Every time I open the Podcast portion of Spotify I am confront with this list of Followed podcasts I aspirationally wanted to listen to but literally have never once listened to in years. I feel like I SHOULD be someone who listens to environmental journalism podcasts on the climate and knows a lot of information about climate lawsuits lawsuits. It’s not like I don’t know things about that already, but I somehow feel like I’m being an inadequate person engaging in sustainability if I’m not listening to these climate ones.

Each time I look at the podcasts, I’m drawn to the podcasts I really want to listen to that are about random special interest topics and nothing professional VS the ones I feel I should listen to in order to be a “better” climate or green design educator.

The guilt hits in. The idea of listening to the climate politics ones make my stomach turn. I don’t want to unpack that feeling.

I put on Taylor Swift instead and close the Spotify app. It’s been like this for two whole years. Possibly even three.

So I’m coming clean. I’m reckoning with my fantasy self. I want to listen to the podcasts I do like! I want to not be met with guilt and self-sabotage when I look at the podcast lists!

My fantasy self listens to environmental journalism podcasts and eagerly shares the information with others. My real self feels anxiety stricken at the thought of spending my free time learning more about the climate crisis when the problem feels both impossible and hopeless to rally against entrenched corporate and political interests.

My fantasy self listens to leftist podcasts and is extremely knowledgeable about specific policies that will push climate action forward. My real self feels lost at sea and hopeless after Bernie Sanders withdrew his presidency campaign. I’m Canadian, but fuck, there’s no interesting leftists here.

My real self just wants to learn about animals and marine biology and birds.

But my specific situation isn’t everyone’s. I know that these podcasts are extremely high quality, well-researched, and interesting. So as my send-off to my fantasy self, I’m sharing these podcasts I wish I could listen to but can’t here. Just in case any of you want to listen to them! And then I’m also going to share the podcasts I do listen to.

Guilt Podcast #1: Drilled

A TRUE-CRIME PODCAST ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE.

There’s 9 whole seasons of Drilled: they cover everything from corporate denial and cover-up of fossil fuels causing climate change to how free speech from climate activists is at risk. The seasons follow different themes of corporate sins or environmental litigation.

The quality of research I know is extremely high and the cases they cover are all important and noteworthy.

Guilt Podcast #2: Timber Wars

Summary excerpt: It's the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. A march of chainsaws clear-cuts the country's last available ancient forests. Protesters bury themselves in front of bulldozers and spend months sitting in the tallest trees in the world. And at the center, the Northern Spotted Owl becomes the most controversial bird in the country. The "Timber Wars" podcast tells the story of how this conflict reshaped the Northwest and the nation as a whole, in ways we're dealing with still.

Again, a great well-researched podcast on forestry, endangered animal activism, and civil disobedience. I’m certain. In some ways, this is the podcast I feel guiltiest about not listening to as it’s taking place in my general area of the PNW. But alas, it’s just not something I can engage with right now. Perhaps another time.

Guilt Podcast #3: Damages

LAW & ORDER MEETS THE CLIMATE CRISIS

I’m going to issue a small addendum here because as I was going through the seasons of the podcast, I saw that Season 1 is actually about whether or not nature should have human rights like corporations do, with specific case studies per episode. I find that stuff really interesting and not depressing to listen so, so my promise to myself is that I will listen to Season 1 of this show!

There are three seasons, each discussing a different aspect of climate litigation, how justice systems handle climate cases, ecocide, and complexities around developing countries using natural resources.

Guilt Podcast #4: Threatened

Okay, so I do actually listen to this one, off-and-on. And wish I listened to it more. But it’s being consumed by my guilt over the above three. Hopefully, with a more curated list I’ll find the time for it.

This podcast has a threatening name (lol) but it’s actually about the incredible relationships and conservation work going on in ornithology. Each episode focuses on different endangered bird species, why they’re interesting and important, and the different ways communities are working together to save these species.

So, what do I listen to?

Joy Pocast #1: Ologies

Undoubtedly my favourite podcast. Although I only listen to the episodes about animals/fungi/plants hahhaa. All the human stuff or abstract stuff I give a miss, but I respect that there’s a variety of topics. Allie Ward interviews respected scientists and experts in their respective -ology fields and takes listener questions to ask the guest. No question is too stupid for Ologies and each episode is always fun and interesting to listen to!

Joy Pocast #2: The Science of Birds

Birds are really cool and stuff. This is just a podcast on different birds and behaviours and lives of birds and feathers, nests, and eggs. It’s neat. But fairly self explanatory.

Joy Pocast #3: Specimens

Specimens is a podcast by Elle Kaye and it focuses on interviewing people in different fields related to science and conservation. The podcast covers topics like: science educators, entomology, taxidermy, diaphonization, museum work, and more. The podcast unpacks odd or strange jobs and focuses on how they contribute to important conservation and education work for nature.

You can see, there’s like a naturalist theme between all these podcasts. Also yeah, I don’t listen to a single Design or Art podcast don’t @ me lol.

I’d love to know: what podcasts or anything else (books, shows, movies, etc) is on your shame guilt list that you feel you SHOULD be the type of person who enjoys it but always find yourself shying away from it?

And what are you listening/watching/consuming instead - the stuff that actually brings you joy and lights you up to learn about?

I know I can’t be alone in this and that probably everyone has something they feel guilty about not consuming yet. I’m sure that everyone’s two wolves are different. My black wolf of biology stuff might be your guilty white wolf or vice versa.

I’ve also now removed all these podcasts from my list and cleaned out my miscellaneous saved episodes to also remove all guilt-inducing content. And I’ve since listened to like 4 podcasts I enjoy and am very happy for it.

If you enjoyed this issue and would like to support my work here, consider buying me a coffee here! This is what feels more comfortable to me than setting up a monthly subscription for this Substack right now! It’s entirely optional and only for those who wish to support a little and have the financial means to do so!

Ink Made from Air Pollution

The first interesting ink is made from the carbon in the air. Produced by Graviky Labs, the ink is literally carbon black. Graviky Lab’s founder originally started researching ink from air pollution while he was studying at MIT. Carbon black is a common pigment for blacks and is usually extracted from fossil fuel sources. The same is true of AIR-INK, however it’s been pulled from the atmosphere instead of the ground. This means it’s using already burned fossil fuels to create it, instead of raw materials.

While technically, the ink is removing emissions from the atmosphere, there’s no way the ink can truly scale up to make a significant or meaningful impact on climate crisis. That’s alright though, it doesn’t have to solve climate change to be an interesting and impressive result!

Each marker holds about 30 milliliters of AIR-INK, which is equivalent to approximately 45 minutes of diesel car pollution.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine

AIR-INK is available in marker and screen print ink form. Kinda tempted to buy a marker now haha!

Visit the AIR-INK Website

To learn more about carbon black inks and sustainable alternatives, check out this issue on Algae ink!

Jeppe Ringsted’s Work with Soot in Water

By using the techniques of suminagashi (Japanese marbling technique) and serigraphy (placing paper on water to get a print), Ringsted works with India Ink pigments (made from soot and sap) to create intricate and beautiful snapshots of the ripple patterns on water, be it in a creek, tidepool, or ocean.

The ink is neutral to the environment and leaves no harmful chemicals, his art does not damage any area he places it down on. He uses only a few drops of ink, most of which is captured by the paper.

More process vidoes are available on his Instagram. He marks each piece with the geographic coordinates of the print.

Giving Fish a Second Life through Prints

Gyotaku is the Japanese art of making a print of a fish. It originated as a form of nature printing that was used by fishermen to record catches. It has since become an art form itself.

Gyotaku embodies the oldest form of taxidermy. Although it has been refined for a long time, it holds a wealth of data on marine life in Japan, allowing the cataloguing of its biodiversity.

On each print, the fishers wrote down the measurements of the catch, the name of the species, the place and date, and then signed it. Sometimes they added an ode to the sea to express their profound respect. The print of a body, in the detail of each of its scales, was an homage to the beauty of nature.
Source: Beside Magazine

There are several different ways that gyotaku or “fish rub” prints can be made, resulting in different levels of detail depending on whether or not you ink the fish directly or apply rice paper to the fish first and then ink. The ink is made from soot and vegetable oil to be entirely nontoxic.

In Canada, Alexis Aubin-Laperrière has spent years learning the art of gyotaku. One day he caught a particularly ugly mackrel but decided to try making a print of it.

For Alexis, each gyotaku is a window into the underwater world, but especially the improbable trace of an encounter between an artist and a fish, between the ephemeral and the indelible.

Through the art of gyotaku his relationship to fishing and to art has transformed. The act of printing the fish is the act of bringing it back to life, to be preserved forever on paper.

Read 'Imprinting Memories with Gyotaku'

Foraging in Your Backyard for Inks and Pigments

This is where I got first introduced to making your own pigments: Jason Logan’s book Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (2018).

His book is the perfect place to start: it features a recipe for trying out a pigment from anything you forage, instructions for specific colours he’s tried, and encouragement that it’s all about the fun of trying things out. No matter what happens with the colour in the moment or over time. Natural inks are living inks and will change over time.

Foraged dyestuffs can often result in surprising outcomes, I encountered this even recently when I made an ink from purple basil: it produced a desaturated greenish colour from bright purple leaves.

The external appearance of a plant is not always an indicator of the colour that it will produce. For instance, black walnuts impart a brown colour despite their name and lime-green husk, and the deep purple berries of buckthorn bestow a hazy light green.

Source: Beside Magazine

This is part of what makes natural ink and dyes so fun to experiment with. It’s fairly simple work in some ways: most of the recipes just involve boiling the ingredient with water, salt, and vinegar for several hours until it’s simmered down into a thicker concentration of pigment in the water. It’s something you can set up and leave relatively alone (although not entirely alone) and just check in on it every hour or so to see how it swatches! I am able to do it even in a tiny 400sq ft apartment. Just make sure you have an old pot that isn’t used for foodstuffs, a funnel, a coffee filter, and a jar to put the ink in (I use old spice jars haha).

View Full Natural Ink Recipe

I’d love to know: Would you try out any of these natural ink techniques? Have you done anything with natural inks before?

If you enjoyed this issue and would like to support my work here, consider buying me a coffee here! This is what feels more comfortable to me than setting up a monthly subscription for this substack right now! It’s entirely optional and only for those who wish to support a little and have the financial means to do so!

After doing more research into gyotaku for this issue, I now really want to try that, although I’m not sure how feasible that one is in a small apartment. I am not a fisherman and I don’t particularly want to buy a fish from the grocery store just to do a print with.

I am now imagining finding a dead fish while beachcombing and bringing it back in a little container on the bus and having a good little chuckle. If you’re into more witchy activities like this, check out my personal substack, Strandline. In the latest issue, I wrote about my purple basil dye experiments.

