My 2016 Highlights

This year has been a tumultuous one with lots of ups and downs (although most downs if you ask popular internet-opinion) and while many can’t wait to see the back of 2016 I thought it would be healthy to take a moment and personally look at what went right this past year. I don’t know about you, but I have a tendency to always rush towards the next thing and sometimes negative experiences weigh more heavily than positives. In that environment it’s easy to gloss over awesome things you achieved and dwell on things that went wrong. In reality it should be the other way around. So to turn that upside down, here’s some things that happened in 2016 that I’m really proud of.

📺 My first real year on Youtube

Some 130.000 views and 4673 subscribers. That’s been the result of a focus of mine this past year. In the spring of 2016 I decided to “get serious” about video. I have always loved video and have maintained a vimeo profile since forever. I did 5 years of video podcasting at university, made more travel videos than my family care to watch and worked as a photo journalist. But it has only been this year that I’ve made a continued effort to use video to share my world. These past months I have shared my experiences traveling, flying drones, doing client design work and even bitesized photoshop tutorials.

It’s tough starting fresh on a new social network and building an audience, and I’m not going to lie, some of the content on my youtube channel has taken an enourmous amount of time to make and have still only been viewed by a relatively small audience. However when you look at the stats, the effort is clear. 329,834 minutes watched this year. That’s 229 days of continuous playback! That is time people are spending in your company, getting to know you. Going on adventures or maybe learning something. It’s an incredible reach and far more personal than 140 character messages.

I feel like youtube is making me more friends than any other social network I’m on. I’m hoping to continue making more videos in 2017.

🚀 Launched Apply Pixels

It seems like it has taken me years to finlly have the courage to do this, but this Fall I transitioned my free resource appicontemplate.com to a much more ambitious resource platform. It wasn’t something I did lightly. Maintaining free resources have given me so much over the years, but to truly take it further I needed to turn it into a sustainable business. I dwelled on the decision for months and then worked hard throughout the summer. I was crazy nervous when I launched it (which I think shows in the video below), but overall the experience has been eye opening for me.

In the 4 months that applypixels.com has been operating, more than 16 new high quality templates, each with their own tutorial video, have become available. Most of the resources on the site have received continued updates, making them better and more powerful. Hundreds of people have signed up and the response has been largely positive. I’m now making resources that power other people’s creativity while simultaneously creating a scalable platform that allows me to dedicate more time towards empowering those creatives. This has easily been one of the most succesful things I’ve done this past year and I’m really excited for where it’s going next year.

🗯 Traveled and gave more talks

Since I decided to say yes to (almost) every speaking opportunity, my career as a public speaker has taken me around the world and given me so many amazing experiences and friendships. 2016 was another year on that trajectory and it took me to places like Barcelona, Nantes, Verona and San Diego. I also gave several talks in Denmark where I got to talk to both students and businesses alike.

This was also the year where I made two new keynotes, one about bullshit in design and a 200-slide fun-filled adventure about how I became a designer and learned the secrets of the universe. I’m really happy about this corner of my career and I feel like it is taking me places and letting me meet people that I would never have, had I not braved the stage.

✨ Started an entertainment design studio and made a (succesful) game

It would be hard for me to think about 2016 and not think about Northplay, my new startup. I’m heading up a small team of highly specialized people in making entertaining products, games and gamified content in Copenhagen. All beginnings are perilous and this past year would make great movie-material. Finding clients, bootstrapping and sustaining a small team, making the right hires and working on in-house projects is a thrill-inducing balancing act. This past year we did all of that. And in true movie-format we pulled through in the end, launching our first game Conduct THIS! on December 2nd.

I’ve heard people say that you’re not a real game developer before you ship your first game. Well we shipped and in less than a month, our game has been experienced by more than 1.6 MILLION people! It’s been a worthwhile third act to the year.

I’m really excited about the future for our little studio and looking back at this years’ hard work, I couldn’t have imagined a better outcome and a more hopeful start for a young company. I’m so damn proud of the team. We’re working with a few really cool clients, we’ve got critical acclaim for our first game and we’ve got exciting things in the pipeline. You’ll be hearing more about Northplay in 2017, that’s for sure.

Closing the book on 2016

There are many other things I could have written about that went down in these past 12 months. Other things went both right and wrong. Things I tried that didn’t work out, projects that never saw the light of day, or efforts that somehow failed. It’s been a year with much personal and professional turmoil. But ultimately the above are my highlights for 2016. Those are the wins I want to hold on to, those are the things I want to remember.

I think we owe it to ourselves to focus more on the wins and less on the things that didn’t work out. What was your personal highlights in 2016? I’d love to hear it. Write a reply or let me know on Twitter.

Happy New Year everyone and thank you for reading 🎉

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Michael is a Danish designer, entrepreneur & keynote speaker. He runs entertainment development studio Northplay, Pixelresort and design resource platform Apply Pixels.