Good Day. The web grew up this year, and so, I think, did I. The downturn has been a hard teacher, and I have felt it most as the year closes, applying for work heavily and watching client after client decide that design is a luxury they will revisit later.
The timing makes it worse. We are into the holidays, the year-end numbers are landing, and whatever budgets existed have already been consumed by the season. Trying to find new work right now is like knocking on doors in a building where every light is already off. Everything is shutting down for the year at exactly the moment I need it open.
But a lean season has a way of pushing you somewhere new. Rather than only chase the vanishing client work, I have started to turn my craft on myself, to productize what I can make rather than wait to be hired to make it.
So I launched a clothing line this year, called Forfame, and I have simply been having fun with it. With the client work thin, building something that is mine, a small business of my own, has been a genuine joy and a quiet kind of insurance.
That instinct feels important, more important than the line itself. When the market will not pay you to make things, make things anyway, and find a way to put them into the world under your own name.
The web grew up this year because the easy money left and the serious question arrived. Not what can I sell quickly, but what can I build that lasts, that is mine, that does not depend entirely on someone else's good quarter. I do not have that figured out yet. But 2008 made very sure I would start asking.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · December 2008