breath. Really miss that little guy. He was a special little dog. And that was sad. On top of that, I. In the last month, I did a lot of, like, we did traveling and family, the holidays. It's hard to get anything substantial done, but I did more work on the house. I did a little bit of updates and things for Vincent on the streamline stuff, additional switch to studio projects, but that's pretty much it. I mean, that is. Gosh, we're at 23 minutes now. Hopefully this got edited down to much shorter and a much more watchable video, but that's gonna be it. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one. Actually, I'll just let this run. Let this run for 20 seconds. You always gotta leave like 20 seconds at the end of these videos so you can have these, like a little, you know, click my face to subscribe thing and then your two videos right here. So I'll just let it.