Like many others, I sometimes go out and find a different spot where I can sit and work on all the things that are not a part of my day job.
It doesn’t matter if it is a ciber café, a pub or any of the many coffee shops in Lisbon. What matters is that for an evening, an afternoon or a few hours, that place is “my Lab”. It is where I can have a drink and explore my boundaries. Because one thing is to think up a communication plan and see others build the programs and designs that will make it work, another all together is to follow something from start to finish with little or no resources.
My projects at the lab are what helps me debug faster what is going on with an app or a website, to communicate better with the developing team and to think up new communication plans with the newest tools in web development.
But recently, a friend alerted me saying “I can’t keep up with everything you’re doing”. There is in fact too much. There are projects I decide not to finish, others that become so known to my closest friends that I forget to share them with everyone else.
That is why I created a new page for the blog called the lab.
There you will find a list of what I have been up to that resulted in something worth showing. And to save you a click, scroll down for the current listing.
What do you do in your lab?
The Untitled Series was a weekend project where I succeeded to deploy a full blog in less than 1 hour. It lacks any branding or elaborate design, but it is made out of static files and therefore a small team could customise it in a matter of minutes. This sort of solution is ideal for Crisis Communication or small projects with low budgets. The Untitled Series is where I store what I write for fun, small texts and short stories, mostly in portuguese. It is powered by Jekyll, in case you are wondering.
Mobile Profile makes your business cards better. It lets you register a profile and gives you a QR Code so others can access it and use your contact details with a few taps. With it, you can make sure that the information on your business card is always up to date because you can edit your email, telephone and other details. It was also the first time where I attempted to build something made for mobile screens, using the Twitter Bootstrap framework.
A Different Perspective is not just my blog, it is a collaboration in personal branding with Diana Costa. It was rebuilt with a new editorial line, a full graphic identity and a design that works across every screen, from mobile to large desktop monitors. The main concern was to make it easy to read and provide an uncluttered user experience. The blog runs on WordPress and the theme was fully coded by me. (I even learned a bit of javascript in the process.)
Cenas Que a Gaja Diz is written in Portuguese and it got the inspiration from Justin’s twitter account @shitmydadsays. It is written in collaboration with Tânia Rodrigues.
Natal PT proved that it is quite easy to engage people across the country with just an afternoon of work. It is an instagram gallery that collects photos using the same hashstag, in this case #natalpt. After letting people know about the gallery, we collected over 300 photos in about 4 weeks. The whole thing started when a sudden rain ruined my plans to enjoy a saturday afternoon.
Merry Christmas is a blog I update just once a year. Around Christmas time I put some work towards creating a different kind of postcard to send to friends and family across the globe. The “card” can be a video, a photoshop ilustration or even a whole website. It was only fair I took some time to keep a record of everything I do around Christmas.
