Goals
2019—my first full year at Brokaw—was marked by tremendous professional growth. I learned a lot about teamwork and communication from being immersed in a collaborative agency environment. And by working hard on web projects big and small, I improved my skills in many areas, from design and coding chops to broader knowledge in advertising as a whole.
I'm excited about where I pushed myself beyond day-to-day expectations, too:
- Introduced Notion to the agency to help keep us organized on web projects
- Completed assignments, such as HTML emails, with minimal oversight (relying on my abilities and resourcefulness)
- Developed new skills and training (PHP and WordPress)
In 2020, I'll be working toward a creative goal and a handful of technical objectives. My manager and I developed these goals to leverage my strengths in places where there are opportunities to grow. Goal-setting for professional development is new to me, but I'm looking forward to all the ways I'll be helping our company while learning new things in the process. Check out the full goals/descriptions below:
Creative
My creative goal is to improve my abilities in web design by leveraging my existing branding skills. Applying a brand's look & feel to a website and focusing solely on visual design (not code or interactivity) is a valuable skill. By understanding the clients we work with more deeply—their values, products, and goals—I can deliver more nuanced, effective designs.
Some actionable ideas I might use to make progress toward my goal this year are:
- Immersing myself in learning more about a client or brand to gain greater knowledge
- Designing mock websites/redesigns for dream clients or current clients to practice my end-to-end design skills
- Creating or following simple design briefs and assignments to exercise my web/UI design abilities
SCSS
This first technical area includes many sub-goals that will directly improve the websites our team builds. SCSS/Sass is something I learned on the job, but it has proved to be an immensely useful and time-saving language for coding stylesheets. This year, I'll be:
- Auditing our existing SCSS system to find what's working and not working well
- Researching CSS/SCSS systems
- Researching coding standards/guidelines
- Optimizing our base WordPress theme to improve areas of code (in tandem with documenting this)
- Learning about an emerging front-end technique (i.e., CSS Grid, CSS custom properties, or text animations)
Efficiencies
Notion was just the beginning of becoming more organized and efficient in our projects and workflows. This second technical area focuses on ways to streamline everyday tasks. I'll be working on the following for our team:
- Creating and using Notion templates for projects in a consistent manner
- Creating an Adobe XD template for sitemaps and wireframes
- Creating a blank page template for designs with preset grids for Bootstrap
Knowledge Base
In our team, there's an abundance of information that gets passed around and learned in a given year. The idea behind this third technical area is to centralize and document what we know and where we're going—our systems, processes, resources, and inspiration. For our knowledge base, I'll be:
- Documenting our optimized SCSS system and guidelines
- Creating and maintaining a roadmap for what to focus on next for our system
- Documenting helpful resources for design/coding
- Documenting processes for other types of projects within our team
As I work on these goals, I'll also be sharing my learnings and progress right here on this blog. So for more insights, follow my latest posts by bookmarking this page!