Week 50: December madness
So much has happened over the course of these five days, where do I even begin?
Hi there, this is Harry, one of the founders of diesdas.digital, a nimble digital product development and branding studio in Berlin. We do design, development and strategy with a team of currently seven people and each week we write about our experiences right here on Medium. You’ve stumbled upon the 50th of these recap posts and so without further ado: let’s jump right in! 🏊
Alright, brace yourselves, this post is a collection of many smaller topics … each could probably have filled its own post, but I only have so much time to write each week. Let’s start with the obvious one…
So much to do, so little time.
Everyone who’s ever worked in an agency knows: December is by far the busiest month of the year. All clients want to get stuff done before everyone leaves for the holidays and so there’s an onslaught of tasks coming at you from all directions, with the whole Christmas thing added on top. It’s stressful and every single one of us is very much looking forward to the holidays by now.
Developers wanted!
And since there’s so much to do and we have many projects confirmed for next year already we’re looking for developers to join the team. The job posting is right here, and it’s a blog post in itself:
Job postings have always been a tricky topic for me … it’s hard to strike a good balance between making clear what you’re looking for without turning away too many people; making it inclusive, but not random. Also the tonality + photos, how you address people and what can be read between the lines reveals so much about your company … it’s a bit daunting. Judging from the feedback it worked out rather well though, so maybe give it a read and consider letting us know what you think. Also, if you have any developer friends, we’d appreciate it if you passed it on! Thank you!
Nicolás joins the team full-time, for real!
Speaking of developers and jobs: Nicolás signed his employment contract this week and is now a full member of this team. Having worked with him on a freelance basis for almost half a year now, I am super happy that we reached this agreement, bringing him fully aboard. Here’s to many more fun days and projects together! 🎉
Sharon and Lorenz on tour!
For our biggest project Lorenz and Sharon had to travel twice this week: to Poznań in Poland to visit a studio for app development we’re working with and to Zurich for the usual review and planning meetings with clients. Lorenz seemed to be on the phone continuously this week, handling a good chunk of the project management, but also doing design with Sharon and development with Santiago. No idea how this guy does it, his head not having exploded yet and still smiling. Impressive. 👀
Oh my, we bought a big ass printer!
To prepare for a workshop we bought an A3 color printer and holy crap, this thing is huge. The box weighted 45kg, but once unpacked the setup was unusually swift and we were printing posters over wifi within minutes. I guess owning such a machine (it even does faxes) makes us a real office now. Many memes shall be printed and taped to walls! 😅 📠
Our office is coming along!
In February we will finally move into our own office and the planning is in full swing:
- What to do for the kitchen?
- Black or white tables?
- Which lamps?
- Internet? Electricity?
- When can we realistically move in?
- What kind of dinner table do we want?
- Stools or banks around the dinner table?
- Where to store meeting room supplies?
- Do we need a safe for important documents?
- …
All this is an infuriatingly arduous (and expensive 😇) process, but it’ll all be worth it in the end! #ersteeigenebude
Christmas is coming and that means: Christmas cards!
As a design studio you have to send people something nice for the holidays, at least that’s what the tradition dictates. We knew that we didn’t want to buy chocolate bars or something similarly generic and so in the end we decided to simply make a nice card, send some personal greetings and use the money we save for a good purpose: Inspired by this blog post we’ll donate everything we didn’t spend on gifts to the Save the Children initiative. Hopefully that way someone has a better, safer Christmas (even though they might not celebrate it themselves).
And that’s it already for this week!
Have a calm Sunday and a good start of the new week. We’ll be around at least until Thursday and as always we appreciate all your feedback! Even if it’s just a click/tap on that little heart below (only in case you liked this post, of course).
Anyhow, take care! 💚
Your friends at diesdas.digital
I’ll leave you with the only group photo from our Christmas party on Friday. I thought we had this photo thing figured out by now, but oh well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
diesdas.digital is a nimble branding and product development studio in Berlin, featuring an interdisciplinary team of seven designers, developers and strategists, each with years of experience in branding, interaction design and programming. We create tailor-made digital solutions with an agile mindset and a smile on our faces.
Wanna team up for a project? We’d be delighted! Simply shoot us an email, reach out on Twitter, drop us a message on Facebook, or send us grimaces viaSnapchat. We’re also on Instagram and we got gifs over on tumblr, just sayin’.
No matter the channel: We’re listening and can’t wait to hear from you! 🙌