The Strandline

No.12–Experiments in Purple Basil Dye

My summer plans to make a purple basil dye were fairly waylaid. Due to a number of chaotic reasons including but not limited to being sick for 2 months, my poor purple basil didn’t get enough sun, didn’t get enough water, and was in a generally dreary state come late-August. I got it to limp along until I could try and salvage an ink batch out of it…

Read more

3 years ago · Emma Fanning

This issue feels most natural if I frame it as a collection of my thoughts and the creative explorations I’ve been undertaking recently that have been gently mending my burnout.

1.
Burnout is such a funny thing: it’s almost pitched as being this simple thing where once you realize you have it, you can reduce your work (in theory), take a bit of distance from “overworking” and then in a few weeks, or possibly even a few days, you’re back to being a productive member of society.

This hasn’t been my experience, and I’m sure matches almost nobody’s experience. Burnout mending I’ve realized for me isn’t just about taking space, it’s about doing the right things while I’m taking space away from work. It’s not just as simple as sitting around relaxing and doing non-work things like household maintenance or such. For me, it’s important to actively push myself to engage in hobbies or activities that are positively mentally stimulating in some way: art, reading, research, some kind of dabbling in a creative endeavour of some kind.

And yet, it’s really difficult to motivate yourself to do these things when you have the combination of burnout-depression and burnout-aggression where small inconveniences feel like large frustrating events. To combat such things, I’ve created a notion list of all the activities I want to do in this last half of the year, as well as some basic self-care reminders (workout, take a bath, paint my nails so I don’t pick at them, etc.)

The list has been helpful beyond measure: I reference it frequently, and even added images to each listing so I’m visually met with the inspiration that made me want to do that activity in the first place. I’m happy to say that I’ve already done 4 things off this list in the last week, and I think it was thanks to the images.

2.
I’ve been feeling bad I made promises about posting weekly in September and then gloriously have failed at that. Despite working on my burnout and SADs with daily sun lamp and morning pages, it’s still frustrating to not have capacity to work on everything you want. The guilt seeped into this post as well and made me procrastinate on posting because somehow it feels a post like this in a string of personal-style essays here on this space is “low effort”. But it’s not, and the personal essays always perform the best! Not that I really care about metrics for this. But I get a lot more replies and lovely conversations going on these styles of posts! :) I can return to some more serious essays when I’m ready. It’s better to take things at the pace I can manage than trying to push and failing and achieving less than I could have if I took it slower. This is me giving permission to myself to write weeklyish and return to writing detailed, researched essays when I’m ready.

3.
It’s decidedly Fall now. As soon as September 1st rolled around, my Substack inbox was filled with excited posts about the autumnal season being the best of the year.

Contrary to seemingly everyone, I don’t like Fall (anyone else? haha). The weather is fickle, the rains start (it’s not a crisp, dry fall on the Pacific NW Coast, it’s a soppy fall where the colourful leaves don’t last very long), seasonal affective disorder creeps into my life, and wasps get particularly aggressive. I struggle to find a part of the season I enjoy. But I’m endeavouring to change it this year: I want to find the joy of the season in some way. I think the key is mushrooms. I want to learn to make lake pigments from natural dye baths (just need a few supplies), and I want to learn specifically how to extract pigments from mushrooms, turn them into lake pigments, and then, eventually, buy a glass muller to turn these pigments into my own personalized watercolor palettes.

I was inspired to learn mycopigments from the Mushroom Color Atlas, which is a beyond-incredible resource about all the pigments you can extract from mushrooms.

I’ve decided I’m going to take a local class this year on how to properly and safely identify, forage, and collect mushrooms locally. It’s later on in the season, but I’m excited. I don’t plan on foraging to eat, so that definitely removes most of the risk in a wrong-ID but I still want to learn about foraging correctly and ethically.

4.
While actualizing my project list, I decided to try and salvage a dyebath from my purple basil. It was bought with dye intent, but after being sick the entire summer I wasn’t able to give it the sun it needed and it was now dying (haha) at the end of the season. A more detailed post coming soon on Strandline if you want to know more about it, but here’s the result.

5.
As a tangent off of this, I want to learn how to make lake pigments. This is the process of turning a standard dyebath (usually created through either boiling the material or through an ammonia solution if you’re working with lichens) and make it a shelf-stable powdered pigment. You can do this with any natural dye you extract by adding the right combination of alum and soda ash until the PH is correct and causes a separation of the pigments. Once that’s done, you can rise the pigment and dry it on a coffee filter. It’s then shelf-stable and you can store it in a vial and eventually mill it into a watercolor paint in the future. This video has an excellent demonstration of how easy it is to make a lake pigment!

6.
This is where my head’s been at these last few weeks. I am hoping that with direction on personal projects that are outside of a screen and outside of design, the mending can continue. Thank you to everyone who reads these issues weekly; as much as burnout is hard, Substack and this community brings me such joy. To everyone who’s written me and had a conversation with me, thank you. It’s a lovely joy to talk with you all!

What personal projects are you working on or looking forward to doing?

Do you also struggle with autumn?

Got any ideas for me on other ways to love the season?

I would love to know!

Have you experienced anything similar? This was all too familiar to me over the second half of last year, when I was required to work through long covid. It’s the purest manifestation of my burnout on design and being a designer, especially a designer that can handle “high-level” branding/packaging/web projects on my own. And now, after nearly month of being incredibly sick, I’m experiencing it again.

Recovering from burnout isn’t linear and I have no doubt that being so acutely ill over July dredged up a lot of the baggage of long covid. And so I once again find myself in a place where the act of designing gives me a physical reaction of anxiety. I’m writing this essay both in hoping to find some catharsis from writing it out but also to share some of the toolkit I developed for myself to help myself get out of this state. It’s different now from when I had long covid: I feel I have coping mechanisms to draw on to ease my stress.

I wrote this first introduction when I thought I was well for the second time (so, in between my second and third round of antibiotics) and now, as I’ve been sick for approximately 40 days, this draft has been in my Substack for weeks. I’m (embarrassingly!) finding it even hard to talk about my burnout. It feels intimidating not just to do design work, but also to write this first Substack back from my impromptu hiatus. It feels scary to send an email again, to try and achieve a sense of normal when my last month and a half have been anything but.

It’s hard to lose a routine. I’ve been writing weekly essays here since February or March and now I’ve opened and closed this one more times than I can count. Nothing’s changed from the introduction: I still feel pretty damn burned out, now I’m just struggling to find the words to share about it too, as I know that actually getting back into a routine, trying to get on the bandwagon again of sending weekly Substacks is actually more likely than not a step towards not feeling that way. Substack has been a place of joy and I love writing these essays, it just is a bit harder right now. The gears are a little rusty, but it’s time to get them turning again. Hiding away from this draft won’t help me feeling any better about being gone so long!

It’s hard to fall out of the little routines of your life: before getting sick I was working out regularly for the first time in my life and it feels like a personal failing to have been wrenched away from those routines, even though I couldn’t control it at all.

Which I suppose brings me to some of the things I’ve been trying to implement even before feeling 100% better (antibiotics are funny that way where you start feeling better right away, just as long as it’s the right one).

Practical Realities of Managing Burnout

Too often the advice for getting over burnout is “Outsource!” or “Only do what you love!”, which is all fine and dandy if you have a comfortable amount of money to spare on outsourcing to pay someone fairly and sustainably. I honestly don’t have the money to do that. I’m the sole breadwinner for my family of my husband and our cat and I don’t have much luxury to take an extended “finding myself” leave and it involves managing balancing enough work to pay the bills while being able to take more time than myself. And this in itself can feel and did feel exhausting and overwhelming.

The idea of working on more than one client project or request at once felt like an absolutely impossible task mentally and emotionally. I had to turn a lot of work away during the last month as I knew I was at my limit with two projects as it was (even though one was just a powerpoint design). I don’t regret doing that at all; a previous version of me would have tried to work through the illness and suffered deeply for it. I had the confidence and clarity this time to be able to turn away work I knew I couldn’t sustainably handle.

Toolkit #1: Morning Pages

One of the best tricks I picked up while trying literally everything to feel like myself again post-covid was doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Everyone recommends this and I decided to give it a try. I can’t say I was a huge fan of the work as a whole, a lot of the prompts and questions felt repetitive, unrelatable (as the author has a lot of rich person privilege of being in rich ppl circles in big cities), or too consumerist focused (a lot of them wanted you to buy stuff and I did not want to do that). But I absolutely loved the concept of morning pages.

Every morning first thing you write 3 pages of stream of consciousness writing. It doesn’t matter what you write: whatever is on your mind. To-do lists, complaints, worries, anxieties, miscellaneous thoughts, no matter what, just keep writing for three pages and brain-dump everything onto the page. And then you never have to look back on it or read it again. But I found this practice extremely therapeutic when I had long covid for bringing clarity to both my individual days and my general outlook and goals. I could feel the difference when I skipped a day: I was agitated, unfocused, and prone to more distraction or upset.

I’ve brought out the morning pages again during this time and it’s again helped me sort my feelings on how to return to Substack, how I need to be kind to my body that’s struggling against a bacterial infection and how pushing it won’t work out well for me. If you’ve never given it a try, I highly recommend it with any notebook you have lying around. It feels uncomfortable at first, but I find the mental-load I carry is hugely relieved by just writing and venting and rambling about whatever shit is bouncing around in my brain first thing in the morning.

Toolkit #2: Quitting Social Media

I did it. I finally did it. I quit Instagram. Without much fanfare honestly. Before, I wrote a long post on how much I was hating Instagram but was scared to leave.

Shortly after writing that post, I tried to do some more posts on Instagram but it felt like the algorithm changed YET AGAIN to make any post reach to my followers AND new viewers nearly impossible (I started reaching 50-80 of 2,300 people.) After a few experiments and then a reel that also performed like shit, I decided to just straight up leave it be and wrote in my bio I moved to substack.

I regret nothing. I deleted the app off my phone. I don’t have TikTok. I barely have Facebook and now that the Canadian government banned news on Meta (lol), I see no news now (other than what I look at on my preferred leftist news outlets). I feel gloriously oblivious to so much of the doomscroll and fuckery of the internet that brings your mental health down.

Toolkit #3: The Help of a Friend

This one’s perhaps unrelatable in some ways as it’s not accessible to everyone and is unique to my situation, but I want to mention it anyway. I’m doing branding subcontract work under my dear friend where the pressures of interacting with the client and selling the concept to them, processing revisions etc, is not on my plate. I’m doing strictly behind-the-scenes work for her and she’s been absolutely the sweetest and kindest. We’re doing work in Figma together and she comes over and comments things like this on my designs.

It feels very safe and she was really encouraging even when I told her I was scared to work on the project (and lowkey tried to reject it first from anxiety). She believed in me, and her trust was everything. I still don’t know that I could do a brand project on my own right now, but her unshakable confidence in me and support has been invaluable to helping ease the anxiety.

