Studio Missive 18: Working through a cold

Hi friends,

Hope you are doing well! I’ve got a cold (more below) that I’m not a huge fan of. Here’s what’s happening in the studio this week:

What’s inspiring you?

1. Lots of great New York signage and lettering on this Instagram page. (It sadly hasn’t been updated in a long time, but even small things like this are valuable resources.)
2. “Our strength as a business comes from it being personal. And the rewards that I get from this work, and deciding to continue this work, are personal.” Charles Broskoski’s piece about keeping business personal, which is how I’ve lived out my whole career. (And now I really need to rewatch You’ve Got Mail, which I don’t think I’ve seen in twenty years.)
3. Sketch’s latest release has added Liquid Glass in a thoughtful and measured update that looks very nice. As Nick Heer points out, Apple hasn’t updated any of their pro apps to use Liquid Glass, so in some sense, Sketch is paving the way here. It might not surprise you to learn that their use of Liquid Glass is minimal and smart. (Their decisions around sidebars and toolbars are interesting and revealing; I wouldn’t be surprised if the entirety of Liquid Glass shifts in this direction in the coming years.)
4. Use the sibling functions in CSS to sequentially animate items. (Very often, I put a link to some cool new CSS in here so I can find it later when I want to use it in a project. This is one of those times. Right now, I use AOS for most of my intersection-based animations, but it would be great to lose that dependency in the future. Or I guess I could lean in and go all the way to animé.js if clients need something super fancy for… some reason.)

What are you working on this week?

This week, I’ve been working on getting over a cold. Super not fun. I think I got it from my two year old niece last weekend? Who knows. The cold hasn’t been too bad. Just a slight sore throat and your usual fatigue and fogginess. I’ve had worse. Last year, I missed my birthday and Christmas and New Year’s because I somehow simultaneously contracted an upper respiratory infection and influenza B. I couldn’t breathe much for a couple days. On December 22, both my wife and I thought I was going to die. (I will remember that date forever.) Ended up in the emergency room, where they also weren’t sure if I was going to die before they ran a bunch of tests in record time to confirm I wasn’t actually dying.

In between numerous trips to the bathroom, when I finally could sit in the room long enough to have a conversation with him, the Irish doctor who attended to me just said: ​“You’ll feel a bit s— for a few more days.” That was underselling it, but I think he was leaning into his accent, because it was also a very funny way of describing how I felt and also my symptoms. An illness like that tends to change your perspective on just about everything else.

So this is nothing. Nothing that Advil and Dayquil can’t fix. Just an annoyance. 

But what an annoyance! I had a jam-packed week planned. I wrote a new case study last week, and was going to make all the pictures and images and videos for it this week so it could launch in time for this missive. I had two YouTube videos I was going to record, and I planned on publishing the first one on Wednesday or Thursday. I had an entire Christmas campaign ready to go for a client (this has only been slightly delayed, thankfully, so I think I can still finish by the end of the week), and I was going to completely redesign a series of content creation forms for another.

Sitting in front of a computer is a little dizzying right now, so anything related to my own work more or less got pushed to next week, and my focus this week has just been all the client work. The work is getting done, and I’m very grateful to have it, but it’s just getting done… slowly. During shorter days. With breaks.

This week, my hand was played for me. But next week is go time. I hope to publish the new case study, record both YouTube videos, and launch a new site on Friday for a client (obvious asterisks on this, since things might come up between now and then that slow me or the client down). Next week is the week I’ll finally take over the world.

Hopefully next week’s missive is of more interest. Thanks for pushing through with me through the doldrums.

Until next time,

Nathan