What I Did On My Summer Vacation

As a 5-year employee of Automattic, I have the option of taking a 2-3 month sabbatical. I opted for the shorter duration as I felt it was a good amount of time to get some artwork created and some studying done on being a stronger leader in my design community, so that I could come back to work strong. I felt like a 3-month break would have been too much time to get lazy and bored, making for a bad re-entry to work.

Copenhagen

Before my break would start though, I’d have an inspiring last bit of work to do in Denmark with the Automattic Design Team (the half that wanted to travel to Copenhagen, that is. The other half went to Atlanta).

WordCamp

During a jetlag-fueled haze, I quickly wrapped up the badges and schedule designs for WordCamp Denver. My first official week off included spending some good time with my kids, the longest time I’ve had with them since their mom and I separated in mid-2014. I also spent time that week designing the slides for my WordCamp Denver talk “Full-Stack Web Design: A Case Study in Interactive Prototyping”

Something Along the Lines of Dating

Between Copenhagen and WordCamp Denver, my girlfriend Beth and I got to see the premiere of a movie that we’d been extras in over a year ago called Something Along the Lines of Dating:

Apartment Decorating

Since I’ve now got an amazing apartment, I finally took the time to decorate it how I like:

Art

One of the main reasons for this sabbatical was art. I spent some time getting back in touch with my art school education by doing some drawing and painting: skills I don’t use in my every-day professional work, done with tools I’ve allowed myself to become unfamiliar with. Time to change all that.

Writing

I’d long had a blog series in draft form saved away that I wanted to flesh out and spend more time getting right before I published. This series turned into the Why I’m a Designer series on this blog that I started posting early into my break. I have 4 more parts planned, but I have some studying to do first.

Part 2 of this series is titled View Source and it’s a concept I’ve decided to flesh out even further by writing an Almost Famous-type film loosely-based on a fictionalized account of my first real job in the early days of the web. I was inspired by attending the premiere of the film I’d briefly appeared in; it seemed possible for me to actually make something worth watching. The rough writing I’ve gotten done is a baby step in that direction. I’ve been watching films by my favorite directors trying to study their work.

Music

Since writing isn’t a strong suit of mine, I decided to mostly tackle the View Source film through its music. I first created a Spotify playlist of the music we used to listen to in the office at the time, music that lived inside of a 300-disc CD changer that also powered what people calling the office heard when they were on hold. I augmented this list with music I was personally listening to a lot at my first job.

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

The second part of this approach was to record an original motion picture soundtrack influenced by music made in the 1998 – 2001 range.

Some of the elements in this design are over 15 years old

I also wrote these songs I’m not sure what else to do with:

Kid Time

I was very glad to spend some extended time with my kiddos this summer.

The Gin Doctors

I got to see my friends and Denver’s Best Cover/Tribute act (according to voters in The Westword) The Gin Doctors a couple of times this summer, which is always an incredible time:

GIFs

I found reasons to use these images:

Underground Music Showcase

I got to go to a couple nights of The Denver Post’s UMS event held on South Broadway. Highlight of the event for me was an epic performance by Denver’s own Slim Cessna’s Auto Club: