Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.

Website

Regarding this website, very little was done in 2010. I tweaked the design ever so slightly and updated the engine to the latest version of Habari, but apart from that I honestly haven't done that much. That's not true, I added some @media queries and did a bit of updating when it comes to trying to give the site some responsive design. Sadly it's not really there yet, or at least it doesn't render the way I imagine it to render on my iPhone, but that's only because I've not done enough testing and reading around the subject.

I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.

I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.

Creatively

Creatively this year has had some immense highs and some very long creative-less months. The main peak of creative activity as you can imagine all happened during my sabbatical months. Sadly that wasn't meant to last as shortly within those months I had to start planning my change of life and country. Having said that I still managed to do a few things. First of which was this drawing for my cousin, using my lettering style which I developed a few months earlier for another little pet project.

Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.

I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.

As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.

Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.

When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.

One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.