Week 1934

It's been a long time since I read a personal blog. The Internet I have refined around me during so many years is not more than a mix of a weak professional network from where I get some trends and a collection of pictures when we show the best of ourselves. Do you remember personal blogs? Fotolog? Those were cool tools everyone around me used.

Last week they announced this year's Design National Awards. It's great to have people you know like Danny Saltaren, or Isabel Ludita the previous year, as the winners. I never told anyone, but the Photography one has been, since my teenage years, like the goal that I know I'm never going to achieve. Huge respect. Talking last week with my partner about it, she asked me a simple question that has made me think a lot during the last couple of days: what is your piece of work as a designer that you feel more proud of?

It took me a lot of time to answer. My first take was: none. Hey, it's hard to think that you don't feel specifically proud of any of your work during the last 12 years. I worked on really complex projects, and the pace of the tech industry puts you far from how what you do improves the user life once is released. Also, doing more management than craft during the last couple of years didn't help as the impact is more about creating environments for people more than ownership of delivery.

After a couple of minutes, I said: "I think it is Globo. A project where I spent two months in Rio, and with a small team, designed something still being used (and brought years of contracts to my former company). It was for one of the biggest media companies in the world where I got the chance to design for Big Brother, the F1, technology, soap operas, or almost any information and entertainment thing you can imagine. Delivering a good experience from rich people with the last iPhone to the worst feature phone you could find in a favela".

That was almost eight years ago. Is my best work so far away? I enjoy my job most of the time. There are places like Tuenti or Funky Projects where we had strong design teams, and we run some experimentation and push forward one to each other. I loved that. But it's proudness something I feel?

I decided to start every week writing during an hour a reflection about the previous week and post it here. Something not very intellectual or well-rounded but more personal. Also, I'm going to spend some time working on a good personal site. Right now, I do only crappy portfolios once I decide I want to change jobs. But could I do something good if I removed the enormous constraints of working at big digital companies? Last week I moved this site and the .work to start using Cloudflare (Pages), so I think it's good timing. Thanks, Asier, for the recommendation.

At work, it was a tough week, not going to lie. October pressure to deliver is here, and we have advanced a lot with the hiring during the last couple of months, so now we need to start improving how we work, which brings some considerable debate among Leadership about things like the expectations about a Design System, the roles of the designers, or ownership and quality.

We also soft launched Instant Observability. The first big project we delivered that I've been part of. Good to understand how we push projects from idea to market in 4 months and how design is involved. Not perfect, but a lot of learnings about working with little design and many PMs and decision-makers.

On a less boring note, I visited two excellent restaurants in Barcelona last week. Dos Prebots is a restaurant I think created by one of El Bulli's chefs. Great mid-week dinner with friends. The squid a feira was terrific. We also went to Quinoa, a tiny vegetarian outlet at Gracia. We tried to visit when Evasan and Boton came to Barcelona a couple of weeks ago, but it was packed. The Bánh mì was awesome.

We also went to watch the last James Bond movie, Not Time to Die. A Bond movie, so I don't expect anything profound but a great 3 hours closure to the Craig era. I also spent some time trying the beta of the new Halo being released by the end of the year. Great multiplayer, but I keep finding myself spending more time playing Splitgate. It has some old Unreal Tournament vibes that I love.

50 minutes writing. I think this is more than enough for the first week, and I'd need another 10 to check that I remember how to deploy it, haha. It looks like last Tuesday morning was the last beach day for this season here in Barcelona, so more time to focus this week on online projects.