Hello Again

It feels a little strange opening a blank page again.

Not unfamiliar, exactly… More like returning to a room I haven’t stepped into for a while. Everything is still where I left it, but there’s a thin layer of dust over the furniture and I have to remind myself where the light switches are.

So… Hello.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. And… if I’m being 100% honest, it’s been a while since I’ve written much of anything simply because I wanted to write.

There have been words, certainly. Thousands of them. Millions, probably.

Emails.
Client copy.
Social media posts and captions.
Blog articles.
Research notes.
University assignments.
Project documentation.
Brand strategies.
Website copy.
Ideas scribbled into documents at ridiculous hours of the night… technically morning at that point.

Words have still been everywhere.

They just haven’t always felt like mine.

There’s something different about writing without a deliverable attached to it. Writing without a word count, a client objective, an assessment criterion, an SEO keyword, or a deadline hovering somewhere above the page.

Writing because there’s something inside you asking to be put somewhere.

I haven’t done enough of that lately.

Life Got Very Full

The simplest explanation for my disappearance is that I’ve been busy.

The more accurate explanation is that I’ve been very, very full.

This year has brought study back into my life in a significant way. I started my Graduate Certificate in Design (due to start my Masters in September… which is soon…). Returning to study has meant throwing myself once again into research, experimentation, reflection and making. I’ve been thinking about design differently, questioning some of the assumptions I’ve carried through my professional practice, and exploring ideas that sit somewhere between visual communication, technology, storytelling, and human behaviour.

There have been projects that have stretched me both creatively and intellectually. Storyboards, moving-image work, scripts, research, visual experiments, and hours spent trying to translate an idea floating somewhere inside my head into something another person can actually see and experience.

At the same time, I’ve been working on my QDN Emerging Leader change project, Foundations of Inclusive Design: Rethinking Design Education.

That project has become an enormous part of my year.

I’ve been researching how accessibility, disability, diversity, and inclusion are taught within Australian design degrees, speaking with universities and thinking deeply about what it would mean if inclusive design were treated as foundational knowledge rather than an optional consideration somewhere near the end of a project.

It’s the kind of work that feels extremely connected to why I became a designer in the first place.

It also requires a significant amount of brain space.

And then… of course, there’s work.

Angell Designs continues to grow and evolve, and my days are often filled with branding, websites, social media, content, accessibility, strategy, and the hundred tiny decisions that exist behind every finished piece of design.

Much of my work now sits within health, disability, and wellbeing spaces, which has made me think more carefully about the responsibility designers carry. A website isn’t just a collection of attractive pages. Branding isn’t just the colours and logos. Social media isn’t just something to keep feeding because an algorithm demands yet another post.

Design shapes how people understand information.

Whether someone feels welcomed…
Whether something feels easy or exhausting…
Whether someone trusts a service enough to ask for help…

Those ideas have been occupying a lot of my mind lately.

And apparently there are still only 24 hours in a day, despite my repeated objections.

A Different Outlook

The strange thing is that I don’t think I stopped being creative.

Creativity simply changed jobs for a little while.

Instead of appearing as poems, essays or stories, it showed up in client concepts.

It appeared in colour palettes and typography.
In university projects.
In research questions.
In layouts.
In presentations.
In figuring out how to communicate an idea in a way that might make somebody stop scrolling for three seconds and actually feel something.

I’ve been making things constantly.

But making things for a purpose and making things simply because they belong to you aren’t always the same experience.

Somewhere among deadlines, coursework, and client projects, the creative work that exists purely for me silently moved further down the list.

Writing was probably the biggest casualty.

There are unfinished projects and pieces sitting in folders.

Half-formed poems.
Ideas for essays.
Fragments of stories.
Notes that made perfect sense when I typed them into Word at 2am and now resemble cryptic messages left by a slightly unhinged (okay… severely unhinged) stranger.

There are books I still want to write.
Artwork I want to make.
Ideas I want to explore without immediately needing to know what they are for.

And I miss that.

I miss sitting with an idea long enough for it to become something unexpected.
I miss writing sentences and rearranging them simply because I like the rhythm better another way.
I miss following a thought without needing to justify where it’s going.

The Back Seat Isn’t the Boot

I think, for a while, I was telling myself that I wasn’t being creative enough.

That because I wasn’t writing regularly, or producing personal artwork, or progressing every creative project at once, I was somehow neglecting an important part of myself.

But I’m starting to (slowly) look at it differently.

Sometimes something has to sit in the back seat… that doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned it on the side of the highway.

There are some times in your life where certain parts demand more of us. Study has demanded more of me this year. My business has demanded more of me. Research has demanded more of me. My health has demanded more of me.

And I chose those things.

They all matter to me.

They are also creative pursuits in their own right. Maybe creativity doesn’t just disappear when we become busy.

Maybe it waits.

It watches what we’re learning.

Collects strange little observations.
Stores conversations and colours and emotions somewhere in the background.

Then… then, when we finally come back to the page, it places everything on the table as says:

Right. Look at everything we’ve gathered.

Perhaps that is what this is.

Coming Back

I’m not returning with some enormous declaration that I will now write every week.

I’ve learnt enough about myself to know better than to publicly make that kind of promise.

There will still be assignments.
Still be client deadlines.
Still be research interviews, emails, projects, meetings, and days where opening yet another document is approximately the last thing on earth I actually want to do.

But I do want to make a little more room for this again.

For writing that doesn’t belong to a client.
For ideas that don’t need to become anything profitable, productive or impressive.
For reflections.
Essays.
Poetry.
Stories.
For whatever strange thing happens to be rattling around inside my crazy little brain that week.

Because for all the wonderful things design allows me to communicate visually, writing has always given me somewhere else to go.

So…

This isn’t some grand return.

There are no fireworks.
No dramatic relaunch.
No carefully constructed content strategy lurking behind the curtain.

It’s just me. Opening the door to this little corner of the internet again.

Dusting off the furniture.
Turning the lights back on.
And saying…

Hello.