Goals and reflection.
March 28, 2012 at 5:16 pm 2 comments
If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit, then you already know that I’m a major supporter of documentation. It’s good for your portfolio, it’s good for predicting or explaining value, and it’s also good for yourself. Just ask Nicholas Felton, the whose been creating annual reports (famously) since 2005.
photo via
Last month Mashable reported on the growing trend of people tracking their individual data, for example Dan Meyer, who says: ”It just speaks to the natural tendency to introspect, look inward… I do it for the same reason people journal or blog about their lives.”
While by no means a full-fledged graphical report, here are a few interesting stats about the past two years on Daily Design Idea (all gathered through WordPress’ own “My Stats” tool):
51,824 All Time Views
50 All Time Average (Mean) Views Per Day
160 2012 Average (Mean) Views Per Day
916 Views on the Busiest Day (thanks in great part to a retweet by Design Milk about this post)
Top 3 Search Terms leading searchers to the blog:
architect (6,904 times)
street art (3,617 times)
Paula Scher (500 times)
Beyond the home page, Top 3 Pages visited:
the post What does an architect look like? (9,163 times)
the post Fantastic photographic reenactments (2 of 2). (1,341 times)
the post A challenge from Paula Scher. (1,275 times)
So what does this mean going forward? I definitely plan to use Twitter more consistently and finally do a long-awaited update to the Paula Scher-inspired tshirt designs. I’m also hoping to publish more interviews (get ready for some great insight from Nate Poel), bring in more guest writers, and live Tweet more events.
March 28′s daily design idea is document your progress (and plan for more of it in the future!) and you’ll be that much more likely to make – and achieve - great goals.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: Dan Meyer, data, documentation, goals, graphic design, infographics, journal, Mashable, motivation, Nicholas Felton, process, progress, statistics.
1.
Mike Barratt | March 28, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Sounds like you’ve had some great success blogging! What are your top 2-3 things you’ve learned or would share with someone new to this?
2.
dailydesignidea | March 30, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Hi Mike – yes, it has been a fun couple of years for me! Though I definitely still think there’s room to imrpove.
My top three pieces of advice would be:
1. Go for quality over quantity of engagement. It’s more fulfilling and leads to more interesting opportunities.
2. Don’t feel pressured to engage with every media platform possible (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc). Just choose what’s right for you. I recently disabled the Facebook account associated with this blog, for example, because I realized it wasn’t generating very much engagement. So it was becomming more of a burden for me than a genuine channel for interaction.
3. I also heard a great piece of advice from Paddy Johnson (founding editor of Art Fag City) last night at a blogging panel. She asks herself: “Do I have something to say about this?” before blogging about anything. In other words, if you’re not contributing to the discussion, then it might not be worth generating additional (repeat) content. This is something I definitely want to keep getting better at myself!
Hope this helps!
Gisela