Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello, this is John Locke of Lockedown Design
and I'm coming to you on Labor Day 2013 to talk to you - the web designers and web
developers
in the audience about the importance of side projects.
Now, to give a little back story to
everyone who might not know me: I came to
web design/development on my own
about four years ago. I was working in other industry,
and I decided that I
wanted to do web design and build web sites for the rest of my life
and work in the web industry. So I got
down to learning.
I went online school, and that wasn't going fast enough for me, so
I bought just a ton of books; I read blogs,
but the most important thing I did is I built sites.
And even if they were
just goofy sites, built just to experiment with new techniques,
like responsive design or
you know, just to play with gradients or CSS3
or whatever was the new thing at that time -
I did it.
So one of the first side projects that I did
was a goofy little idea... so at the same time
on my list of things that I wanted to learn was to learn how to bartend.
Don't ask me why; it was just a thing I wanted to learn and
so I started a mixology site and a mixology blog.
And I remember two years ago I was
ecstatic when we had a thousand views in a month.
I thought "Wow we're big time - you know this is huge".
And today we're getting
40,000 views a month on the website; with 60,000 views
a month on YouTube.
We're probably going to hit a million views on YouTube by the end of the year.
I mean - we're making
revenue off of this, which is cool.
It's self-sustaining. And once we have about another 10,000 views a month
on that website I'll be able to
upgrade advertising and go through something like BuySellAds
and make a little bit more money ( hopefully ) on it.
So that's very exciting. I learned a lot about marketing. I've learned a lot about
social media, and I have learned a lot about
content creation. And
redesigning a site - I've redesigned that site a few times.
And so it just goes to show that your
silly side project, that you just start for
laughs, *** and giggles,
that can become something. And not every side project will. Some of them are, just you
know, for fun.
But a lot of web designers
do different side projects. Dan Cederholm, before he formed Dribbble, he had
a little app called Foamee,
that rode on the back of the Twitter API
and people could -
say you did a favor for somebody else
and they owe you a beer, or you owe them a coffee,
you could just tweet it out and it would show up
on it's timeline. It would ride on the API and have it's own little thing (a display).
Jessica Hische, a very famous letterer and web designer in our field:
some of her most famous projects
are just little side projects,
like the one where she teaches her mom how to use Twitter. But they're useful
for real people
and that's the thing. You don't know what's going to happen.
I'm working on a side project right now - I'm hoping to debut it within this month,
this next month September, in time for my birthday,
and it's going to be a sort of e-commerce site,
so I am really excited about that.
Just remember it doesn't have to all be
- you know, client work or all product work.
You can definitely do things that you control
all the time, and have things going because you learn
different parts of the game. You learn different aspects.
It's not all about just web design, or just web development,
or just marketing. You learn like all the different aspects of it.
You learn to deal with different people
in the industry.
And some of these things they, you know, they can bring you notoriety.
And they can just be fun to work on, just fun to have around.
So the importance of side projects in web design
is that they keep you fresh; they keep you motivated to learn new things,
and they keep you invigorated. Because we love our work-
but if you just do the same thing all the time, it can grind you down.
It's nice to have something
that you built for yourself. That's it, signing out.
I'll hopefully see you next week with a new video,
and peace out. john@lockedowndesign.com