There’s a lot of ways to be a freelance designer or “business owner” and I’ve realized that what’s best for my mental health and comfort isn’t always about being the one who’s shouldering the responsibility of large, high-stakes projects like brands or websites. Sometimes the right option for me is just help out behind the scenes. It doesn’t have the glitz and glam of taking on these projects yourself, but I’d take a happy co-design relationship with a supportive friend who needs assistance any day over the “prestige” of stressing out over complex projects on my own.

And of course, it would be remiss not to mention just simply how a supportive friend can make scary things feel not so scary anymore.

She writes a lovely substack herself, I highly recommend giving it a follow.

Figures & Figures

Soulful Thoughts on Data and the Ordinary by Gabrielle Merite.

By Gabrielle Merite

Toolkit #4: Prioritizing Joy

This one might seem a little oversimplified or cheesy, but I find when I get burned out it’s hard for me to even make the time for what brings me joy because I feel a crippling pressure of responsibility to complete [x] task that is required of me before I’m “allowed” to do something fun.

I’ve been trying to do things differently this time being sick. I’ve been allowing myself fun first instead of tiring myself out doing the obligatory thing first and not having enough energy left over for the thing that sparks joy.

This has looked like making time to go to the museum to sketch and see a behind the scenes tour on a workday, writing for my personal publication, The Strandline before returning here, and taking a lot of time to read fun things like romcom shoujo manga and picking up A Court of Thorns and Roses which is objectively badly written but very fun in my current state if I turn off my brain.

I’ve also been superbly enjoying the “Seek” app by iNaturalist that uses your phone camera and an AI to live-ID creatures, plants, and more as you see them! It’s really neat watching the ID come up right away and you can save the photo and catalogue that creature or plant into your iNaturalist account and Seek species library. It gives you little challenges to find nature in your area and broader challenges you can participate in along with others too. I used to have no clue what any of the plants around me were on walks, and now, through continued usage of Seek, I feel like I have a much deeper and more nuanced understanding and relationship to the environment around me. Not that I’ve been able to go out on walks that much while sick, but when I have, it’s brought a lot of joy.

Anyone that hangs around me long enough knows that I love anime and manga. I always have since I was a teenager and discovered it and then spent time in my later young-adult years feeling that this hobby was embarrassing and cringe and I had to kill it to be a “proper adult” and tried to hide this part of myself for a long time. This recent year I’ve started to really embrace my joy of this hobby again and it feels freeing and wonderful. Like I’m really able to reconnect with a part of myself again honestly and authentically. While I was sick, I was reading manga on my phone and discovered a manga entirely around deep sea marine biology. Each chapter features a storyline around a unique creature and the whole experience was honestly so joyful it was a hugely bright spot in a very rough period of time. And the art is just stunning:

In this season of my life, I’m embracing what I love even if that’s cheesy romance stories, japanese manga, awkward, tentative amateur watercolour art or being a huge naturalist nerd. Noticeably, none of these things sparking joy are about design, but that’s for another ramble ;)

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to resume a weekly pace in August. I’m going to make a good faith effort towards it, but after being sick for so long, I want to give myself also the space I need to not go into the fall and seasonal depression time in a better head space.

I have more thoughts on this space, the course I developed and how my feelings have developed around that experience, and what I think might make sense for my design and educational content going forward, but perhaps I’ll save that for another letter.

September seems absolutely lovely for weekly emails again, but I’m going to take August as it comes: it might look like weekly emails or perhaps just one more this month. All I can promise is that I’m working on things, and I will return to a weekly schedule in Fall as I loved the routine and being engaged here and know returning will bring me great joy over the long-term.

Thanks for being here and supporting this publication. It’s the first time I’ve really been “writing” as a core portion of my career. And I’m really loving it. Seeing people follow this space gives me a huge amount of joy, and I’m really looking forward to how this space will evolve in the second half of the year.

What are your best toolkit pieces for recovering from burnout? What have you learned from previous or current burnout experiences?

Leave a comment

Essays I’m working on (or at least, attempting to chip away at):

• A close look into ecobrutalist architecture and design: What it is? Is it truly sustainable? How might it help us re-envision a sustainable future?

• An honest discussion of business finances and expenses and the peer-pressure around buying design assets often found in the online design community. (ie: No, you don’t need that font!).

• Some thoughts/rambles about whether or not it’s possible to be an “ethical” or “sustainable” brand designer for product-based businesses and how dizzying the world of brand design can be at times.

• Plans for the Green Graphic Design course for this year.

This barbie is also (still) too sick to write a proper Substack. With the launch and hype of Barbie movie, this is maybe the only things I can think of to share this week.

On one of the (seemingly rare) days I felt up for a walk, as we walked past the movie theatre to enter the bird sanctuary trails, a shiny black vinyl plastic cursive ‘B’ stared back at me. Of course. Plastic waste destined to stay on this Earth far longer than the cultural impact the movie will ever have.

I’ve felt a bit icky about the Barbie movie ever since the trailer. It painted a cheeky mocking feminist picture of the toy brand fit for our late-stage capitalist society, but something just didn’t sit right. After all, Barbie is, at the end of the day, a brand not just an original movie. A brand made by corporations. To sell us things. That we probably (definitely) don’t need.

Today I bring you a few pieces from other amazing writers and thinkers to read and ponder that might change your views on the Barbie film and how authentic it is (or maybe isn’t).

“How the Barbie movie merch undermines the Barbie movie script” by Jessica DeFino

The Unpublishable

Barbie Has Cellulite (But You Don't Have To)

There is a moment in the Barbie movie when Barbie (Margot Robbie), in the midst of dancing at a Barbie party, turns to her Barbie friends and asks, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” The record scratches. The music stops. Dolls don’t think about death…

Read more

3 years ago · 844 likes · 38 comments · Jessica DeFino

If the Barbie production “speaks directly to women … about the impossibility of perfection,” as the New York Times Magazine insists, its products speak directly to women about the importance of attempting it anyway.

The Plastic Feminism of Barbie by @verilybitchie

A deeper dive into the history of Barbie and its “feminism”, and also what Mattel, the toy brand that owns Barbie as a franchise, has to say about the film. It also covers why Barbie’s new “eco-friendly” recycled plastic scheme is just some fancy greenwashing of plastic components.

And you know, it wouldn’t really be a true Substack if I didn’t at least mention the environmental impact once. Curious about the carbon footprint of Barbie? Check out these links:

1. In a Barbie world: Tonnes of Barbie dolls may end up in landfill after movie frenzy

2. Barbie Product’s life cycle

I’m sure there will be some folks here who don’t want their Barbie dreamland reneged on. And I get that. It’s hard to find joy sometimes and I’m not trying to inherently take that away. I’m sure some of you might feel I can’t talk shit about it until I’ve seen it. But I’m just not that into massive multi-million dollar campaigns to sell toys or products through films: it’s certainly not new, but Barbie sure re-popularized it this year.

Shoutout to my bestie Amy for a. encouraging me to send this post today since I had already written it on Monday and b. helping me workshop the title in my sick state. I love “brandwash” that we came up with, just a catch-all for greenwashing, wokewashing, and whatever else you can apply under the umbrella for a brand behaving badly.

Hopefully next week I’ll be feeling better. It’s Day 19 of being sick as I write this. Fingers crossed.

Welcome to my latest essay:

Also, fair warning, this is a super long rant/essay, so feel free to read it in chunks.

The Mental-Health Problem

After I caught Covid, and subsequently long-covid, I didn’t post on Instagram in any serious way for over a year. And, when I was recovered and felt capable of returning, I just couldn’t find the spark in me anymore. In fact, I was trying to reduce my screen time on Instagram: I would spend hours just scrolling the explore page and it was hurting my mental health. The last thing I wanted to do was spend more time on Instagram making posts, posting stories.

Over the last few months, I’ve actually set up a proper app-blocker (Opal) that blocks my access to Instagram all day unless I ask it for permission to enter the app (and it only lets me do 15 minutes at a time maximum). It’s reduced my daily phone screen time from 5-6 hours (9 on bad days) to around 3, and I’ve been happier for it. I only unblock it to check DMs and post stories. But even DMs I can access on my desktop website version of Instagram without triggering the doomscroll.

And you might be like thinking, I don’t spend that much time on my phone, you have a problem. Maybe. But these apps are designed to be addictive and steal your time, attention, and data from you. There’s much more interesting things I can be doing with my time (like writing Substacks, doing art) than scrolling on social media and feeling the ambient crush of the world sink into me.

The Business Problem

So, where does this leave Instagram as a tool for my business? The truth is I deeply dislike making carousel posts now. It feels draining to think about how to condense detailed topics into 400 words maximum (and only like 50 on each slide). I feel like I’m only able to deliver awful surface-level content on there now, and it’s one of the main reasons I’ve been just loving writing long-form content on Substack.

Somehow, writing weekly essays of 1500-2000 words is MUCH easier to me than making a fancy graphic in Canva with 300 words on it once or twice a month. I really want to be able to provide thoughtful written pieces to my followers and community who care about green graphic design, and it feels incredibly cheap and dishonest to be basically gutting interesting ideas into a shell of themselves for Instagram.

I wanted to find a way to leave, and this is partially how I found my way to Substack, in an attempt to be able to leave a social media platform that made me only feel bad vibes when I went on it. But I was/am extremely nervous and scared to abandon it entirely.

My main fear is that through Instagram is how future students of the Green Graphic Design Course find me most often, and the course is one of my proudest business achievements. If I could devote 100% of my time to education for green design and the course because Substack created a way to introduce people to the course and further their green design learning, I would absolutely love that.

I’d happily drop client work if I could be a full-time writer, researcher, and educator for design (hell, I’m honestly a bit scared to admit that here on Substack as it feels like a huge deviation from what’s “socially acceptable” in the design community to admit… and it feels like a far-off goal that might not ever be achievable. Same with the idea of gently monetizing this Substack and providing bonus content, I am not ready for that yet, and nervous about the idea even though I’d love it more than anything to write even more here…).

But despite that, surely it would be easy to just stop doing what you don’t like, right? That’s what every design-business advice tells you lol. That or outsource, which quite bluntly, we cannot afford to do while paying someone fairly, so that’s off the table for us. I wanted to understand the issue a bit deeper though, why I felt such fear and dread at the idea of leaving a platform that I honestly hated.

The Research… ie. the TEA on EXACTLY why big Social Media Platforms SUCK.

When I don’t understand something, I research it. And so that’s what I began to do. I stumbled upon 3 important resources: the first, “How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Orville, the second “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back” by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, and finally third, an article by Cory Doctorow, entitled “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok: Or how, exactly, platforms die.”

