Studio Missive 19: All gas, no brake

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! As I write this, big fluffs of snow are falling outside my living room’s bay window. It’s pretty, if you don’t mind the imminent thoughts of death and the constant depression that plagues you this time of year. (Or is that just me?)

This week’s missive is going to be a little unusual, because I have no inspiration to share. I am sure there is plenty of inspiring stuff in my inbox and my RSS feed, but I’ve had no time to read it all this week. I am eager to catch up on some of that soon.

However, as I mentioned in last week’s missive, there is a lot I wanted to get done this week. Thankfully, I am no longer sick. But I put way too much on my todo list when I wrote it last week. (Little did I know we’d have backflow in our house from the city, and I’d lose another day to make progress.) Despite that, I’m pretty stoked on what is done:

A revised product design

I finally finished designing a new framework for creators to upload content in V2 of a product I’m making for a startup. In V1, you could upload content, but each piece of content was just a form. Now I’m proud to say it’s a full-fledged multi-step, flexible workflow for every content type — music, podcasts, videos, live streams, and more — and the new flow also supports extremely robust analytics and reporting for creators too. I had several major breakthroughs this week on the project, and it’s the most satisfied I’ve ever been with a product I’ve designed.

This is the same product that shipped a couple months ago, and I’m eager to get it in my portfolio, but these changes (after the pivots) have made everything so much better that now I’m holding off. Either way, the product is going to be much richer and more feature-complete once I’m done.

A Christmas catalogue for a NPO

I got a nonprofit’s Christmas catalogue up on their website this week. They update their gift catalogue every year, and it’s normally just a series of copy edits and image swaps and things like that, so it’s not hard. But it was made more complicated by some sort of server error this week. I pulled the database with a bash script (standard procedure), and then the server crashed for some reason. Just completely hosed.

Then Linode’s backups all failed to restore (“the blocks were not matched between the backup and the volume you were trying to overwrite” — yes, that’s why I was restoring it, thanks for nothing customer support). So I had to spin up a new server, get PHP and NGINX going, set up a SQL database, install the CMS, pull the database from the staging server again, manually check all the installation config settings and the logs on the new server before hitting install, and then set up the DNS and SSL. It was the most stressful ninety minutes of my week. 

What was the problem? A point release in the CMS. Some edits in the catalogue were made on a point release that wasn’t in the main git branch, but the whole server expected the new version of the CMS to come along with those minor copy edits, and then the server hung until it completely crashed.

Why was there a separate git branch further ahead than the production server? How did I make this completely amateur mistake? That point release update was in preparation for…

A website launch

By the time you read this newsletter, the aforementioned nonprofit is going to have entirely new website. It’s going to amalgamate their main website, one of their outreach sites, and their existing donation site (which I already built four years ago). I’d share the URL with you, but it’s going up when this newsletter goes live, so it will be much easier to share it next week.

Needless to say, this week has been a flurry of activity surrounding the site. Apart from the catalogue update, we’ve had hours of meetings and phone calls to wrap up the final copy and select final images (both from their large collection of around-the-world photography and stock imagery), and I’ve done all the final testing to make sure that their e‑commerce site shouldn’t skip a beat. All the SEO metadata and redirects are in place, or at least ready to be put in place.

So all that’s left is to go live.

I’m excited to publish a case study around this one. It’s actually two case studies — one for their new outreach site and one for this site — and because I have four years of data from their e‑commerce site, I can speak with a high level of accuracy about conversion results. Very exciting times.

I thought I’d leave you with a few screenshots. These are not case study quality, and I have no idea why my screenshots include a drop shadow on the left hand side, but I am too eager to share.

The home page has nearly a dozen images that rotate out in the hero on refresh.

EHC resources a lot of churches, and whenever they talk about their church ministry on their website, the aesthetic is slightly unique. However, certain motifs — like the hand-drawn yellow horizontal and vertical rules — remain constant.

EHC is a warm, global ministry. One of the design motifs is maps, but the maps are outlines that look like pencil sketches. I wanted to reinforce a humanistic element to each line on the site, so many elements look like they were carefully drawn by hand.

The maps can also be used as larger visual elements, and the outline colours can vary. You might also notice the numbered list on this page includes stacked circles that are layered asymmetrically to help reinforce that hand-drawn feel.

EHC offers many, many resources, and finding different ways to showcase them was one of the many challenges in this project. On this page, the Order button remains sticky while you scroll, and even though the resources come in various shapes and sizes, they are presented with a similar aesthetic throughout. 

I can’t wait to show you more from this project. (Of course, I also feel a little uneasy about launching it, like this is when everybody will figure out I’m a fraud. But that’s normal and a small amount of it is probably healthy.)

A new video

I also published a new video and a new blog post with a few simple SEO tips. I get at least one email from an existing, prior, or potential client every single week about SEO, and wanted an evergreen piece of content to send them when they ask questions about why their SEO isn’t doing what they want it to do.

In my second video, I forgot to hit record for my first take. This time, in my third video, I hit record, but I guess my microphone was further away from my mouth than I realized, because the echo was horrific. It sort of sounded like I recorded everything with my Studio Display microphone, rather than an actual high-quality mic. So that’s another less learned, I think. (I also discovered this morning that I have been recording everything in 16 bit fidelity, when I could have been recording in a 32 bit float, and seriously, I quit. I know so much about all this stuff, and yet I can’t even set the dials on the widgets to do the thingies.)

When you edit a video, the typical advice is to chop up your A roll in your NLE, then edit your audio in your DAW and bring it back to the NLE after. I’m going to start ignoring that advice, because it’s a royal pain in the butt to do it that way, and it sounds like the advice comes from people who worry about the file size of a very long audio take. That doesn’t phase me. Audio files are much smaller than video files. But it’s extremely annoying that you’re locked into a video edit once the audio is done. It feels so final. If, like me, you only discovered you had audio issues at the very end of an edit when you put on your good headphones, it’s not easy to fix.

So from here on out, I’m going to do that differently.

What I didn’t get done

Last week, I mentioned I wanted to record two videos this week. I didn’t have time to batch record both, and in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t, because the audio for the second video would have been terrible too. 

I also didn’t get to finish the case study I wrote last week. Hopefully there will be time in the coming days to collect screenshots and videos and wrap that up.

And finally, I didn’t get inspiration for this week’s missive. I’ll do better next time.

Until then,

Nathan