Ways to stay sane when working from home

  Working from home can be a complete luxury and also a total buzz kill, depending on how you go about it. Unfortunately, in the current time, we are all being encouraged or dictated to work from home for a significant period of time. For some people, this conjures ideas of “staying home” all day and working in your PJ’s with Netflix on in the background. For others, it conjures ideas of complete and utter social isolation and uncomfortableness. Both can be true, but what you do really need to focus on is how to best stay sane when working from home.

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What Grinds my Gears – the idea that because you work long hours, you work harder

Working in agency land and the corporate world was a real eye opener for this multitasking machine who likes to go home at 5:30. I found that many of my colleagues would not be efficient or effective as they could (or should) be during their standard hours, only to work back late and turn up late citing having “worked so hard and so late” and were both celebrated and sympathised for it.

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HOW TO START SAYING NO IN SMALL BUSINESS

Saying NO to different opportunities as a small business owner is scary. We want to say YES all the time because we aren’t sure when the next opportunity might come or if by saying NO just that once, all the opportunities will disappear. But it’s not that cut and dried.

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Learning to say NO in Small Business

NO is the hardest thing that someone in Small Business can do, but it is something that we all face at one time or another as businesses grow and change, sometimes in completely unexpected ways.

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KNOKAL HOMEPAGE REDESIGN

I think one of the hardest parts about going out on your own and starting your own business is knowing where to start, and where to find new customers. Part of it is not being afraid of rejection and literally getting in touch with everyone you have ever wanted to work with. And part of it is just putting yourself out there, and hoping that the person you are looking for is also looking for you. My god, this could be the intro profile on a dating website. What they say really is true – the best opportunities come when you put yourself out there. And in very few instances has that statement been as true as in the work that I have done with Knokal recently. Knokal is the online version of a business directory, specifically designed for small businesses – if you’re looking for an accountant, a graphic designer and even a zoologist, Knokal is the place to go. If you’re working for a big corporation and you need a freelancer or small business person to help you out, Knokal is the place to go. And as a small business owner myself, I wanted to check out the competition, get a bit of work from other small business owners (some of my favourite kinds of client) and generally put get on the page. I created a profile on Knokal, thanks to a hot tip from other entrepreneurial ladies in the LMBDW Group on Facebook. If you aren’t involved, you really should get on there, it’s a hotbed of badass babes doing good things. Anyway, that aside, I created a profile. Put in some information and thought that at the very least having more information about me around on the interwebs would be good for my SEO, and besides it was totally fee – so I wasn’t loosing anything by putting myself out there.   Then along came David. David is the founder of Knokal, and knew that he needed a homepage redesign to get better conversions and attract more sign ups. He is a big fan of the entrepreneurial theory that business owners should “eat your own dogfood” – that is, if you have a product, use that product when you find yourself in need of whatever it is that you offer. So David needed a graphic designer, and he went to Knokal. I don’t know if it…

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DOMAINE JULIO – Packaging Design for This Must Be The Place and World Class Cocktails

I like to think that I am pretty lucky in the people that I call my clients. I know a lot of people with an incredible amount of talent, and one of those is Charlie Ainsbury. Charlie with his business partner Luke run one of the best bars in Sydney, This Must Be The Place, named Timeouts Best New Bar of the Year in 2016. Being that they are both absolutely top-shelf bartenders, they have this tendency to win awards – and there isn’t a bigger cocktail award in Australia than the World Class Cocktail Competition, which Charlie won in 2014 and again in 2016. Pretty incredible huh.   I was invited by BLANK Agency, the marketing gurus for This Must Be The Place, to help design the packaging for a product that was part of the submission for this years World Class Cocktail Competition – a ready-to-pour cocktail that could be sold off the shelf. Charlie created an amazing cocktail inspired by the passion of Don Julio Gonzalez, the maker of Don Julio Tequila, which extends the cocktail flavours and experience into the meal, blurring the boundaries between wine and cocktail. Infused with vanilla, cardamon, chardonnay and star anise, this cocktail is the perfect accompaniment to food and brings out the best in a range of flavours. For the bottle design, we utilised watercolours to abstractly show the range and levels in the cocktail, from strong and rich to light and fruity. The label was designed to compete with a range of wines in the category, particularly those which are biodynamic and boutique. Wine labels are typically beautiful, with a focus on art and design elements like illustration and watercolours, and so to appeal to a similar target market and belong as a part of the category, similar inspirations were used. To accompany the cocktail, we created a booklet that was designed to educate the customers, being that this product is a completely new concept and quite innovative. This would be hung on the bottle and is full of ingredient illustrations, tasting notes and serving instructions, to make sure that each bottle of Domaine Julio is served in the way it was intended, to best appreciate the flavours. I love working with anyone who loves what they do, and the team at This Must Be The Place are exactly that. Here’s hoping that this beautiful cocktail is available on shelf sometime in the near future…

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A Line Up – Logo Design, Website Design and Brand Presentation

a line up clotheslines daytek logo design website design branding graphic design parramatta

“The Hills Hoist. The Backyard Clothesline. The Verandah Clothes Line.  Whatever form yours takes, we want to build it for you.” Every Australian can identify with and understands the necessity of a clothesline in a backyard. However, if we are all being brutally honest, a clothesline is not a sexy home item. Its not something that people necessarily want to think about – they just want it handled when it needs to be, and be functional when your getting a little low on clean underwear. That’s where A Line Up come in. They provide a complete end to end service, from removal of your existing clothesline, to supply and installation of the new one and clean up at the end of the process. The team at A Line Up approached me for a fresh new logo design, having operated under a different business name for some time. They wanted something that highlighted the clean and simple nature of their business, while being quite literal in the kind of service that they do. The logo design does exactly that – in clean and simple line work, it specifically depicts the iconic Hills Hoist clothesline, while being slightly abstracted within the blue square. Couple this with a strong blue-toned colour palette, designed to be relaxing and calming, and you have a simple logo that really speaks to stressed-out home owners. This logo design was paired with some beautiful imagery of clotheslines and landscapes in the business cards, with each member of the A Line Up team having their own unique image, tailored to their personality. This has created a solid foundation for the way that the brand will be presented in the marketplace. The website itself needed to be a few things to really meet the client brief and client needs. It needed to be simple, so as not to overwhelm users and coordinate with the new look and feel of A Line Up. It needed to have a client-operated back end, so that information could be updated quickly and easily as needed. This was built onto a WordPress back end, which I wholeheartedly recommend to my clients for being able to quickly and easily update their websites, while also give great Google Search results with minimal interference. Line models needed to be shown, and a contact form needed to be included, for easy contact by prospective clients. Visually, the entire website was left…

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CLEVER CLOSET COMPANY WEBSITE GETS A FRESH MAKEOVER

clever closet company website web design wordpress website wardrobe design website emma wright em designs

I’m so absolutely thrilled to unveil my latest and greatest website design. I was lucky enough to meet Sally from The Clever Closet Company at a lecture that I gave earlier in the year, and aside from wanting some consultations about how to manager her social media accounts, Sally was most interested right from the outset about redesigning her website.

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