Build 06/30: Activity Bingo Board Layout with Affinity Designer

⊕ show captionI'm using Affinity Designer as a productivity form tool for the first time. This is where I left off at the end of the first day.

Last Friday I had started to burn out from the very long production days. I hadn't taken the amount of time to finish a deliverable and then spend another 3-4 hours preparing a blog post. I took the entire weekend off to recover.

For this week, I'm adjusting my production strategy!

• Last week was mostly about software to make forms. This is a much longer project with more moving parts that could easily take two months by itself.
• Since I have the last run of ETP Mini Notebooks in production this week, I'm going to reorient back to the form design side of things using Affinity Designer. It's about time I really tested it after decades of using Illustrator.

I'm going to adopt a progressive sharepiece model.

• On production days, I'll stop working at 5PM and share what I have with very light notes.
• Writing the big blog post that explains what I did and how to use it will be allocated its own production day

I'm hoping that this keeps the production load manageable.

The Current Project: Activity Bingo Board Form

You may recall the Activity Bingo Board (ABB) from past blog postsSee Making Operationsl Diagrams for Motivation for a recap.. It's a memory map of things that I thing are relevant to having a design business that is integrated across my neurodivergent needs, demonstrable skills, and community aspirations. Here it is again.

⊕ show captionFigure 1. The original collection of contexts for categorizing or generating project tasks. It can be viewed larger on Whimsical

While this looks nice, I found that I wanted more specific direction day-by-day with some sense of continuity. So I thought I'd try to make a form that nudged me in that direction.

Here's what I started with today, just plopping stuff onto a page in Affinity Designer as I got used to its tools.

⊕ show captionFigure 2. Conversion to Affinity Designer, rough layout and ideas.

And this is as far as I got:

⊕ show captionFigure 3. Creating more of a bingo layout, with a coordinate system based on quest ranking. Below is an outline of possible progression for a path.

I'm still figuring out what this thing will do, but so fare there there are the ideas I'm playing with:

1. There are a number of task categories at the top that are the "bingo board"
2. Each row represents a more complex deliverable, ranked from D (lowest) to S (super)
3. There's a progression idea similar to a sales funnel. Maybe this will turn into some kind of game board?

It doesn't make a lot of sense yet, but tomorrow is another day. We'll see where it goes tomorrow.

BUILD CHALLENGE COMMENTARY

The main goal today was to see if I could control the amount of time it took to "make a thing" and then "write the blog post". Total production time spent was around 3 hours, and about an hour of blogging. That's much better than the 8-12 hours it was taking before, and I feel I had something interesting to share. More process than finished deliverable, more of a puzzle that readers might find intriguing themselves.

I was able to run some errands too, without feeling the pressure to finish something. While it's still 11PM because of evening plans, I wasn't rushed and it's much easier to just write, I MAKING A THING AND HERE'S WHERE IT IS with easy screenshots.

BONUS ACHIEVEMENTS

This was the first time I used Affinity Designer instead of Adobe Illustrator to do this kind of information design work. I'm still learning how to get the precise layout control I am used to having in Illustrator.

I also spent about 15 minutes looking at a blog improvement so I could see the titles of jrnl entries on the home page, but determined that this would require a bigger refactor than I wanted to deal with. I wrote down what I'd do and logged it for later.