I opened an online shop in 2017 on Instagram that I individually handed. It was my happiness, my passion and my creative outlet. As 2018 knocked on my door, things started crumbling down. My workload was increasing at the shop, I was balancing freelancing along with final year of MSc in Applied Psychology and I was also trying to keep my relations strong and healthy. To summarize it, I was under a lot of stress. In search of balance and to reorganize my shop, I took a break from it for a month. But what I wasn’t aware of, was a surprise that I never saw coming. I went to get my eyesight checked and found out, after many hectic appointments and hospital visits, that I had an eye disease called Keratoconus. The months after that were filled with a lot of tiring, disappointing visits, a laser eye surgery and then eventually, in November 2018, a cornea transplant.

A year has passed since then but with an unstable vision, headaches and the time it has taken to accept my disease, I was unable to open my shop. I had a lot of plans that I wanted to execute but somewhere, over the last year, I haven’t been able to start. So, when Amal asked us to #juststart, this is what I wanted to work on.

My goal was to re-design my shop’s logo and make five designs at least for three products that I could order and keep in stock. These few products could then be offered in cheaper prices when I re-open my shop, to celebrate the support all my old customers have given me till the date.

In the past months, every time I tried working on the designs for my shop, some health-related issue would break my momentum. Sometimes I had headaches, sometimes my vision would be too blurry to work with, sometimes I had gotten one of my stitches removed and the eye would just feel irritated. So, to keep my eye safe from any harm, I kept delaying this project.

There were three main tasks I had; generating ideas for products, working on the designs and finalizing them for printing. Given the short amount of time I had, it was difficult to design brand new products from scratch. So, for some of the designs, I reused the designs I had made after I put my shop on hiatus. I reconnected my old hard disk, found old photoshop files and revamped the illustrations to make brand new designs for notebooks, stickers, and gift wraps. Another challenge that I faced was finalizing each design. Going through each design, really carefully looking for any tiny errors was time-consuming and also difficult.

In the end, I was able to send five designs per each product to the printing shop. Here are some of the designs I made:

I learned that I still have the passion and will to do hard work. However, I need to take care of my eyes as well and make sure I’m not hurting them by putting too much strain on them. My next step would be to continue working on more product designs weekly until I’m all set to re-open my shop.