All three gave me unique perspectives (and comfort) on my feelings around Instagram and helped lay down in a clearer picture both why the platform made me feel bad and why I was also deeply scared to leave it. And I wanted to break down some of this insane shit here. There are actually specific reasons to what’s going on with Instagram and social media platforms and why the experience is frustrating and un-enjoyable.

The “Enshittification” of Instagram

One of Cory Doctorow’s key thesis ideas is that social media platforms are destined to undergo what he calls “enshittification”. This is basically the process these advertising-based platforms undergo to push their profits to the max, at the expense of both users and businesses.

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. -The “Enshittification” of Tiktok

Cory Doctorow makes the case that for Facebook the enshittification process went like this: first, they wanted users, so they encouraged everyone you knew— friends and family—to join and stay connected with each other. Facebook showed you only the feed of people you were friends with. By doing this, users are entrenched after a short period of time: to leave means missing out on the connections with your loved ones. To leave means convincing them all to leave with you too.

Next, it was time to advertise: Facebook started to show you posts on your feed from companies you didn’t follow: mostly news/media companies but also businesses. Soon, these businesses became dependent on Facebook’s algorithm to drive traffic to their own websites. And the final step was to monetize: Facebook suddenly prioritized both business/media posts unless you paid to “boost your reach”. Paying for the ads was the only way to have any kind of reach, no matter who you were on the platform.

I feel that this process isn’t too dissimilar from Instagram: at first it showed us everyone we followed in our feed and it was awesome! You could have really cool interactions with people and really grow organically. Then, the recommended posts and sponsored posts came in. And now, not only do you barely see the people you follow in your feed, you have to basically pay for advertising in order to get any significant reach. Also, side mini rant, but I tried to monetize the course advertising once on Instagram and it blocked my ad from running because climate crisis messaging was inappropriate for advertising lol.

Inside “Chokepoint Capitalism”, another problematic framework of the algorithm for creatives was discussed:

“[Youtube’s] algorithm shapes creativity: ‘The topics discussed in videos, genres engaged with, video lengths, titles utilized, video thumbnail design, and organization of speech.” -Chokepoint Capitalism

I can’t help but feel this applies directly to Instagram as well. The content that performs the best isn’t the kind of content I would create independently: reels and carousels are shaping our creative process: the types of media we create, the topics we talk about, and even how we talk about those topics. I certainly can’t talk about why I hate Instagram or why X company is greenwashed in 300 words on a carousel or 1 minute video.

But you CAN quickly and effectively pass along misinformation like “Did you know a cotton bag is actually 1000x more bad for the environment than a plastic one? OMG!” (Yeah, only if you don’t count every important life-cycle analysis metric that actually matters. Once you do that the cotton bag reigns supreme after closer to 10 uses). And of course, it would take more than 300 words to debunk that myth as well! And my debunk wouldn’t trend as fast or intensely as the misinformation making it feel like I’m screaming uselessly into the void.

It doesn’t end there though:

“Creators are encouraged to pursue a quantity-over-quality approach if they want to achieve success. This, combined with a lack of clarity around what content exactly YouTube will promote and what might be demonetized, leads to an extremely precarious and stressful working life for creators.” - Zoë Glatt (from Chokepoint Capitalism)

Once again, I feel this is extremely transferable to Instagram. I totally relate to this: it is stressful, and it feels extremely precarious. I’m sure most of you can also relate to this—you never know if a post you upload will perform well or if it will flop, often the things you work the hardest on can perform the worst, and vice versa.

As small businesses on Instagram, we basically know our posts won’t be shown to our own followers unless we a. pay for advertising or b. make a high-performing post. But we’re also left entirely in a lurch for how to even make a “high-performing” post. The algorithm is entirely opaque to us, no matter what Mosseri occasionally reveals on his Instagram stories (more on that later).

I find this aspect particularly crushing in the sustainable space. On Instagram, I’m constantly bombarded with misinformation around sustainability, both in the design space and in general. It makes it feel like a very frustrating place to be in because it is very depressing to see harmful sustainable information circulating so successfully. I’m not equipped to debunk it all in Instagram’s formats, nor would it matter much even if I did because it wouldn’t be sent to my followers. This bleeds into the next point that was quite cathartic to read about in Orville’s “How To Do Nothing”: how Instagram and social media at large has intentionally created an uncomfortable space to exist in.

Misinformation and Hysteria Keeps Us Coming Back

Jenny Orville identifies some of the mental health struggles that can plague us on social media, as intentionally designed by the platforms themselves to drive engagement:

“…one of the most troubling ways social media has been used in recent years is to foment waves of hysteria and fear, both by news media and by users themselves. Whipped into a permanent state of frenzy, people create and subject themselves to news cycles, complaining of anxiety at the same time they check back ever more diligently. The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of “arms race” of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.

Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement. Meanwhile, media companies continue churning out deliberately incendiary takes, and we’re so quickly outraged by their headlines that we can’t even consider the option of not reading and sharing them.” -How To Do Nothing

This is one of the areas I’ve been struggling with, especially for how I post about environmental education/research for sustainable design on Instagram. Outrageous or overly simplified/positive ideas (like yet another ocean garbage plastic catcher designed by a teenager that will break within months due to the volume of microplastics, just like the last 10 overhyped inventions for this task) are what gain traction.

I can’t ethically or honourably pretend even those “positive” solutions are worth posting, because in my mind, that’s almost as bad as posting misinformation minimizing how serious the climate crisis is. My research or nuanced points simply don’t drive engagement. I know that, generally, at least in the community I build (and definitely here!) my followers do seek out that kind of content as preferable, but what does it matter if none of my followers even get to see it when it doesn’t pass Instagram’s initial engagement test to show to them.

“It is not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger… We have to be able to do both: to contemplate and participate, to leave and always come back to where we are needed.” -How To Do Nothing

A quiet, contemplative approach is what I’m trying to achieve here on Substack, in a way I was never able to do on Instagram. I want to be able to have space to reflect on trends, news, and research and actually provide interesting nuance, investigation, and build a space where we can have thoughtful conversations about these kinds of topics.

I don’t want to spend my time trying to reduce interesting ideas into like “bite-sized” sticky ideas that will either outrage people or encourage mindless sharing in the hopes of bending the algorithm for ultimate gains in followers. This doesn’t even get into the fact that 3% engagement is apparently a “good” engagement rate on Instagram nowadays… AWFUL! We are all dying on this hill for 3% engagement rate on thousands of followers?! But this is the problem: if it’s so awful, why aren’t we all leaving…

So, Why Can’t We Leave?

On Instagram, we don’t have “Freedom of Exit”. This is often what people talk about when they say you don’t “own your following” and you need to “start your email list”. This is generally true, although it’s more complicated than people make it out to be. To truly own your email list you need to be able to have an actively updated data-base that’s saved directly on your computer and isn’t wrapped up in the servers of whatever platform you’re using to send emails. This is true of Substack, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, any of them. These platforms are as likely to suddenly fuck up, experience downtime, or disappear same as Instagram or Facebook is.

Freedom of exit—the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought and preserving the data you created. -The “Enshittification” of Tiktok

But it is important to note that these email providers DO allow you to download and import your data elsewhere. Substack allows you to download your follower’s information and port it to a different platform if you want (hell, they even encourage you to do so if you truly feel Substack isn’t a good fit). We can’t download and input our Instagram followers anywhere else. They’re locked in Instagram and we have no way to contact them elsewhere.

This is what entrenches users and businesses to stay on platforms undergoing enshittification, as discussed earlier. They’re designed intentionally to keep you there, even though the platforms suck because of sunk cost fallacy: the time you spent building that audience can’t be gained back or transferred if you move platforms. The only option is to leave it behind with a pleaded ask that people follow you in your new destination. It doesn’t matter how much Meta makes the platform awful or ineffective for you, personally or professionally, you can’t leave because they make it near impossible to.

The reasons why I am enjoying Substack so much are threefold: (1) it doesn’t rely on advertising it relies on subscriptions, so—ideally—will not be subject to the same enshittification process as the other social media platforms, (2) it allows me to write long-form content to my community and read other people’s amazing Substacks and (3) I can leave and transfer my following elsewhere if I want. Also, Substack is extremely transparent with how to succeed on the platform and offers MANY excellent guides about how exactly to set up your content, how to write good content, and how their recommendation process works. I don’t feel in the dark at all about how Substack functions as a platform.

But I haven’t left Instagram yet for the reasons above. I’m scared to leave when I feel I could be still missing out on potential audience reach, even though it seems every day that passes, that reach is harder and more unobtainable to receive despite having new followers incoming. It matters because in the economic downtown, work for us has been slower. And during my almost full year with long-covid, my business took a pretty serious hit financially as well, as I wasn’t able to take on the same amount of work as usual. As a freelancer, I was prepared and have emergency funds for situations exactly like that, but of course, lean times can’t go on in perpetuity.

The course is an important income stream for us, even with its low pricing, and I can’t risk cutting off a potentially valuable stream of accessibility to students easily. Many of the ethical marketing decisions we made to create the course (lifetime access, evergreen openings, fair and equitable pricing model, etc.) did hurt our sales overall, and while I’ll never back down from the accessible education model I chose for the course, I do know if we had marketed the course more “normally” in enrollment cycles, it would have driven higher sales overall. But this isn’t what I want to do. I want to be able to find a way to have an accessible, fair education model for our Green Design course while also being able to make a modest income to be able to save for my partner and I’s future.

The Future of Instagram, According to Zucc Himself

Instagram is currently undergoing changes and won’t be staying the same, even in this current, shitty state. On July 27, 2022, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, went on stories (likely in response to backlash from the Kardashians and general public complaining that Instagram was no longer a photo sharing app as photos were being de-prioritized in favour of reels), and admitted that Instagram had “overfocused” on video in the last year and “re-affirmed” that photo sharing was still important to the platform. Many users took this as a sign that Instagram was going to switch their focus and restore itself to some of the former glory days. That reels would now be the de-prioritized ones, and photos would have their reign again.

One day later though, it was Meta’s quarterly earnings call and Mark Zuckerberg, who ultimately is the one making the decisions, not Mosseri, had something else to say about it. The transcript for the call is available here, but I’ll be pulling the sections relating to the future of Instagram through 2023.

In regards to the feeds, Zuckerberg stated that AI-based feed recommendations are going to grow and drive most of what we see on our Instagram feeds:

One of the main transformations in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being driven primarily by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by AI recommending content that you'll find interesting from across Facebook or Instagram, even if you don't follow those creators.

He further goes on to say that:

Right now, about 15% of content in a person’s Facebook feed and a little more than that of their Instagram feed is recommended by our AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don’t follow. We expect these numbers to more than double by the end of next year. As our AI finds additional content that people find interesting, that increases engagement and the quality of our feeds. Since we’re already efficient at monetizing most of these formats, this should increase our business opportunity over that period as well.

