The Designers Desk Community is Now Live

Hey everyone!

Hope y’all have been doing good lately. I’ve been busy moving into a new place, unpacking, and settling in to a new routine and way of life. Between January and now work wise, it’s been about “trimming the fat” and getting rid of ideas that no longer served me. This also includes trimming down on team size and rethinking how I go about my relationship with our collaborators.

What to expect in the Designers Desk Community

Before I get into that (I’ll circle back on this later in this post) I want to talk about the Designers Desk community. I’ve been working on this for a while and before I even got to this place I’m at now with it I was debating on doing it or not. Reason being: time and effort. I’m the type of person that gives 110% into everything I do, so much so that I obsess and burn myself out quickly, as i’ve gotten older and more experienced I’m learning how to work in sprints and cycles instead of a long consistent commitment.

“Open Office” series

With that said, the Designers Desk has a livestream series called “Open Office”. Open Office was originally for just the Crafted Studios team to talk about work and experiences in their worlds, but I figured why not get that same perspective from a wider audience and open it up to all designers, devs, creators, and studio founders who are leveraging today’s internet to build a work-life that they enjoy. It’ll take some time for momentum to swing but the “Open” aspect of it is for the audience/community members to give us topics and spark conversations by asking questions and submitting ideas.

The series is a 6 week series each Friday at 11AM PST to talk creativity, business, experiences, collaboration, etc. After 6 weeks I’m taking a break for a few, then coming back fresh to interview more. In the break periods I’ll still be nurturing the community, writing this newsletter, and working with my coaching clients.

The first Open Office features my good friend, and collaborator w/Crafted: Edward Penna and we’ll be talking about collaborating with agencies and how we finds work by building relationships with Studios like mine (on his side) and others.

Signup here to attend “Open Office” (at this moment, we only have 10 spots left):

1 on 1 Coaching

The other thing I’m working on is Coaching for freelancers and studio founders building out a web design studio. So far I have a couple of folks I’m helping out and it’s pretty cool so far. Helping others break mental barriers and business roadblocks is more enjoyable than I imagined and if I can share what I know to help one another then I’m all for it.

So far, I’m doing weekly 1 on 1 calls and sharing my resources with them. It’s been helpful, but in the future I may start to look at curriculum to help keep myself and the client focused on each step. For now, this works and I’ll be opening this up to more designers like yourselves really soon so if you’re interested I’ll keep you updated.

Slimming down: Sometimes the key to profitability and balance

Back to what I mentioned earlier. This year I’m focusing on what I do best, and that’s UI/Web Design. For a long time I led Crafted solely as a founder, but I was getting bored and uninspired. Being lead designer again has sparked my creativity again, and from here on out I’ll only be collaborating with the very best at what they do. No sub contractors, no outsiders, only a tight-knit group of good folks I can rely on (and they can rely on me).

Reason being is last year some quality suffered and I couldn’t stand letting that happen. Shrinking down the team size a little bit and letting go of the idea of having a “talent pool” of folks has been the best thing I’ve done for our profitability, quality of work and mental health as of late.

P.S. Webflow featured us

“Trimming the fat” also includes less focus on random creative projects, and more intention on expanding the business in profitable ways such as Crafted Essentials: craftedessentials.co which was featured in a Webflow blog recently for Black History Month celebrating black creatives, check it out if you haven’t yet!

Crafted Essentials is an avenue for all of the leads we unfortunately have to pass on due to lack of resources (budget for example). This will give pre-seed companies and small business owners the opportunity to have high value design work at a reasonable price with myself as the sole designer on all projects. No subscriptions, no quick turnarounds, just simplicity at it’s best — a website that meets core marketing needs.

That’s all for now, hope to see y’all join and chop it up with us at Open Office on Friday!

Talk soon, take care,

-Dexter