A risk or courage
The curious stage of finding what's next in my life and career. Going with the gut feeling is the only possible way I can see as of now.
I was very confused about where my life and career going for a long time. Like what I want to do in my next job and with my life.
I really hated the experience that I was looking for Fridays and hated Mondays. I knew that living like this was not going to do any good for me in my life or my mental health.
So after leaving my past job (this is where I got the chance to explore more about my knowledge, really grateful for that), I decided to avoid all my distractions and go straight into the discovery stage. I was not ready for the next job. I paused every subscription and almost every “good to have” expense to sustain without any hassle.
I did nothing in the first week. Instead, I spent my time thinking. I realized that I’m having a creative block. Tried to do some designs, but I just can’t start anything. My mind is completely off.
I was procrastinating on the decision to learn Framer. But to find the next job I prepared a resume and a portfolio on Framer and that is where it all started.
Just do it
As I explored the platform more, I learned a lot of little things here and there2. I went straight into completely Framer. I didn't know what to do with it. I knew that it is the most powerful tool that happened to designers at the moment. So I just started to do things.
So far I built 10+ templates and a few others which I paused or archived. You can view all the framer templates here. I stopped “thinking” and started doing. And the results are these. “Just do it” is the only possible thing I find helpful.
Nitty-gritty things
As I started to build templates, I started to notice one thing. It is important to have proper legal content covering each. Like disclaimer, terms, and privacy.
Because I use dummy data in a real way. So, there is a chance that some people may misunderstand the whole site as a real site. When I did the “Therapy Doctor website” I feared that someone who seeks help find this helpful and try to contact me. I just didn't want to deal with difficult things like that.
But like I said, doing this for every template is some kind of boring job. If any of this was real this is like one of my favourite thing to do. I care about these nitty-gritty things. But doing it for “the purpose only” I find it boring. Still, I managed to do that in everything.
Landing pages
I did a few landing page templates in this gap, one is for professionals, one is for shop owners and one is for voice-to-text transcribing platforms.
My whole point of doing this was to help small to medium businesses launch their presence online in a simple way. Because with Framer once they went live, they only had to subscribe monthly or yearly. With Google Maps and other platforms, website traffic can be increased and more leads can be generated.
Marketing
This is the part I have not done even a single thing yet. I’m in a stage where I kind of don't want to do but want to do. Tried to submit it in the Framer template channel, but I stopped halfway.
Based on my self-analysis, I found a possible reason that it is because of the uncertainty of my current stage and responsibility after the commitment (like a doctor agreeing to purchase this template, but I have to support them in case something happens) is making me delaying this process.
It is a bit complicated as I explained above.
So in simple, if I take a job somewhere, I don't want this responsibility to delay or affect my job commitment in any way. That is the fear that is keeping away from marketing or cold outreach. But I’ll find a solution to this soon.
I did both Zero to One and DigitalHub v2.0 templates to decrease the dependency on other marketplace platforms and to increase self-marketing.
No freelance for now
There was Contra. I created an account but I didn't want any clients at the moment. So I passed on every opportunity that came my way - both online and offline.
But this might change in the future. I don't know I’m still figuring it out.
At the same time, I’m waiting for Framer to evolve more, and with less dependency on other platforms, I want to create a web app. There are a few ideas I’m sleeping on. I need to try them all out. That future is not so far I guess.
Experience so far
To be frank, the current stage (the past few weeks and at the moment) of my life is the best investment I have made so far. Yes now thinking it really is. The answer is still not clear but I never waited for Fridays and never felt like "Oh tomorrow is Monday". To be Frank I guess this is the first time in my life I'm experiencing this.
All the ups and downs. Doing everything alone. There are some self-doubting stages too, but I guess it’s all part of the journey. I’m 100 percent sure that I’ll find what I’m looking for. It’s just a matter of time.
Nothing is keeping me bored at the moment. If I’m tired of working on the CMS content, I’ll go to Figma and do some cover images. I’m in control of my work. All day I’m doing a solid amount of work and I can see that when I look at my Google task.
I never experienced time flying this fast. One day I realized that tomorrow was Sunday and I needed to do some shopping. In my mind, I’m still at some Tuesday or Wednesday. In my phone, there is this security feature that keeps asking me to manually type the password every 72 hours. I feel like this happening at a few-hour intervals(felt like the interstellar meme). I don't know if somebody can relate to all this. But this is not a made-up story. I hope there will be someone.
Why this image: It’s really peaceful and beautiful. And this is how can I best describe my stage now. Some people say that it is foolish. But it is all about the perspective.
Peace.
TL;DR or tl;dr, short for "too long; didn't read.
Like, as the A11y, how a dev sees the design, the importance of naming the layers and everything accordingly, optimizing for SEO, the effects, etc