Functionally, this means that our feeds, as awful as they are, are likely only 15-20% AI recommended, and are only going to get worse with 30%+ being the goal for our feeds by the end of 2023. Functionally, this means that our reach and viability as users of Instagram is only going to get worse.

Zucc also talks about reels, and says nearly the opposite of Mosseri:

Reels engagement is also growing quickly. I shared last quarter that Reels already made up 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram. This quarter we saw a more than 30% increase in the time that people spent engaging with Reels across Facebook and Instagram. AI advances are driving a lot of these improvements.

One near term challenge is the growth of short-form video. Reels doesn't yet monetize at the same rate as feed or stories, so in the near term, the faster that Reels grows, the more revenue that actually displaces from higher-monetizing surfaces. Now in theory, we could mitigate this short term headwind by pushing less hard on growing Reels, but that would be worse for our products and business longer term since we're confident that Reels will grow engagement overall and quality will eventually monetize closer to feed. Our work on ads monetization efficiency for Reels is actually making faster progress than we'd expected. We've now crossed $1B annual revenue run rate for Reels ads, and Reels also has a higher revenue run rate than Stories did at identical times post launch. So the bottom line is I think we're on track here, and we just need to push through this one.

Zuckerberg actually states that pushing less hard on Reels is the wrong approach and that they will be pushed harder to force ad monetization more intensely on the platform to increase engagement and profits.

It’s also notable, that just earlier in this year, Mosseri effectively backtracked his own position on reels being “overfocused” in an “update”:

“To the degree that there is more video on Instagram over time, it’s going to be because that’s what’s driving overall engagement more. But photos are always going to be an important part of what we do.” -Adam Mosseri

The July 2022 quarterly report also brought to light that Meta was reporting their first ever revenue loss.

Meta reported its first ever revenue decline in its decade as a public company, losing 1% in revenue and 36% in profit year-over-year. In addition to these financial hits, Meta is also suffering from the same reduced demand in digital advertising affecting peers including Google, Twitter, and Snap. Meta affirmed on Wednesday that it expects the weak demand for advertising to continue in the current quarter. -Gizmodo

Meta is desperate to make up their lost revenue and turn the fates back around, and that doesn’t mean making the platform better for its users. And Mosseri’s change of heart illustrates closely that he’s not actually the one pulling the strings of how Instagram functions: Zuckerberg is—and Mosseri will fall in line with his decisions.

Another important aspect of Zuckerberg, Mosseri, and the fates of Instagram is that last summer, Instagram was developing an entire re-design of the app to have full-screen video that would functionally make it visually more like TikTok. The beta test of this new layout met with criticism, forcing Meta to “temporarily pause” the redesign project to evaluate it. But in no way does this mean Instagram won’t be redesigned in the near future. TikTok has far surpassed Instagram as the most downloaded app, and there is a functional arms-race between the platforms for social media dominance.

In response to the backlash against the new feed design Mosseri stated:

“For the new feed designs, people are frustrated and the usage data isn’t great,” he said. “So there I think that we need to take a big step back, regroup, and figure out how we want to move forward.”

Fundamentally, this doesn’t mean that Instagram will get easier for us to use, if anything, it’s the small breather before everything significantly changes to show us Zuck’s goal of 30% AI recommended content and even more monetization from reels. Meta has identified the problem: it’s not that users don’t want recommended content or shouldn’t have recommended content. It’s that their system for recommended content (while bringing in engagement increases in its current state) “isn’t good enough yet”; likely this means more of what we’re not enjoying as it’s up against Meta’s bottom line. The platform performing the best that Meta is seeking to emulate is TikTok and entirely video content.

I am confident in my thinking that we will see a full Instagram redesign some time in the next year, simply due to Zuckerberg’s thinking around reels, the need to keep up to TikTok and the driving force to reverse their market losses.

To me, this just makes it very clear that Instagram isn’t for us: the creatives; the small businesses, anymore. And it’s only to get worse to be on the platform and succeed.

So, where do we go from that?

Honestly, there’s no easy answer. Simply by design, not everyone is going to be able to just leave Instagram. I hope to be able to leave it behind soon, and save myself from most of these incoming changes.

It’s my ultimate goal that one day I’ll be able to lightly create a paid tier for this Substack and be able to write even more here. But I think this is still a bit far off for me right now. For now, I’m just hoping that I can build a great free community here with my weekly content on sustainable design!

Thank you for being here and supporting my work! Returning to “normal” work after long covid and finding this platform to be able to publish long-form content to has brought a lot of joy and made my work days seem a bit brighter as I can see before me a happier, healthier path towards continuing to share about what I’m passionate about online, and a viable path towards building a community here as well, not just on Instagram.

✺ Emma

Post Essay Thoughts

If you read through all of this and are like “Wow, I want to know more"!” (lol), I highly recommend you check out the books and articles I mentioned, but also this YouTube video that discusses the prevalence of misinformation on Meta.

If you made it this far, you’re the best! I know it was a long one. If you’re interested in supporting me and these essays, please subscribe to join our little community here and for weekly essays that usually are about sustainable graphic design or related topics. You can also give this post a ‘like’ to show me you enjoyed it, if you’d like! ^.^

Subscribe now

If you’re looking to sink your teeth deeper into Green Graphic Design, you can check out our full course, which is currently our only paid offering. Hell, if you got all the way to the bottom of this and want to join, use code ‘SUBSTACK’ for 10% off XD

And if that’s not right for you, never fear, I’ll continue to drip weekly green design essays into your inbox :)

Thanks once again for being here in any capacity!

I thought it might be fun to do as a series here because honestly, the world is a bit grim routinely, and sometimes we all need a bit of a spark of joy from somewhere, and I thought I’d share what brightened my days a bit this last month.

I’d love to know what’s brought joy to your month this last month!

ART + WHIMSY

David Bird’s “Becorn” art; creating little people and whole worlds through the photography.

I just adore the compositions and little worlds David Bird creates. The images have so much beauty and whimsy in them. I really love fae compositions and these little acorn peoples are just simply adorable and spark so much joy. I love the compositions with little creatures like birds or squirrels. They remind me to think outside of the box and be inspired from the world around me.

This one has so much joy in it—what a cute use of lighting. There’s so many more whimsical and enchanting photos on his Instagram and his Youtube also has BTS videos talking about how he planned the shots and implemented through trial and error to get just the right one! An absolute joy.

PERSONAL

My partner starting his first creative fiction project and publishing it online.

My partner has launched his first large-scale creative project himself–a Deckbuilding LitRPG fantasy novel called Shuffle of Fate! He’s already got over 30,000 words written and is currently publishing it in a serialized platform. His write-up of the plot:

Jack is an archetypal son of Calamut—a city undergoing a technical and social revolution. Ambitious and intelligent, he embraces the progress the city has made and the wonders the future seems to hold. His own prospects rely on the quality of his first carding—the moment when otherworldly forces manifest in him abilities of profound power.

In a world routinely ravaged by apocalyptic upheaval, where change is treated as a threat, how will those who wish to buck inevitability respond?

If you’re into kind of fantasy-esque settings with a world where characters have certain abilities based on a “deck of cards” that they “hold” (mental not literal cards), or think it sounds interesting check it out! I’m super proud of him and am enjoying the story so much myself, there’s a lot of really interesting world-building, good action and interesting characters.

Read Shuffle of Fate

GAMES

Little Mouse’s Encyclopedia

This is a game I picked up on my Switch for $3 on sale. It’s for kids, I think, but that doesn’t matter to me—it’s a lovely relaxing little game with stunning visuals and design. You wander around as a wee little mouse with a magnifying glass and can interact with the creatures, plants, and environment.

Each plant or animal has a custom animation and shows you a little informative encyclopedia entry that identifies the species and tells you a little about it. I love it!!!

There are so many little hand-drawn details, the facts about each species is interesting and informative, even for adults, and the little animations on each species you interact with is just adorable. It’s given me a lot of inspiration and even though the game isn’t very long, I am really happy to spend time in it and find it quite inspiring.

PERSONAL

Starting my own personal project: A Substack about nature journalling, art, and citizen science.

In a similar way to my husband, I decided for the first time since starting Little Fox, to start a new personal project: a personal Substack. This is my latest endeavour of working through my burnout; I created a space only for things I personally care about. It’s part journal, part me learning to draw/paint through nature journaling, part me geeking about birds I see and marine biology and nudibranchs.

A dyscalculic millennial’s exploration into citizen science, marine biology, nature journalling, art and fighting imposter syndrome at learning biology with a humanities background. This is my project to reconnect with my childhood love of nature, to take time and make space for myself to enjoy what I’ve always loved.

I’m super excited about the project, it’s been an absolute joy to write so far, I hope to write on it at least once a week with a goal of twice. No pressure to follow me there, only if you’re interested in that kind of thing or interested in supporting/following me personally! It’s definitely different from this space: I won’t be talking about design or anything like that there. It won’t really be a journal about my day-to-day but just about the various hobbies and interests I’m passionate about other than design! My goal with it is to have this external place I can post my progress in learning/drawing and keep myself accountable and be able to “justify” making more time for art and personal loves. I always find myself prioritizing client work no matter how small over this other creative work, and I want to be able to work on changing that mindset through sharing my explorations publicly!

The Strandline

A dyscalculic millennial’s exploration into citizen science, marine biology, nature journalling, art and fighting imposter syndrome at learning biology with a humanities background.

By Emma Fanning

READING

Reading ‘Witch Hat Atelier’ Manga

One of the manga I’ve been reading recently is Witch Hat Atelier, a lovely little story about a girl who wants to learn magic and become a witch, but only those who are born with magic can practice it. Or can they? Due to some extenuating circumstances of which I shall not spoil, she’s taken on as an apprentice by an older Witch who agrees to teach her what he knows of magic. There’s a burgeoning sinister plot, engaging characters and beautiful art. There is so much whimsy and creativity in the art, setting, and creatures of the world, and each character is relatable in a unique way, struggling with meaningful internal conflicts, like being able to be true to themselves, or become less shy and more confident. I highly recommend checking it out, even if you’ve never read Japanese manga before. The only thing you need to know is to read the text right to left instead of left to right! :)

Thanks for reading this fun little issue about what’s been cheering me up! What have been some of the highlights of your past month? Let me know! I’m also launching a chat thread where we can collectively share some of the things that have been cheering us up so we can maybe help collectively cheer each other up - you can even post photos in it in reply!

It says “exclusive to the app” but they just launched chat functionality for desktop, so it’s available for all :)

I normally write about design, art, sustainability, colours, and other more generally design related topics! Consider subscribing! Tune in next week for a post on algae ink!

Subscribe now

In case you haven’t read the article in question that inspired this, I highly recommend you checking it out!

New Study Finds That Hazy Skies In Impressionist Paintings May Have Depicted Air Pollution

A recent study found that famous Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet and Joseph Mallord William Turner may have based their later paintings on their air-polluted environments — providing an alternative explanation for Impressionism’s signature hazy, dream-like glow.

