Goodbye IM

Today is my last day at Irwin Mitchell after 2 years. I think it’s worth reflecting on my time here as my role went through a lot of changes. I certainly made some mistakes along the way but I also grew creatively, learned a lot and got to work with some brilliant colleagues.

I was brought in to be a ‘Creative Designer & Front End Developer’ after being an occasional UX designer and mostly front end focused developer for Plusnet. I was looking for more creativity and so having that in my title got me a bit giddy.

I soon realised what that meant in practice was designing a lot of graphics. Graphics about charity events, graphics about campaign launches, graphics about awards we won, graphics about news stories. Starved of creative freedom for so long at Plusnet I threw myself into it willingly and blazed through tickets. 9 graphics for this series, no problem? 14 for this one? No problem! Don’t like the creative on that one, no problem! The team loved it, I was a hero. The problem was the more I did, the more the tickets piled up. I was heading for burnout.

I managed to keep this enthusiasm up for three months before the cracks began to appear. I started getting grumpy about what I saw as unwarranted amends. I started to become disillusioned with spending hours crafting a graphic only to see it die on Twitter with a couple of likes. Was it worth it?

The other half of my role was ‘earned media’, a term I was baffled by for a while but came to accept. What this meant was building topical, interesting and impressive web apps that would earn media coverage and build links into the website. This was exactly the sort of work that would provide me with an oasis in the vast desert of graphics I was churning out.

Alas, the oasis became a mirage as these projects failed to materialise. I managed to turn around some quick quiz projects but they were never likely to trouble the press, nor did they provide the sort of worthwhile work I longed for. Once we had designed and built a quiz, every creative meeting ended in a quiz suggestion. I began to churn out quizzes just like graphics. Was I just fickle?

Looking back I could have done more to make sure the bigger, more ambitious projects got the scheduling I thought they deserved and been less fatalistic about the work I had in front of me. Fighting for and proving the ROI that a bigger, more thoughtful project like this could provide could have transformed my role and ultimately my future at the company.

Alongside all this, as I was sat with the UX designers and front end developers for the main website, I was beginning to get involved there too. It turned out I had a lot of javascript knowledge that would enable the designers and devs to build more complex interfaces. I began to learn more about the legacy codebase which was in dire need of attention and I yearned for the chance to rewrite it.

This is when the political struggle began. In my eagerness to please I had made the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone which meant there were now two competing teams I was part of. This further increased my workload and gave management a big headache.

Life rumbled on for a while, my second child was born and with it a renewed perspective on work vs life. I accepted my role and workload.

At some point after this I attended a conference in Sheffield called Front End North, and saw a talk by Chris Hutchinson from The Financial Times. He had developed a tool that allowed journalists to quickly create quote graphics to go out on social media alongside articles. A lightbulb went off in my head and I joined it up with a prototype I’d worked on already for a suite of graphics around hiring. That prototype came to be called “The Quote Machine”. It was a combo of Javascript, Canvas and my desire to shift the drudgery of creating unfulfilling graphics on to the campaign team who demanded them. Effectively allowing them to self-serve and make the amends themselves faster than they could get them from me.

After a luke warm reception and a few bugfixes and feature requests later, this tool became embedded in the teams workflow. Over a period of six months, alongside a change in team priorities, creating graphics became a small part of my role. A huge win.

Alas, never one to miss the opportunity to shoot myself in the foot, I began to get more involved in delivering motion graphics and film. It began as a small project, just adding some titles on to the bottom of an iPhone video and progressed to using the in-house camcorder to film some interviews and ended with me teaching myself After Effects to deliver extended motion graphics content. This was a huge mistake on my part, as it again pushed out projects and work that sat within my specialty and lead me to become more of a jack of all trades than In retrospect I would have liked.

It wasn’t all negative, I got to do a bit of travelling, expand my creative ability and work on some interesting campaigns. It also further bolstered my reputation as someone who can make things happen for the team. On the other hand it also created a pipeline of work that no one else could do, further exacerbating the management headache.

I ploughed on with this arrangement, seeking to do the best I could and deliver what was asked of me. It was only after a trip to another conference that I realised how far from my specialty I had drifted.

Sat there listening to talks from specialists about user research, design patterns & service design I realised my focus had drifted and I knew I needed to make a change.

So that’s where I sit today, on the cusp of a change. IM remains the best company I have worked for in my career and I have many, many fond memories of the team and great pride in the work we did there. I leave a better designer and developer than when I started back in 2015 and far richer for the friends I have made.