Week notes: June 19th

I've got a few blog posts in progress up to publish on the Dodeca Studio blog (oh hi! yes, that's happened!), but they all involve a fair amount of work, and there is rather a lot to do, so I've decided to try out week notes. Old school. I thought about putting them on my company blog, but the content isn't always going to be relevant or "work" focused, as work is very much home at the moment. So figured I'll try it out here, which is lacking blog posts of late anyway. Weekly musings and goings-on, to keep up some sort of frequency of posting. These Week Notes will be as brief as possible, and no doubt it might read as a little hurried.

The lockdown

Gosh, that H3 is large (that's what H4 said?). You can tell I've not been on my blog in a while.

I should probably address the main topic of recent months: Lockdown. I left Media Molecule and started Dodeca Studio at the start of lockdown. I've since been working through many personal projects as well as getting the ball rolling on my first contract; it's a long term one which I'm currently designing. I've found visual design during the lockdown to be difficult. It's made me realise the importance of uninterrupted flow for creative thought, which is only possible at seemingly rare occasions these days. Time for happy accidents and exploration feels like a luxury. The morning attempts at home-schooling and the occasional screaming fits/tantrums from the children need to be dealt with at random intervals. However, the periodic hugs from a two-year-old are almost impossible to refuse.

This week

• I mostly had my head in Photoshop, Sketch and Illustrator for various amounts of time and frustration. It doesn't matter how much ram or processing power you have, Adobe software will crash. And Sketch, apparently.
• Signed-up for the beta of business carbon accounting app Bloom, from Tomorrow who make North. I used North app over the past few weeks and even tried out their community-made Tesla integration to track carbon footprint from travel (that part was at least, not a success).
• Did some work on Electric Brighton, which I recently re-launched. Chatted with the Council about ongoing EV charging installations in Brighton, updated the Electric Brighton planned EV chargers map and added an option to show these on the unmet demand functionality of the Hug the Plug campaign. Also wrote some content. I'm planning to write more answers to common EV questions and some myth-busting where I can:
  • Do electric vehicles produce more carbon dioxide than petrol vehicles?
  • Will a second-hand vehicle have a lower carbon footprint than a new electric car?
  • How do you unplug an electric vehicle?
• Spent some time looking at the feasibility of booking a cottage holiday in August. Slim pickings, probably unwise, but desperate to be somewhere other than here, soon.
• Spent 30 mins playing Fallout Shelter in the car with Rocco, the latest game to be added to the Tesla arcade. Great fun, can see me spending too long at the charger playing this.
• Signed the petition to keep Madeira Drive closed to traffic.
• Belatedly realised the PS5 design, announced last week, is following on from the PSVR design language, duh.