The study, conducted by scientists at Harvard University, Sorbonne University, and École Normale Supérieure, found that Impressionist paintings by artists like Monet and Turner closely followed 19th-century pollution trends.

Prior to the study, art historians described Impressionism as an art style of perception rather than reality. “Impressionists wanted to paint not simply what they saw but the way they saw it,” the National Gallery of Art wrote.

Read the Full Article

As it turns out, maybe there was less of “the way they saw it” as originally thought. It’s interesting to look at, especially this painting by Monet in that context. The red, dimmed sun, the burned sky. It feels extremely reminiscent to the skies here on the West Coast during fire smoke season (man, do I hate that this is a “season” now).

I wonder if it was these apocalypse skies that got researchers curious about the accuracy of the impressionistic paintings. One of the things I found most interesting in the article is how in their letters written to friends and family, the artists frequently remark on the “fog” of London and how much they love it, with Monet even writing to his wife in 1900:

I wonder if the artists could feel the air quality change as we can when we breathe in. I know I am exceptionally grateful for N95s and carbon filter mask inserts when the fire smokes close in.

Waterway Pollution in Taiwan Visualized Through Popsicles

This has been another project that’s stuck with me over the years as being both a hideous and memorable visualization of pollution, in a way that, to me, is almost art. The project was conducted by three art students, I-chen, Yi-hui and Yu-ti.

Each popsicle was made from a collected water sample from lakes, beaches, rivers, streams, and other water sites across Taiwan, both in tourist areas and remote locations. The water was frozen and then encased in a plastic resin for preservation of the “popsicle”.

By imitating the aesthetic of recent artisanal food trends, the Polluted Water Popsicles serve to highlight how beauty doesn’t always correspond with optimum human or environmental health.

They even designed (honestly pretty epic) wrappers for each sample.

It’s pretty gross, but also pretty amazing and interesting and I think about it all the time. I wonder what the waterways around me look like.

Promotion of Plastic in 1950s Advertising

As dystopian as this seems now, this image was published in a 1955 article in Life magazine to emphasize the benefits of disposable plastic.

Plastic Pollution Art: From the Ocean, and from the Stomachs of Seabirds

Mandy Barker’s art from plastic pollution she finds along the shore or in the stomach of Albatross chicks is beautifully grotesque.

The poor Albatross chicks can’t tell the difference between plastic and food and eventually end up engorging their stomach on plastic pieces they can’t process and pass away. *I’d seen these artworks before, but every time I find it very upsetting to see :’(

To connect to the substack a few issues ago about recycled plastic, this collage by Barker speaks to the common experience we all share across the globe: finding pollution in the ocean from Coca-Cola.

Explore the rest of Mandy Barker's Work

Contemporary Dinosaurs: ‘Toxic Life’ Exhibit Explores Evolution and Extinction

Set up like dinosaur exhibits, Catalan artist Alvaro Soler Arpa’s “Toxic Life” exhibit displays grotesque (yet enthralling) creations of animal bones mixed with plastics, netting, and futuristically-disfigured re-imaginings of skeletons of animals distorted and mutated over the decades by pollution.

With a total of fourteen sculptures created with bones and plastic waste, Mr. Arpa emphasizes the human impact of runaway plastic pollution on ecosystems and individual animals. Approximately eight million tons of plastic are dumped in the ocean each year, making marine plastic pollution a major issue that impacts animals across the food chain, from whales to zooplankton.

In my opinion, these works are visceral: you can feel the tension and the imagined pain from the entanglements, despite them being entirely original compositions.

“The work has a creative origin but has always existed in concern for the environment,” noted Soler in the press conference presentation of his work, until now virtually unknown. “I dedicated myself for years to find bones in the mountains, in restaurants and butcher shops…I even dug up a horse. The aim of these creations is not to sell, but to convey a message.” 

It’s creepy, but it looks cool. Some analysis of the exhibit seem to read it as “hopeful” in the sense that these creatures have “evolved” alongside the plastic, but I can’t really pick up on that read: to me it seems just a mutated extinction event. But really very creative and engaging. The way the exhibit was displayed was also very reminscent to natural history museums, instead of a “art gallery” style approach to exhibition design.

If you thought this was cool, consider giving it a share to a friend!

Share

Thanks for reading Green Graphic Design! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe now

Most colors and inks these days are synthetically created, and are much cheaper and easier to create than traditional methods. But how were pigments created before we could synthetically create pigment from oil? This is a small history of the natural history of Tyrian Purple pigment made from snails’ intestines and what the current state of the pigment is.

History

Tyrian Purple, also known as Royal Purple, was used to dye the garments of royalty, and was first discovered in the Bronze age (around 14C BCE), and used extensively by the Romans. The color is a purpley-red shade that was often described as similar to the color of clotted blood (ew).

Made from a few types of sea snails, the dye was extremely time consuming to extract, hence its rarity and prestige.

In Phoenician mythology, the discovery of purple was credited to the pet dog of Tyros, the mistress of Tyre's patron god Melqart. One day, while walking along the beach the couple noticed that after biting on a washed up mollusc the dog's mouth was stained purple. Tyros asked for a garment made of the same colour and so began the famous dyeing industry. (World History)

How is it Made?

The dye is a fluid extracted from a few different species of snails, most commonly: Hexaplex trunculus, Purpura lapillus, and Bolinus brandaris. The snails were trapped and harvested for their dye glands. The dye produced is extremely long-wearing and resistant to fading, but only a tiny amount of pigment is able to be extracted from a single shellfish. This increased harvests and left apparently huge piles of shells left to bake in the sun. Approximately 10,000 snails yield only enough dye to colour a hankerchief.1

The dye comes from the snail’s hypobranchial gland. It seems this gland is likely repsonsible for the snail’s defense mechanisms and the extretions only turn coloured when exposed to the air. The method to extract the dye was record by Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, consisting of:

• crushing the snails

• leaving them to purify for 3 days in alkaline salt water

• boiling them for over a week2

Although the shellfish glands can range in colour from pink to dark purple, so secret recipes for shellfish blends, extractions methods, and additional ingredients were well-kept secrets.

Some of the species of snails were harvested to extinction due to the demand for the dyes that were the backbone of certain Phoenician economies during this time. Eventually dye production ceased when the Ottoman Empire came to power, as green became the new purple.

It costs how much?

During the Roman empire, one pound of the dye was equal to a quantity of gold worth $19,000USD in today’s money3. Now, the dye is worth $2,700 a gram, a pound would be equal to just over $1.2 million dollars. Expensive!

Current Use

The dye is still being created and harvested. A few companies have figured out how to extract the dye from the snails, however, another hobbyist, Ghassen Nouira, has figured out his own methods for extracting the dye using traditional methods and turned it into a small traditional business. He has a Facebook page with examples of his dye and sells tiny bottles of the powered dyes. He had a hard time figuring out the method though: no public knowledge of it really remained other than the vague description by Pliny the Elder, and the corporations were tight-lipped about their methods.

“Actually, no-one could give me any advice because so few people were doing it, so I had to go it alone, learning the hard way,” Nouira explains. After two years of experimentation, he produced his first pigment powder. (Middle Eastern Eye)

The process takes over 45 minutes where the gland secretion darks from yellow to blue to purple.

Future Innovations

The harvest isn’t exactly sustainable. Nouira’s process focuses on wasting nothing:

“Nothing is wasted. My family eats all the snails after I have removed the glands. I can also bake the shells in large pottery furnaces, then grind them, which results in a very high-quality lime, that can be used as a building material, as a base for Purpurissum (purple paint pigment), makes an excellent fertiliser for acidic soils, and can even be reused instead of soda in dyeing processes,” he says. “And all this from a simple snail.” (Middle Eastern Eye)

However, not all companies can say the same. And the snails are highly sensitive to climate crisis and warming temperatures in the oceans.

As a result, a biotech start up, Conagen, is creating an animal-free alternative to traditional methods. They are developing Tyrian purple through fermentation.4

“Conagen is democratizing the exclusive use of a color once reserved for royalty --- now obtainable on a global scale,” said Casey Lippmeier, Ph.D., senior vice president of innovation. “Our fermentation and bioconversion technologies enable us to offer true-to-nature products. By leveraging Conagen’s bioengineering and commercial manufacturing capabilities, we’re unlocking Tyrian purple’s great potential as an accessible and sustainable dye. We expect Tyrian purple to inspire fresh ideas in multiple industries, making this rare and exciting color more marketable with planet-conscious consumers.”

Let me know if you enjoyed this topic! I’m very interested in the history of different natural pigments and hope you enjoy it as well!

Share

When I wrote my first post on burnout, I wasn’t really sure what to expect: I felt lost and somewhat isolated and was deeply wanting to find some kind of validation in the alienation I was experiencing away from the design community and from working and the hustle-grind culture that is so prevalent. In the month since I’ve written that post, several of you have reached out to share similar stories and feelings and I didn’t feel so alone anymore. Inspired by not feeling alone, I’ve been doing some exploration into different things I can explore to re-invent my creativity, and this newsletter here is a bit of summary of that.

I still feel like I’m figuring out some of the puzzle pieces for a project (unrelated to work) I can engage with that makes me feel passionate about every morning, but each day I think I’m getting closer: these are some of the things that have been inspiring in my life.

In the last two weeks, I’ve finally felt like myself again–100% “normal”; able to set goals and work towards them without feeling like the daily grind was already as much or more than I could handle. This transition marks nearly a full complete year since my original COVID infection. And I feel I got off “easy” with my long COVID infection. I just had fatigue, and brain fog, and some tinnitus. And yet it still took a year to mend. Not an experience I’m going to forget easily. As much as many people have returned to “back to normal”, I still weigh every social outing or shopping trip with COVID-risk in mind and make evaluations and decisions based on a deep fear to not have COVID and Long COVID again.

Museum Sale: Special Treasures

My local Natural History museum was having a sale of old exhibit materials, old natural history books, and just general curiosities! Everything was marked down to very very cheap prices. I found some really interesting and obscure books on how to prepare specimens for collections departments in museums, as well as older books on fish and birds with beautiful colour plates inside them.

My favourite find however, was this dossier that was only a few pages from 1937 on “The Stomach Contents of Sperm Whales Caught off the West Coast of British Columbia”. Obviously, I don’t condone the catching of whales, but science and museum collecting methods were different back in the 30s. Nothing to change about it now, nearly a century later. I think the document is extremely cool: it is the title page, a photographic page with the fish, a giant squid, and some marks left behind by the squid, as well as a third page with a more informative write-up of their findings. I think this is THE COOLEST THING EVER, and I can’t wait to thrift a frame and hang it on the wall as part of a future gallery wall.

