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It’s always been a thing, but it never had a name: Side money projects: digital doodles. art and graphics for friends, marketing and writing and production. After a decade of this, and looking at my student loan balance, I’ve decided to give my business a name and start making things I want to make and also getting paid.
“Starting a business” is hard, ya’ll. I’ve spent so many hours getting up a humble website, figuring out channels for actually getting money, knowing I do things, but asking myself ‘will people pay for this?” Just the audacity to invest money in a website and logo can feel overwhelming.
It’s been 6 months, and I’ve actually made some progress in being a legitimate venture. I’m going to be posting about my experience as notes on the journey.
Here is an outline of this journey, thus far:
- January 1 2020: For the hundredth time in my life, I bought a website and made a logo as a prayer to the future self I would turn these side hustle tricks into some sort of brand and get more business.
- January 3: I can’t find my old planner, or anything that resembles an organization system for me so I decide to design one. Easy, right?
- January 23: after designing a few pages of the planning, I print and tweak, print and tweak for 6 weeks.
- February 2020: Everything is abandoned for a full-time job project.
- May 2020: Pandemic, started painting again, and moved planner project to a new data-based self-help book.
- June 20 2020: buy and iPad, make designs, open a Threadless store, just to “do something”
- June 25, 2020: THE LOGO IS FINISHED! A few years ago I watched a talented professional graphic designer go through multiple logo iterations, finishing their logo, and never seemed happy with it. I know this would be me as well, so once I knew I wanted an eye, I let Canva take care of the layout, and then exported it into Illustrator and remade it with some tweaks to the design. I’m blogging about it here, because I need to put a cap on this project and move on.
- June – October, 2020: 2020 is a disaster, real job drains me completely. I buy a block print kit and a house.
- October 19, 2020: put together my first proposal for a website refresh!
