man cave 
noun Informal .
a room or other area in a home that is primar­ily a male sanc­tu­ary, designed and fur­nished to accom­mod­ate the man’s recre­ational activ­it­ies, hob­bies, etc.

Dictionery.com

Dur­ing my lat­ter years at school while study­ing my GCSEs and A Levels I began to under­stand the need for a cave. Of course still being at school and liv­ing at home I had a ready made one — my bedroom.

As a teen­ager in the early days of devel­op­ing an interest in design, that cave allowed me to cre­ate the atmo­sphere I needed to work. I had a draw­ing table set up where I would work on cre­at­ive pieces and study for my exams. It had a light that bent over me shin­ing a focused beam on my work space and plunging the rest of the room into dark­ness. I had some of my most pro­duct­ive even­ings at that table. In fact I have long stand­ing memor­ies of work­ing on my graph­ics course­work close to a dead­line with the mas­ters snooker on my little tv and that light beam­ing a zone of cre­ativ­ity onto my table.

Mov­ing to uni I again had my own ready made cave. The room in my halls of res­id­ence quickly became the place for all my cre­at­ive work. Angle poise shin­ing on my desk, laptop on, a dark room and momentum build­ing music on late in to the night. Then the bed­room in my shared house in the final two years at uni and the first year in employ­ment had a sim­ilar feel, but repla­cing my laptop with my iMac.

I miss those caves.

Since I’ve been liv­ing on my own I’ve not really had a cave. A flat with a liv­ing room, kit­chen, bath­room and bed­room doesn’t really lend itself to cre­at­ing one. The liv­ing room is a place for relax­ing, eat­ing and host­ing vis­it­ors. The bed­room is for sleep­ing and relax­ing, I need it to be purely for that else I’ll never shut down prop­erly to sleep.

The quest for a cave

Since I’ve no space for a desk and no closet I could con­vert into a cave I’ve been explor­ing ways to cre­ate an envir­on­ment that can be quickly and eas­ily set up, then eas­ily removed when I have visitors.

I’ve always tried to zone my liv­ing room so that I have a lounge area and a din­ing area. The din­ing area is the only bit of my flat that I can sit down and do work at and so it’s become the centre of my quest for a cave.

The table lamp which used to sit on my din­ing table has been removed and replaced with my angle poise. My laptop now has a home on the table and my wired Apple key­board and Logit­ech mouse have come out of stor­age. All of them can be quickly packed away when vis­it­ors are around and for the first time in a few years I’ve been able to begin cre­at­ing that cave like atmo­sphere as I work by the light of my angle poise. I can even do it with my iPad instead of the laptop should I wish.

Whilst it’s not quite the same as a per­man­ent cave, it’s a step in the right dir­ec­tion until I’m able to afford a place with room for a per­man­ent cave. Most import­antly it’s already hav­ing an impact on the way I’m work­ing in the even­ings on my own pro­jects as well as on per­sonal freel­ance clients.

But the les­son that I’ve learnt, in this little exer­cise is that actu­ally it’s not neces­sar­ily about hav­ing a phys­ical space, it’s about atmo­sphere. In order to foster cre­ativ­ity I need the right atmo­sphere, a per­man­ent place makes that easy to cre­ate but the quest for my cave isn’t really for a phys­ical space at the moment. It’s about a way for me to recre­ate the atmo­sphere of my early and ori­ginal caves. It’s about devel­op­ing a method that allows me to quickly set up at my din­ing table and focus. Events over the last few weeks have caused me to real­ise spe­cific­ally that by my very nature I’m a night owl and not an early bird. Maybe that has some­thing to do with my atmosphere…

I’ve been try­ing to work a seem­ingly ran­dom col­lec­tion of thoughts into a fol­low up post about New Adven­tures con­fer­ence. It’s not really happened so I’ve chosen to just throw them out there to any­one who is interested.

Over­all I enjoyed the day, it was fun, inform­at­ive and pushed me out of my com­fort zone, teach­ing me things about design and myself that are valu­able and I am pro­cessing in order to improve.

Most enjoy­able was Brendan’s talk. He was the most enter­tain­ing in deliv­ery and engaged the audi­ence excel­lently. His pas­sion for design is infec­tious, but some­thing I felt myself identi­fy­ing with straight away. I don’t obsess over using the right pen­cil, but my friends can attest that I do obsess over other seem­ingly point­less items.

Most dis­ap­point­ing was Veerle Pieter’s talk about inspir­a­tion. I really enjoy Veerle’s blog, and so was look­ing for­ward to hear­ing her talk but, for me, it had too much example and not enough insight. I was hop­ing for some pro­cesses which people could adopt or adapt to make their own and use as trig­gers in the cre­at­ive pro­cess. I know we all work dif­fer­ently, but hear­ing how someone goes about find­ing inspir­a­tion when all they are hit­ting is brick wall after brick wall can be inspir­ing in itself. Veerle also seemed to con­tra­dict some of the talks from the morn­ing, with a theme of doing some­thing a cer­tain way because you like it rather than for a par­tic­u­lar reason. Whilst design is sub­ject­ive and some­times we go with our gut, there’s usu­ally reason for doing it bey­ond “I like it”.

Most thought pro­vok­ing was Dan Rubin’s talk on matur­ing the industry by devel­op­ing a lan­guage that has mean­ing and that every­one can under­stand. Hav­ing moved to a new job around 3 months ago and hav­ing had the oppor­tun­ity to work on a couple of web jobs, this struck a cord. The things I mean when I refer to some­thing and the things they mean when my new col­leagues refer to some­thing are eas­ily con­fused on these jobs, how­ever, when it comes to a print job every­one knows exactly what the other per­son means.