COMMUNITY

Discovering + Exploring Citizen Science More Closely

One of the other things I discovered recently, doing a little rabbit-hole down citizen science and specifically marine biology was citizen science apps like iNaturalist and eBird. I’m sure some or many of you will be familiar with them already, but I’m SO excited to have dived deeper into this! You can observe and document the nature around you, be it plants, fungi, animals, insects, etc. and upload it to iNaturalist and have help from the community in IDing it if you don’t know. Researchers will pull data from apps like this and use it for their papers. Really neat. I’m excited to get to know how to use the app more.

I was looking for ocean-related citizen science projects that were in my area I could contribute to, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything beyond beach cleanups, which, don’t get me wrong. Are super great! But I’m a little more interested in data-collection projects. I’ll have to look into it more overall, but I was coming up with nothing so far.

The other app I found was eBird which is like iNaturalist but it’s where ALL THE BIRD PEOPLE ARE. My partner and I walk in a bird sanctuary regularly and see all kinds of cool ducks and Great Horned owls there, and I was able to see a list of all the birds in the park we walk in that have been spotted by others, see photos of the birds taken in the park itself, hear the birdcalls in the area and more. It was SO COOL. I now know what birds to keep an eye out for on our walks that we haven’t seen yet! The park has had some amazing restoration work conducted on it in the last few years, and even on our own, without the guidance of an app, we’ve spotted a lot more different types of birds than ever before! So amazing to see the progress. Now, if only bats would roost in the bat houses they have set up!

Tidepools Nearby + Naturalist Decor Inspiration

I moved to the apartment where I live with my partner 6 years ago. It’s the furthest in-land on the island I’ve ever lived, and I figured I was nowhere near any tidepools or the ocean, or at least, the nearest ocean was a 40-min bus away. WRONG. I recently learned that not only is there a beach about a 15-min bus ride away from me, the beach has (if iNaturalist is anything to go by) AMAZING tidepools with nudibranchs and sea stars. I can’t wait to check it out and bring my seaweed-stained ID book and engage with iNaturalist app and my love of tidepool exploration and marine biology.

I’m thinking I can combine species identification with research into the creatures I find and as well have a great reason to practice my watercolor art and nature journalling all together! The citizen scientist apps only accept photography, of course, but being able to go further with it through my art personally seems so exciting and I can’t wait!

These pinterest “naturalist decor” searches have been really making me feel inspired to practice sketching and watercolor outside.

DESIGN EDUCATION

Getting back to normal after a year.

One of the things I’m most proud of the last few weeks is doing a proper “course launch”: weeks of preparation with Instagram carousel educational posts (which I’ll be continuing, of course), a free webinar that I hosted with 30+ people live in attendance, and also the routine I spontaneously developed writing here every week. During all of 2022, all of this felt impossible. I could barely think about educational green design content, let alone run a webinar. I felt extremely guilty for abandoning the Green Graphic Design Course, something I poured love, sweat and tears into during 2020 and am extremely proud of. I am really happy to have “mended” this process, and breathed some life back into it. The guilt no longer gnaws at me in the same way, and I am working on finding peace with what’s left.

I was going to use the Substack to entirely promote the course, but honestly, it didn’t feel right – and another writer I follow on Substack did their course launch just quietly and nicely at the end of their normal newsletter. I really liked that. So I’m following in their footsteps.

If you’re interested in learning Green Graphic Design, my course is the place to do it. When I started learning green design it was extremely hard to find any concrete, sourced information about the role designers can have for environmental sustainability. The course is what I wish I had when I started. It’s extremely deeply researched with dozens of hours of both scripted content and podcast-style discussions. It includes workbooks, guidelines, a private Geneva community, and more. The topics vary from forestry to printing methods to climate to recycling to packaging to talking to clients to studio policies and more (check out the full curriculum!). The course has lifetime access and there is a sale running on until this Friday the 3rd for $50 off the course price of $300 CAD/USD with the code ‘RECESSION’. (although if any of you want a special extension since this is going out on Wednesday just message me!).

The course enrolment is evergreen: you can join at any time for $300, our sale is just until Friday, and we are launching community coaching calls that will happen weekly in our course space starting in March and running them through to the end of April.

But things are expensive right now, and if it’s not the right time for you to join if you’re interested, don’t sweat it. No FOMO marketing here: the discount and the community calls will come around again this year. I’m basically anti-marketing, but I just disagree so much ethically, morally with how a “standard” course launch is done, I can’t help it. If it seems like the right fit at the right time without financial strain on you, it’s your decision to make–I’ve tried to lay out all the information I can on the course website so you can make an informed choice on your own without a crazy sales pitch from me hitting into some kind of “pain point”. I put a lot of love and care into the course, and I believe it shows on its own without sketchy promises from me about “signing 5-figure clients” and “running your DREAM design studio”. If you have any questions, feel free to just drop me a message ^.^

Learn Green Graphic Design

If Green Web Design instead of Graphic Design is more your thing or interest right now, my dear friend Amy at Blue Raspberry Design is currently launching her green web design course for the first time. It’s basically the sister-course to mine, covering all things, well, web design! Hers is the same price as mine, and has lifetime access as well! I personally am really grateful she’s created this as there is SO much misinformation in the sustainable web design–at some point I’ll probably do a minor post ranting about the Carbon Calculator Websites and their preposterous claims about how awful your website is, but I digress. Amy lays out all the information, sourced, with real concrete examples of how and why you can make websites greener. And the best part? You don’t even need to code! Her course launch also isn’t emotionally creepy either and based on false promises :)

Learn Green Web Design

What things have been inspiring your creativity lately? Have you started any interesting hobbies? Do you use already use some of these apps like iNaturalist and eBird? :) Got any best practice tips?

Also I’m curious, I know some Substacks have like little chat threads in the app–is that something ya’ll would be interested in? If you participate in those chats, what ones are your favourites?

Emma

This Substack is reader supported! If you enjoyed, consider sharing with a friend who you think might enjoy it, or subscribing yourself for free!

Subscribe now

Time for a more normal change-of-pace from the last newsletter; I’m bringing a collection of interesting environmentally-related things I’ve come across recently. As this newsletter developed from my outline, the theme of this substack is music. Soundscapes, the calls of long-gone birds, albums around climate/physical grief and healing, and a walk literally back in time. This set veers a bit tangential to direct design, and leans a bit into climate anxiety and how we can sit with it. Creativity can come from anywhere, and this is what I’ve been exploring lately.

BIOMUSIC

Soundscapes from extinct birds as a form of meditation.

Where The Wild Love Is is a meditative app that focuses on nature art and the soundscapes from our natural environment and different ecosystems to create a calming experience. From what I’ve listened to, there aren’t any talking elements, just beautiful soundscapes. But what I found really interesting and creatively engaging was that they’ve taken samples of extinct bird calls to develop meditative audiovisual experiences around, to increase awareness for bird extinction and to ensure that these recordings are not forgotten about and lost to the sands of time.

A small snippet from their Instagram account:

I believe the extinct voices are behind a small paywall (ew), but there are some free options for nature meditations which are interesting, this little snippet sample, and also the option to sign up for a free trial and then unsubscribe but you didn’t hear it from me ;) I just really thought it was an awesome idea, (it isn’t too expensive), and I really liked the sample.

It reminded me of this incredible short animated film by lemoncholy on YouTube–telling the true story of the last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō birds in Hawaii. Before they went extinct, field biologist John Sincock recorded their calls in Kauai. The film is only a few minutes long, entirely hand-animated, and breathtakingly gorgeous. I’ve re-watched it countless times. It makes me weepy without fail.

If you’re interested and want to be extra sad and want to listen to the calls without any additional background tracks or music:

If you’re interested in more about John Sincock and his expedition to observe and document the Kaua‘i ‘Ō‘ō, this is a great article here that even features scans of his original typewritten experiences with the birds.

Lemoncholy’s video also has an official soundtrack on Spotify too, the music for it was beautiful as well, if you liked the video as much as me!

MEDITATION

Deep Time Walk: An Interactive Walking and Listening Experience of the History of Earth

Deep Time Walk is a 4.6km walking audio book that tells the history of the Earth. It begins from 4,600,000,000 years ago (4,600 Million Years Ago) to the present with each metre walked representing 1 million years.

It’s an app as well, free this time, for both Apple and Android. “As you walk through time, the dramatized audio narrative combines scientific evidence with poetry to tell the story of Earth’s formation, providing a unique and educational perspective of deep time. Sensitively designed and engineered by a team of experts using appropriate technology, the experience encourages you to focus away from the digital screen and connect with the natural world around you.” (Deep Time Walk Website). A sample:

Dr. David Abram who’s a key creator behind this has this to say on the app:

We tend to think of history as just a human thing. And the land as a passive backdrop against which our human history unfolds. But our real history is the deep story of the land itself. The story of how these continents, oceans, this air, these winds and waters came to structure the world in the way it is structured today.

MUSIC

An album inspired by climate grief, healing and the passing of the months.

Complete Mountain Almanac is a concept album that revolves around being “a climate change record”. According to an interview in Uncut, the album is “an intimate, immersive mix of folk, classical and chamber music. Its 12 songs, one for every month of the year, address decay and healing, both global and personal.”

Each song is titled as a month, spanning January to December, with the goal of capturing the uniqueness of each month, the relationship between the seasons, alongside a climate change message. During production, Jessica Dessner was also diagnosed with breast cancer, and some parts of the album reflect her experience during this time.

I’ve found it both beautiful and intriguing, and am looking forward to listening to it closer and reading the lyrics when they become fully available for a more intimate experience with the music.

IN CONTEXT

So why does any of this really matter for our mental health? An app doesn’t replace going outside or stop animals from going extinct.

To pair with their app, WTWLI has a series of really interesting blog posts on nature and wellbeing. I thought this would be an interesting way to tie up some of these loose threads in the newsletter with an overarching theme.

In their blog post titled “How Observing Wildlife Affects our Well-Being”, Elena Goldberg describes how experiences with nature have a direct correlation to ”good health and well-being”, and how studies have shown that by disrupting our daily lives to experience nature, cathartic experiences can occur which can have profound emotional impacts on our physical and mental health. Obviously, going for a walk is great, but it can be hard if you don’t live nearby green-space. Goldberg discusses how:

Exposure to natural sounds have been associated with a decreased sympathetic response, that “fight-or-flight” feeling, and an enhanced parasympathetic response, which is sometimes referred to as the “rest-digest” response. (Scientific Reports, 2017).

Which seems like a leading idea behind their work, allowing accessibility to the calming effects of nature. Apps aren’t perfect, but the ability to take a small pause, breathe, and experience something else, even inside your own home, can be important.

Read the Full Article

There are definitely plenty of bio-inspired meditations, so while I’m using their work as a case study and particular point of interest, they’re not the only folks out there using bird songs and nature inspiration and incorporation into meditation. I’m confident YouTube and Spotify also have similar content if you’re interested in giving it a try as a break from your workday!

