Weekly Recap #15: Crushed it!
Our Snapchat journey continues, the week oscillates between exhilaration and stress, we launch a website and Lorenz fails to open a bottle of beer with a stapler. This is Harry, we are diesdas.digital and you’re reading our 15th weekly recap! Let’s see what we have in store this time!
These last five days might have been the best we had so far!
Even though there was a shit-ton of things to take care of, we managed to get through everything with a smile on our faces. Some of what happened: wrapping up design and development on a website + launching it, coordinating the creation of several motion graphics for an event on Monday, chasing three new potential projects and discussing how and when to schedule them in, continuing work with three other clients, preparing a workshop, doing accounting + restructuring our hosting offers, being active on social media, coming up with a plan for a conference talk and starting a new project in design. Phew. And then on top of that you have the inevitable meta discussions about how we want to structure our work and who we want to be as a company.
I definitely felt stressed out at times, but instead of trying even harder to get things done, we usually just took a break then and laughed it off. In that sense the photo above, taken Friday afternoon, conveys pretty aptly how I feel about this week in retrospect. Sure, at times you think your head is going to explode, but in the end that also leads to a feeling of achievement.
What’s interesting is that we all had our own topics to take care of, working on completely different things, mostly separate. This could have led to a general feeling of losing control and doubt, but I have complete trust in this team and every member. I feel we’re doing a good job instinctively deciding when it’s a good point in time to loop others in and when you should just take care of something yourself. That way we have very little overhead and it’s a good feeling to rely on others and not be disappointed.
Also we’re not working long hours. For us that goes without saying, but a lot of people are surprised by that fact. We usually start at 9am and end the day at 6pm or 7pm. And we intend on keeping it that way!
About that website launch …
It’s a site for the newly founded Internet Economy Foundation, IE.F in short. Susanna Dulkinys designed the logo and a basis for the branding from San Francisco — then we came in and developed the full digital branding in collaboration with her, communicating mostly via Slack and the occasional Skype call.
The website design was done by us, as well as the development part. The budget for this was tiny and everything was fairly rushed due to a hard deadline on Monday, but the whole process was super fun. Clark Parsons handled things on the IE.F side and his energy and enthusiasm really kept the project going, leading to very quick results and feedback loops. We’re looking forward to doing more things together. 👍
On Monday there’s gonna be a big launch event in Berlin and we’ll be there, so expect impressions on Snapchat, Instagram and the next recap! Which leads perfectly into our next topic …
Social media adventures
We continued our Snapchat journey this week and it’s been a lot of fun, as those who follow us might’ve guessed already. I’m definitely feeling more at ease in front of the camera now and I’m starting to enjoy it. I gotta work on not repeating myself so much though. Around 30 people are watching these snippets every day … if you’re not one them, you can just click play below to watch everything combined on Youtube. But the video quality is crap and the footage is kinda not meant to be watched in these large amounts, so it might make more sense to follow us and watch the story unfold gradually throughout the next week. How it’s meant to be. 👻
And while this is all fun and games, I gotta say that taking care of all these social media channels is getting a little out of hand. Whenever something happens in the office, you gotta make a decision whether you take a photo to put it on Instagram, make a Boomerang to get a Gif or use Snapchat to add it to our story (or ignore it and just let it happen). Everything is recycled later … Boomerangs eventually go on Instagram, Snaps end up on Youtube, Instagrams go into these Medium posts, everything might be linked to on Twitter … and our Facebook page is mostly dead in the water.
Not really making a point here, other than it being fun, but definitely also work (which is never scheduled in or planned).
On the other hand it’s completely worth it when people tell us they read our posts and enjoyed them. So keep the feedback coming (and also tell us when you didn’t like sth we posted) — we read every email, tweet, snap or comment we get and respond as quickly as possible!
Photo break
This might turn into a regular section of our recaps from now on … because we always take too many photos, VSCO cam is so much fun and the posts look longer, so I have to write less. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Last but not least: .process conference
We’ve been invited to speak at a conference in May, called .process. Here’s a description from their website:
.process is a series of community-driven events, focused on the findings, surprises and learning that happen while we work, design, and create. We believe unexpected discoveries, failed prototypes, unintended outcomes and new approaches and tools often pave the way toward great ideas and innovative products — .process is the attempt to make these hidden outcomes visible.
Not entirely sure yet what we’re gonna talk about, but we’ll find something. If you’re curious about a specific topic or have an idea, please let us know and we’ll try to work it in!
That’s it! We thought about compiling a weekend reading list with all the interesting links we found this week … but you already have enough of those, don’t you? So we leave it at this and wish you a relaxing weekend! See you next week! 😘 🤖