Elliot’s talk, Andy Clarke’s, Jon Tan’s and Mark Boulton’s were also some of the most inform­at­ive, inter­est­ing and thought pro­vok­ing talks that left me feel­ing inspired and motiv­ated. Good stuff that I have already noticed is inform­ing the way I work.

New Adven­tures was a really good day, which I thor­oughly enjoyed, hope­fully I’ll get to a few more in the future and I’m cer­tainly hop­ing that I can make it to New Adven­tures 2.

This week I’m head­ing to my first design con­fer­ence in the form of New Adven­tures in my home town¹. In the past I’ve always looked in on con­fer­ences from the out­side, so when I heard about naconf I figured it was time to take the leap.

As someone who works primar­ily in print but has a real fas­cin­a­tion with the web I’m hop­ing to learn a lot and fig­ure out where my lay­out skills can cross over to the screen. I’ve heard it said many a time that print design­ers shouldn’t switch to the web, but equally I’ve seen many high pro­file design­ers achieve great things in both formats.

I’m most look­ing for­ward to hear­ing some of the best in the busi­ness share some valu­able insights into the vari­ous top­ics. In par­tic­u­lar I’m look­ing for­ward to hear­ing Veerle Pieters share some thoughts on trig­ger­ing inspir­a­tion and how we can break through the block we all suf­fer from time to time. One of the things I find hard­est when I’m design­ing for the web is inspir­a­tion. When you use the web so reg­u­larly it’s very easy to let your­self fall in to a pat­tern of “this goes here, that there…” and before you know it you have a very insipid run of the mill web­site. I’m hop­ing I may pick up a few tech­niques to help me use my exper­i­ence in design­ing for print be the inspir­a­tion for design­ing for the web.²

Since it’s my first con­fer­ence I know I won’t be able to soak everything up all in one go, but I’m going armed with a brand new Mole­skine and I’m hop­ing the notes I make will com­pli­ment the slides when they are released. The whole day will be a learn­ing exper­i­ence, but the learn­ing doesn’t just stop once I’ve left the venue. It con­tin­ues in the fol­low up and, most import­antly, in my efforts to put what’s been said into practise.

Bey­ond the talks, I’m look­ing for­ward to hope­fully meet­ing a few of the people I’ve come across on the web. Be it via blogs, twit­ter or some other means it’d be great to meet some new faces in the industry. So if you read this, or fol­low me on Twit­ter do come and say Hi!

1. Well 25 minutes out­side of the city is tech­nic­ally my home town, but I was born in Not­ting­ham so close enough. [↩]
2. I was going to go on here high­light­ing all the things I’m look­ing for­ward to, but, as I began writ­ing I real­ised I’d be high­light­ing all the talks in the sched­ule. It seems, unsur­pris­ingly, that they all com­pli­ment one another nicely. [↩]

It’s been just under a year since I began tri­al­ling Tumblr as the basis of my blog. At the time I was writ­ing from Elec­tric Week­end but had been strug­gling thanks to sev­eral events that happened at the end of 2009. In an attempt to get back in to the swing of blog­ging I’d decided to make a clean break from my first blog and start again.

For a while I pos­ted reg­u­larly but I soon fell in to a trap of con­sum­ing rather than writ­ing. Tumblr makes it very easy to find new blogs to fol­low, not a bad thing, but I found it all too easy to con­sume rather than cre­ate. How­ever, in the last month or so I’ve begun to feel that desire to cre­ate again, to write on a more reg­u­lar basis. Not only that but I wanted more con­trol, and this is the driv­ing force behind my move back to a Word­Press based site.

Con­trol?

One of the things I used to enjoy most about my old site was the abil­ity to change things up should I feel they’ve become stale. I could more eas­ily try out new fea­tures should I come across some­thing I liked the look of. But it goes bey­ond this, I wanted more con­trol of the fun­da­ment­als of the site.

One of the things that has frus­trated me most, not neces­sar­ily with my site, but with the sites of blog­gers who use Tumblr, is the poor archives. It’s frus­trated me that I’ve not been able to find a link or an art­icle on someone’s site. It’s such a bad exper­i­ence that I began to think people, or at least some people, will have the same trouble find­ing things on my site as I’m hav­ing here.

It all boils down to the fact that I’d like to design the over­all exper­i­ence people have on my site and the only way I can do that is to move to a self-hosted platform.

Theme?

So hav­ing admit­ted I’d like to have more con­trol over my site, here I am using a default theme. Well the answer to that is simple. I wanted to make the move while I had the desire to write more. I’ve already wasted a month know­ing I wanted to leave Tumblr, and so rather than wait until I’d got a fully designed blog I decided to make the move now and begin tail­or­ing my site as I settle in to my new surroundings.

But not everything is run­ning without some cus­tom­isa­tion. I’ve already begun my design pro­cess with the URL’s¹ which fea­ture a more friendly sen­tence like struc­ture that I hope will grow as I develop the site.

You’ll also notice that com­ments are avail­able on this post. Hav­ing not had com­ments on my site for a long time I’ve begun to feel that on cer­tain posts it might be quite nice to try and foster a bit of con­ver­sa­tion, they won’t be on by default but I hope to be able to turn them on from time to time.

I’m also hop­ing to find a way to bring most of the con­tent from my Tumblr site into this one so that everything from PBcom can be archived here. But whilst all this is going on, I now feel I have a web­site where I can start to be myself again. Some­where I’m hope­ful I can get back into the flow of blog­ging reg­u­larly, with a mix­ture of long form art­icles and links. A place where I’m happy to cre­ate is far more import­ant to me than dis­cov­er­ing even more con­tent. This year I’m hop­ing to use my time more wisely, and hope­fully this move is the first step in using my online time in a more pro­duct­ive manner.

1. Thanks to a little inspir­a­tion from Ian Hines. [↩]