And that’s all for this week, folks! Hope you enjoyed!

Emma

If you enjoyed this and aren’t subscribed to this substack, consider subscribing!

Subscribe now

Reading: Babel by R.F. Kuang.

Watching: Catching up on seasons of our favourite anime. Right now: My Hero Acadamia Season 6.

Listening: Tropic Morning News by the National. I really feel it captures a lot of my emotional state around burnout and long covid and feels relatable to the general state of the world right now, and trying to do one’s best to get through it.

Hey ya’ll! I’ve been collecting snippets and interesting things to share in this space over the last few months, but I’ve felt a bit blocked in just simply beginning to share neat things as if these times are “normal” when truly, living and working through an ongoing panorama is nothing short of abnormal, no matter how much there is a push to “return to normal” right now.

In the light of the new year with what is seemingly an even stronger push online towards hustling through a recession in one’s design business, I wanted to pause and unpack some of my feelings around sustainable work for oneself in these times and through a recession. Large parts of the design community feel alienating to me right now, and while these thoughts won’t resonate with everyone, and aren’t a judgment of how other people handle their own unique situations, I wanted to write this just in case an alternative perspective helps someone else who feels similarly to me feel less alone in the community. Because I’m feeling a bit out to sea myself, and maybe I’m not alone as well.

A PREFACE

Ever since starting to recover from long covid, I’ve felt I could no longer the haunting realization that I was no longer feeling passionate about my design work in the same way I used to. Some of this was caused by a harder year in a variety of aspects: health, finances, and a lack successful projects I was proud of it. But also part of it was coming from a feeling that I’d given all of myself into my business and it wasn’t giving back anymore in a hard world. It’s difficult to sustain (for me anyway) a passion for my job when the late-stage capitalist world outside becomes increasingly scarier and crueller in a myriad of ways. Futures, incomes, and the health of loved ones is uncertain among a sea of suffering both locally and overseas. Not to dive too deeply into current events, but I often have come across older generations waxing that they had it harder because they lived through the uncertainty of the cold war. Then what is this we are dealing with now? On top of a pandemic and climate crisis. It’s a job in itself to protect safe and joyful things for yourself personally. It’s hard to keep up the passion for a job on top of it.

And while I like doing design and it is my chosen profession, and continues to be, I feel a need to explore my interests and identity outside of it. My business, my career, my profession has become no longer the most important thing to me, and not what I want to be defined by. These are things I’m continuing to work out now, and using this newsletter is like a bit of therapeutic journalling in a sense. It is not easy to disentangle one’s sense of self identity and self-worth from one’s own business.

ON WORK

I feel a pressure (or expectation) as a designer to be constantly engaging in design-related activities even when I am not working.

Sometimes it feels like if you’ve chosen to become a designer that’s all you should live, breathe, and focus on. When you’re not working for a client you should be working on a personal project, developing a tangentially related skill, doing a design course to make your business better, or curate a perfect wishlist of designer-related things for friends and family to buy you. Or browsing and buying design asset packs so that you can use them in your next project (even though probably you won’t ever use them, …at least I never did…).1

But it can feel like a sacrilege to want to explore interests outside of that, since, surely because you chose to become a designer you should want to engage with it all the time. Choosing to become a designer instead of a more traditional career is almost an act of rebellion in itself, and it feels automatic that it becomes a huge and primary part of your identity. And if that brings you joy, that’s fantastic. But it doesn’t bring me much joy. Not anymore. It all feels like work, or work to be done in the hopes to garner more work. And it’s not that I’m trying to say that personal projects are bad, or that they’re not useful in lead generation if you’re struggling there. But that, barring necessity, I don’t want to spend my free time engaging in simply more of my profession anymore. And it feels like an expected.

I want a work-life balance that doesn’t revolve around only being a designer; I want to work my job and then be able to have the emotional and mental energy to be able to engage in a variety of diverse creative ventures, and try things I’ve never done before and learn more about the topics that interest me, like making inks to understand natural pigments, learning to become a watercolor artist and keep a nature journal, and learn more about marine biology2. And don’t get me wrong, one part of my business I do still have the spark for is trying to re-build my Instagram and community around sustainable design (one of the things I felt the most guilty around disappearing from while healing through long covid with reduced capacity for work) and doing newsletters like this (honestly ironically, I care about this more now than I did before when I felt it had to be a sales-cycle pressure to sell the Green Design Course). It’s just the client-facing side that is wearing me down in difficult times; of having someone else have the final say in what something you've created looks like.

Also, as a side note, but is anyone else a bit alienated by the concept of “just outsource everything you don’t love doing - and somehow everything will magically be better”; and no discussions around when that’s financially sustainable in your business’ books, or what fair pay looks like for the people you outsource to, etc. etc. I am the primary breadwinner in our little family and it isn’t possible for me to put resources towards outsourcing things I don’t enjoy, simply because I don’t love doing them. It feels especially unrelatable in the impending recession when client budgets are tighter, and our everyday expenses only grow steeper (have you SEEN the price of broccoli OMFG actual highway robbery). I think outsourcing is probably outside of scope for most of us and isn’t the easy solution it’s often presented as. I guess my point here is not sour grapes, but just that outsourcing is presented as a viable option to anyone at any stage of their business and I think that’s dishonest, as for a lot of people it’s not financially possible.

ON LIFE

I don’t want to be defined by my business anymore. I want to be a diversely creative human.

One of the traps of owning your own business is that, as a dear friend mentioned to me earlier this week, often “you ARE your business” when you’re a solopreneur. Over the last 6 years I’ve put a lot of my self worth into my business and tied my emotional well-being to it. And when that fell out from under me with long covid and then a string of poorly-matched contracts, I really had to start reckoning with this.

I’d like to live a life where I’m not defined by my business, where people don’t simply know me as “the woman who does branding and websites for start-ups in alternative protein spaces”. Where regardless of whether or not my business is doing mediocre or extremely well, I am creatively fulfilled and happy through more stable creative pursuits that provide intrinsic value and joy to me. Instead of through a profession where this work is hinged around client approval and praise. I’ve realized recently that if I could re-do it all over, I’d go back to school and get a marine biology degree and study nudibranchs. It was a dream I gave up because of my undiagnosed / unrealized dyscalculia (dylexia for numbers); hugely struggling at math meant it didn’t seem like a career path in sciences was “for me”. This isn’t something I can pursue now (maybe when I’m retired! if nudibranchs still exist), but it doesn’t mean this path is closed off to me completely. I can still engage in tidepool explorations with a seaweed-stained guidebook in hand, study first year biology textbooks, and keep a nature journal to observe changing conditions in the ecosystems around me. I’m sure there’s also citizen scientist projects I can look into.

And I can do all of this, I realized while keeping my profession as a designer with Little Fox. But the way I have been working in 2022 didn’t allow for that: I was too focused on always prioritizing client work over my happiness and my mental health, so when I signed off work for the day I was depleted and could barely even play a comfort video game.

My new years goal is that I’m exploring new ways to engage in my business sustainably that allow me the mental energy to be able to engage in these other pursuits after I clock off work every day. I want work that doesn’t consume me mentally, but still pays the bills (my only financial goal is literally to pay the bills and taxes, anything extra is just bonus savings). And for me, I think this means stepping away from the prestige of certain types of projects, and focusing on projects I can rely on stable income through a recession that allow me to rediscover the things I like to do. I want to explore marine biology and I want to explore a whole variety of other creative pursuits and find what makes me passionate and recharges me outside of design.

ON INK

Finding joy and creativity through making my own plant-based inks from foraged materials.

One of the things I started exploring was making my own ink. My mom gifted me this incredible book on Ink Making through foraging your own materials and turning them into inks. I was obsessed, but I felt for many months it must be too complicated, chemical-heavy, stinky to do in a 400-sq ft apartment. As it turns out, I was SUPER wrong and all you need is some vinegar, baking soda, salt, an old pot, and some gum arabic if you want to make your inks permanent for paper. In total, a $10 creative endeavour.

I decided I was going to try to make ink from horse chestnuts - I foraged a bunch from a local park near me (and some guy asked if I was collecting them to get rid of spiders XD That’s a local myth here that if you put out horse chestnuts, the giant spiders we have here hate them and won’t come near. Alas, it’s not true.) and chucked them in a boiling pot of water with salt and vinegar and waited. After about 4 hours I added some baking soda to trigger a release of pigment, and the results were way better than I ever expected!

The color turned out so incredibly and richly pigmented, and can be used similar to watercolor pigments. Here’s a little quick loose painting I did of some wooly bear caterpillars that I’d been seeing crawling around in the autumn (I love them so much they are so cute).

The red stripe on them is the ink I made myself! Natural ink is subject to change in color and texture over time, so it may not stay like this forever, but I’m thrilled by the result and intrigued to try more different things I can forage. I put a bit too much gum arabic in this batch so the ink has grown a bit sticky over time, but it’s all a learning experience!

A FINAL NOTE

I’m sure that this email didn’t resonate with everyone, and that’s okay. This newsletter is where I’m at, and I have a bunch of super cool things plotted to share in the coming weeks like extinct bird calls, and fonts based off of plants. This newsletter isn’t marking a divergence in what I’m hoping to achieve, especially with the green design space and this Substack. But a reflection of what I’m feeling right now as a designer in the community and what I’m working towards as defining my life in a meaningful way for me in a pandemic-ravaged world. Hopefully a few of you are interested in my ink making and other endeavours and would like to follow along with those updates as they come along as well! I’m hoping I can use it to express some of my additional creative explorations alongside green design. And, I mean, I dunno, I think making your own inks from plants and materials foraged in your backyard is a form of green design and sustainable expression through art is it not? Did you know lichens can produce even incredibly vibrant fuscia purple inks and dyes? SO COOL. (I’ve totally signed up for a class in March about using lichens to make dyes).

I’ll sign off here with my last ending credits for what I’ve been reading/watching lately! If you’re feeling like any part of this email resonated with you though, feel free to reply and talk to me about it! I’d love to know as well, if any of you have additional creative pursuits you want to focus on instead of your business this year as well!

Emma

Reading: I finished a fun, fantasy duology “The Daughter of the Moon Goddess” and it’s sequel. It was based the Chinese mythology of the Moon Goddess and her daughter as she tries to free her mother from an unjust punishment in the immortal realm. It’s got great pacing and was a blast to read.

Watching: Glass Onion was great! - F*CK ELON MUSK.

Listening: I’ve been hearing rumours around The National dropping a new album soon and I literally could not be more excited!

If you enjoyed this newsletter, are curious about sustainable design or my plant-based ink adventures, or just coming along for the ride to figure out a life outside of work, consider subscribing! (Substack told me this was a good thing to add at the end of the newsletter so I shall follow their wisdom).

Subscribe now