one year on: from a blank slate to a full business and my first big conference speaking slot at Future of Web Design in NYC!

Submitted by jpamental on

Wow. It’s one year ago today that I left my job at an agency here in Providence to start working on my own again, and I woke up this morning to an email from Cat at Carsonified letting me know that my talk has been accepted for the Future of Web Design conference in NYC next month (writing up my bio and overview for the conf. site now!). That’s a hell of a way to start a Wednesday. When I realized the date it got me thinking on my morning walk with our Collie Tristan about all the things that have happened in the past year. It’s been quite a lot, and certainly serves to reinforce to me that it was indeed the best possible decision for me to move on. I’ve not been happier in a very long time.

While some of this will be the subject of some future posts here and in my (woefully outdated) portfolio section, some of the real highlights have been teaching a class in game design/development, delivering a couple of lectures at area schools, presenting at the Design for Drupal camp at MIT last summer - and launching 10 or so websites for a variety of clients. In addition to the ‘usual’ web work I also had the good fortune to get to design a new identity for a tech company, design software interfaces for their backup applications, help a prominent department at Brown University with their web strategy and get a couple of articles published.

Equally as important as the work itself has been the increased connectedness with the area design/technology community - including helping organize monthly Drupal meetups for designers, developers and site owners, working with BIF on their site a bit and spending more time at RINexus.com and Providence Geeks events. It’s really helped me develop a tremendous network of friends and colleagues - truly making my work experience over the past year much more than ‘one guy in a basement office’ on my own. I know without hesitation that in a matter of hours I could reach out to any number of developers, designers, mobile experts and more to pull together whatever team could be needed for a project, large or small. It’s an amazingly vibrant community, and becoming more so all the time.

While I’m grateful for virtually all of the work experiences I’ve had, I simply could not imagine a better time or place to do what I do. Thanks Providence.

Comments

Mutual friend Stephen Cross pointed me to you.  Congrats on the speaking gig.  Would love to have you on Linchpin Podcast ASAP.  Stephen says you're a Linchpin. 

http://www.LinchpinPodcast.com

Blessings  - Andy Traub